Australian treatment of refugees has been out of the headlines for some months. That may suggest that the changes introduced to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship after the Cornelia Rau scandal have eradicated abuses. But despite some improvements, Australian refugee policy is still destructive.
Let us begin with the improvements. The most encouraging changes have been to the detention regime. The conditions under which detainees live have generally improved, children are not detained, and the government may allow some detainees to live, although under harsh conditions, outside detention centres.
The Department, too, treated with exemplary speed and professionalism the claims for asylum of the first group of West Papuans to arrive by boat.
These improvements are welcome. But Australian policy towards asylum seekers continues to be vitiated by an internal contradiction that expresses itself in the cruel and disrespectful treatment of those who are its objects. It also weakens in Australia the principles on which this nation was built.
The contradiction is this. The only point of signing the refugee convention, as Australia has, is to construct a policy that ensures that those whose human dignity is at serious risk in their own nations find protection. But in reality Australian policy is designed to ensure that asylum seekers who arrive by boat, regardless of the justice of their claims, can make no claim on Australia for protection. Nor, if it can be avoided, will they find protection in Australia. By the treatment meted to those who manage to arrive, too, others will be deterred.
The workings of this policy have been most evident in the travails of the Burmese asylum seekers sent to Nauru. They claimed protection from the persecution they say they have suffered both in Burma and in Malaysia. Australian representatives told them that they would never be allowed to live in Australia, and encouraged them to return to Malaysia without any guarantee that they would not be persecuted there or that they would find any meaningful resettlement to future safety. In effect, Australia was denying them protection and was working for their repatriation to an unsafe place, in contradiction of the Convention.
Government representatives also insisted that their claims for protection would only be heard by Australian officials in a process whose justice and freedom from bias was not reviewable by Australian courts (nor, for that matter, subject to scrutiny and safeguards under any legal system