A Well Founded Fear. November Films. SBS Television, Wednesday 19 November, 8:30 pm, website.
At the beginning of A Well Founded Fear we hear Mr Howard declaring after Tampa, 'We decide who will come to Australia and under what circumstances they will come'. His declaration is received with applause from his Liberal Party audience.
The cameras then leave Australia with Phil Glendenning, the Director of the Edmund Rice Centre. They dwell on his stay in Afghanistan and Syria to track down some of those whom Australia had decided would not come here. They show in the faces of simple people the costs in human life, opportunity and dignity of Australia's decision. They also show the brutal cajolery that was the Australian way of implementing Mr Howard's promise.
The narrative thread that holds the documentary together is the search in difficult places for the returned asylum seekers. Visually it is sometimes tests the viewers' credulity, emphasising the desire for secrecy of the people whom they seek, while at the same time filming conspicuous Westerners going in search of them. But the documentary is powerful because it allows ordinary people of extraordinary spirit to tell their stories. For the viewer their magnanimity in the face of barbarous treatment tempers into compassion the rage and shame that are the natural response to such stories.
The documentary is also blessed in Phil Glendenning. He is the ordinary gruff Australian bloke abroad, a Merv Hughes or an Ian Chappell, not naturally articulate but enduring and not to be fobbed off with smooth talk. He mostly listens. His silent listening is the moral centre of the documentary. His few comments on the significance for Australians of what he hears are the more telling for their sparseness.
The documentary does not pursue the way in which Mr Howard's declaration was translated into Australian law and its administration. It simply shows how human beings experienced these things and the cost to them of the arbitrary exercise of power. But the larger picture also bears reflection.
Those despatched to Syria were from a tribe persecuted in Kuwait and denied citizenship. They arrived with necessarily false passports before Tampa, were detained in Port Hedland, and their claim for protection was denied. The task of the Immigration Department was to cajole them to leave Australia. This was difficult because they were effectively stateless. It offered them the alternatives of living indefinitely in the harsh