White Australia: A Nation of Abusers

On August 10th, some 2000 leaked incident reports documenting the abuse of asylum seekers in offshore detention were published by Guardian Australia. 1,086 of these related to children, including: 7 sexual assaults, 59 counts of physical battery, 30 instances of self-harm, and 159 of threatened self-harm. I could detail the heinous nature of the trauma being inflicted on these already vulnerable children, on their parents, but the truth is, you don’t care. The Australian government and the people it represents just don’t care, and it is ridiculous to the point of insult to suggest otherwise.

How do I know this? I know this because we have heard these things before. None of it is new. The Forgotten Children report by the Human Rights Commission detailed similar findings, the government’s own independent Moss Report backed it up, the UN and Amnesty International have likewise done the same, as have many of the doctors and medical professionals who have worked in these centres. Each time, we see the same cycle: outrage from Left-leaning progressives on Twitter, indifference from the public, and general contempt from politicians.

Most of all, I am tired of hearing people say, “we are better than this”, despite consistent evidence to the contrary. In this one area of governance alone, we have had two decades to demonstrate that we are better than this, and failed every time. Two decades to live by our stated values, two decades which have proven by action what every non-white non-heteronormative person in this country has always known: our bodies have no meaning to a state founded in white supremacy, which continues to perform practices in line with those ideals.

If 2016 has shown us anything, it is that those ideals are alive and well in Western countries today — in the US, UK, and Australia particularly — they’ve simply ditched the soiled name tag and hired better PR. Only weeks ago, a Four Corners investigation revealed footage of the torture being inflicted on indigenous youth in detention in the Northern Territory, which came as a shock to White Australia, but no one else. The indigenous community had been saying as much for years, but no one was listening. It is common knowledge now that indigenous people face disproportionate rates of incarceration and abuse, as well as deaths in custody, and still, little to nothing is done.

When public pressure is high, at most, investigations or royal commissions will be announced. These have the dual function of providing a semblance of action, an illusion of justice, while also creating some distance, ensuring there will be enough time for us to be distracted by another story. To be less angry, less radical, less invested. Then the report will be published, with little to no follow-through, and the system continues unchanged. Undaunted. It works every time. Has the Northern Territory government been sacked? No. Has any immigration minister overseeing the torture of refugees been sacked? No. Why? They are doing their jobs correctly — aside from being caught in the act, of course.

Even that, though, doesn’t matter so much anymore. News is ephemeral, is so constant and so often poorly reported or downright wrong, that it has lost the impact it once had. In virtually every instance a black/brown/queer body has reported being abused, raped, or tortured, or has been killed, one of two things occurs: 1) the victim is blamed for the violence inflicted on them or 2) the claim is dismissed as an “allegation”, and we are told we can’t believe everything we hear. Sometimes, both things occur.

For example, if the refugee didn’t want their kids to be raped in our detention centre, they should have thought of that before fleeing the war zones we helped create. The efficacy alone of the “you shouldn’t have been there” reasoning is a disturbing testament to the guilt-ridden hypocrisy of white audiences. As if where you are by itself justifies whether violence should occur to your body. If it even occurred at all, as Treasurer Scott Morrison said after the latest report, “It’s important to stress that incidents… aren’t a reporting of fact, they are a reporting that an allegation has been made.” You can find equivalences to these narrative structures in all oppressed communities. Secrecy first, victim blaming, then distortion and misinformation to attack credibility, bury it in distraction. Repeat. It is nauseatingly predictable.

The only effective counterpoint we’ve seen to these structures is live footage: in this age of viral media, image is king. Videos of unarmed African-Americans being shot and abused by police, much like the footage of indigenous youth being tear gassed in the Dondale Detention centre, have galvanised their respective communities and ensured their message cannot be overcome by the typical default response ingrained by the racist State. Heteronormative white people are perfectly able to imagine the destruction of non-white bodies, to read about the rape, the torture, the murder — are perfectly able to hold these ideas in their muscle, their skin and blood, and go on living their lives. They just don’t like seeing it. “I can’t unsee that” is a common complaint, and increasingly, the only saving grace for the oppressed.

This is why secrecy is so paramount to the Australian government’s operations on Nauru and Manus Island. They can easily deal with the reports of thousands of cases of abuse, against women, children, and men; they can deal with reports of despairing refugees setting themselves on fire, they can deal with any kind of inhumanity or cruelty so long as it isn’t recorded. Even then, injustice remains the norm — it’s just more obvious in its evil.

So the next time we hear about an authority figure doing obvious evil to a non-white body, spare their community your false apologies, save your “we are better than this” lie for another day, a day when you are not benefitting from white supremacy, not trying to displace another indigenous community, not creating or proposing to create another set of laws for migrant or Muslim communities, not doing everything in your power to ensure we are invisible and mute as we are crushed beneath your heel.