One of the most challenging issues for community organisations is whether and how to cooperate with Government policy. Responses can range from endorsement, to limited cooperation in order to minimise harm, to total dissociation.
Organisations working with asylum seekers will have reflected hard about how they should respond to the Government policy towards on-shore asylum seekers. Government commitment to a policy that would have asylum seekers housed and processed fairly by a regional agreement has attractive features. But on closer examination it proves impossible to endorse.
The difficulty with the search for a regional processing centre lies in the presuppositions on which it is built. The Government identified people who arrive in Australia by boat as a problem, not as people who have a problem. So the purpose of the regional processing centre is not to find the most equitable way of receiving and adjudicating the claims of asylum seekers in the region. It is to ensure that they are not received in Australia.
By any reasonable standards people who apply for asylum in Australia are not a problem. Australia is a wealthy enough country to receive them, to judge their claims and to offer protection to those found to be refugees. The Convention to which Australia is a signatory commits it to this. And despite the present increase of applicants, the number of asylum seekers in Australia is relatively small.
The problem that asylum seekers face in being received fairly and compassionately in Australia is one of irrational prejudice pandered to for political gain. The regional processing centre was proposed in order to minimise the political damage caused by the influx of boats. The Government decided to treat people who arrived by boat as a problem and linked this 'problem' to the claustrophobia experienced by people in marginal electorates.
Governments do what Governments do. But those concerned for the dignity of asylum seekers and for a compassionate Australian response to them ought not to accept that Australia has an 'asylum-seeker problem', any more than there was a 'Jewish problem' in Germany in the 1930s or that there is a 'Gypsy problem' in France today. Nor should they accept the proposal of a regional processing centre.
This