Can our Parliament get any worse?
Scott Morrison showed that when given a choice between principle and politics, he’ll always choose the latter. And Bill Shorten isn’t much better
GIVEN the long and tortured history of false starts, missteps and dashed hopes, the latest attempt to bring some humanity to the asylum seekers incarcerated on Manus and Nauru was bound to end in disappointment.
And so it came to pass that on the afternoon of the last Parliamentary sitting day of 2018 Scott Morrison stood in the Prime Minister’s courtyard and declared he would do “whatever it takes” to prevent the passage of legislation to authorise the medical transfer to Australia of sick asylum seekers from the two islands.
Never mind that just two months earlier, in the heat of a by-election in Wentworth where a desperate PM had sought to make an appeal to the diminishing ranks of small-l liberals to vote for his candidate by dangling the half-formed idea that his government would finally accept New Zealand’s offer to accept the permanent transfer of a few hundred refugees (although even then, Morrison couldn’t resist playing politics by daring Labor to support a punitive change to legislation that would prevent any asylum seeker resettled in New Zealand from ever setting foot in Australia, even as a tourist).
But this week’s tour de farce, where Morrison accused Bill Shorten of being a threat to national security by even suggesting that critically ill asylum seekers should be flown from Nauru or Manus to Australia for urgent medical treatment, was a rotten end to a rotten year by the rottenest government in living memory.
And in doing so, Morrison’s spittle-flecked press conference in the courtyard demonstrated once and for all that he is psychologically and temperamentally unfit for the job of Prime Minister.
The week began with high hopes that there would be bipartisan support for Kerryn Phelps’ Bill to allow the urgent evacuation of any asylum seeker who is critically ill and unable to be treated offshore.
After all, this was an extremely modest formalisation of the current practice that takes place and still would have granted a huge amount of discretion to the Immigration Minister.
It was not as if Phelps was seeking the immediate resettlement of the 1250 asylum seekers on the two islands.
But no, even this was a bridge too far for the government, which could not resist the political opportunity to drive a wedge within Labor over asylum seeker policy.
Given the choice between easing the burden on suffering people – even if only slightly – or seeking to extract a political advantage, Morrison inevitably chose the low road.
What makes this even more depressing is that it took Parliament’s newest MP — and an independent to boot — to propose this Bill. Neither of the major parties has shown any inclination over the past half-decade to soften the offshore detention regime which is arguably in breach of a range of international laws and conventions, and inarguably an offence to common decency and morality.
Why was it left to Kerry Phelps to put forward this legislation? Why couldn’t Labor have shown some moral leadership over the past five years, instead of reluctantly agreeing to back Phelps’ Bill, not for any humane reasons, but because it saw a political opportunity to strike a blow against the minority government?
To its credit, Labor has made some modest advances in this area, although it still remains wedded to boat turnbacks and offshore processing. But at least Bill Shorten recognises that detention for five years and the trauma that causes is too long.
Scott Morrison was true to his word on Thursday: his government did use every tactic and resource available to filibuster and obstruct so that when the House of Representatives rose for the last time this afternoon, it did so without a vote on Phelps’ Bill (which the government would have lost).
Yet, there was no such tardiness when it came to passing the so-called national security legislation which will allow government agencies to access encrypted messages on platforms like WhatsApp. The Labor Opposition was only too happy to oblige to ensure that Bill was passed into law. Heaven forbid Bill Shorten could ever be accused of being soft on the introduction of yet another piece of legislation that encroaches on our privacy and civil liberties.
What this all means is that another year will end for those 1250 or so asylum seekers — many of them deemed to be genuine refugees — continuing to be imprisoned on Manus Island or Nauru.
Amid all the concocted political theatre in Canberra this week, when the dust clears the suffering of those 1250 people will continue. Another year away from their families, another year in squalid living conditions, another year of mental torture and physical decline. Not for them the warm embrace of their loved ones around a dinner table heaving with food on Christmas Day.
Nothing — not international condemnation, nor logic, nor human morality — will shift either of the major parties from the cruel policy of offshore detention.
There is little doubt that future generations of Australians will regard us as complicit in the criminal torture and abuse of fellow humans, and that shame will stain our nation for decades to come, just as current generations of Germans continue to live with the shame that their countrymen turned a blind eye to the genocide of Jews in Nazi concentration camps more than 70 years ago.
We all share a responsibility for this. The only ones with clear consciences are the small numbers who tirelessly continue to protest and rally and work alongside refugee advocates for change.
Is it any wonder then that the most prominent of all the detainees, the journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani, holds his greatest scorn for the politicians and people of Australia.
But for a failed first attempt to cross the waters from Indonesia to Australia, Boochani would have avoided his fate. But it was his bad luck to make that second attempted crossing in July 2013 and to be in one of the first groups to be transferred to Manus following Kevin Rudd’s determination that no unauthorised boat arrival would ever be granted settlement in Australia.
But for that quirk of fate, we may never have heard of Behrouz Boochani. If he had made his crossing just a few days earlier, he would have avoided Rudd’s policy and in all likelihood would be living happily in Australia, working as a journalist and campaigning globally for his fellow Kurds.
Instead, Boochani has achieved unwanted international fame as the voice of the forgotten men on Manus Island, through his journalism, his films, and, most recently, his incredible book, No Friend But The Mountains.
Through a combination of razor sharp observation, lyrical prose and poetry woven through this book, and like a latter day Kafka or Solzhenitsyn, Boochani conveys the misery of life on Manus Island, and his book should be compulsory reading over the 68 day long summer break for all of Australia’s parliamentarians.
Revealed with its pages is the persecution, squalor and tediousness of daily life on Manus Island, culminating in the murder of the Iranian man, Reza Barati at the hands of local Manusians, early in 2015.
Throughout Boochani is determined to assert his humanity, refusing to give into the ‘kyriachal system’, which seeks to dehumanise and humiliate the asylum seekers. He will not allow himself to be labelled or to be reduced from an individual to a number. Nor will he allow the men of Manus to be forgotten; out of sight, out of mind.
But it is true that with much of the recent focus on the #kidsoffnauru campaign, the men of Manus do feel neglected, as if their suffering and their stories are somehow lesser than those of the children and families on Nauru. Adding your name to the #kidsoffnauru petition may ease your conscience, but it does nothing to help Boochani and his fellow prisoners on Manus.
As 2018 draws to a close, it does feel that Australian politics could not sink any lower.
A recurring dream over the past decade has been that an Australian election will be decided by the positions the two major parties take on asylum seekers, with the progressive, humane approach finally prevailing.
For a few days this week, it felt that incrementally we were creeping towards a change of heart, only for those hopes to be dashed by Scott Morrison.
So instead, almost 15 years since Tampa and the creation of the Goebbels-like ‘Pacific Solution’, that dream feels as far away as it ever has.
