In late 2005, Australia’s most famous asylum seeker family, the Bakhtiyaris, hit the headlines again. Nine months after they had been forced from Australia to Pakistan, Fairfax journalist Paul McGeough revealed that the Afghan government had itself concluded that Mrs Bakhtiyari was indeed, as she had claimed, an Afghan. The family’s supporters jumped up and down, shouting, ‘I told you so.’
The Australian Government stuck to its line that the Pakistanis had said that Mr Bakhtiyari was a Pakistani, and that was the end of the matter. Then, after an ABC Lateline interview was aired, the Government sought to even the score with the same I-told-you-so line. Alamdar Bakhtiyari had apparently admitted that the family had lied.
The following day Alamdar’s confession was all over the media. Unfortunately, the ABC’s admission that it had incorrectly transcribed the interview and that the boy had said that he blamed his predicament on his ‘lawyers’ and not his ‘lies’ received a whole lot less attention.
Notwithstanding this regrettable mistake, the treatment of the Bakhtiyaris was reminiscent of the fate that befell them while they were in Australia.
I began my book Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers with a chapter about the Bakhtiyari case. My conclusion was that the family had been caught up in a larger conflict than one simply concerned with their well-being. It was a conflict about how Australia ought to respond to asylum seekers. But it was also more than this. It was part of a larger battle about how the Australian nation ought to be defined. I wrote that the family was positioned ‘at the butt of a battering ram designed to demolish Australia’s onshore protection regime and, to the extent this symbolised it, the Howard conception of the Australian nation’.
The struggle for national identity is often understood as an attempt by the Howard Government to redefine the Australian nation in response to the way it was constructed under Labor and, particularly, under the leadership of Paul Keating. But in many ways the Hawke/Keating governments continued work begun under Whitlam and—arguably more importantly—Fraser. Under Liberal and Labor governments since the early 1970s, the Australian nation had become increasingly imagined as an inclusive place, a place in which, within certain limits—notably a commitment to institutions such as the rule of law and parliamentary democracy—difference was tolerated and even celebrated. The fences associated with Australia’s emerging immigration detention regime