Setting an example
It seems that it is not enough for our sports-people to be setting the standard for athletes around the world. Nor is it enough that Australian actors and musicians have become a force to be reckoned with on the world stage. After spending a few weeks in the UK, where I will be studying for a year, I’ve discovered another great Aussie export which has been filling the Home Office in Britain with glee for some time now: our refugee and asylum seeker regime.
Imagine the pride I felt upon discovering that the ‘Pacific Solution’ was the inspiration for a similar idea—the less exotically labelled ‘New Vision’—which proposes to automatically send asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants arriving in the UK to ‘regional protection zones’ where they will be detained in ‘transit processing centres’ located at the external borders of the EU in order to submit their claims. The masterstroke of the British proposal is the range of nations at its disposal. The suggested ‘host’ countries currently include Albania, Croatia, Iran, Morocco, Northern Somalia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. All have serious records of violating the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants. As this method finds no support in international law, Australia and Britain can now join forces as pioneering nations of the gulags of the 21st century.
Patriotic sentiments have also been stirred by the extent to which the system of detention has been catching on here. Around 1,800 asylum seekers are locked up without trial and without a time limit. Furthermore, in addition to around a dozen centres already in operation here, construction is underway for new detention centres with target capacities of 4,000. And, unlike Aussies who detain asylum seekers in ‘Reception and Processing Centres’, over here a spade is a spade, and asylum seekers
coming across the English Channel are kept in the Dover ‘Removals’ Centre.
When it comes to record-holding however, Australia is clearly in front. The Brits are still able to express shock over the fact that some asylum seekers have been detained for up to two years. The case of two Turkish girls held in detention for 13 months recently provoked an outcry. Have no fear Australia, the record is safe with us for a while yet.
But Australians must not get too complacent, as Britain has plenty of ideas to offer our corridors of power. Just the other day, for