Comment
The split state
Australia’s binary myth about people seeking asylum
by Hessom Razavi
P
eople seeking asylum are off trend. As the black and brown people on boats have stopped arriving on Australia’s shores, so has our interest in them waned. In commemoration, a boat-shaped trophy sits in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office, inscribed with the words ‘I Stopped These’. Today, Australians seem preoccupied by the vaccine roll-out and allegations of rape in parliament. With a federal election on the horizon, people seeking asylum and refugees seem passé, a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. My ten-month-old daughter knows better than this. ‘Object permanence’ is her developmental recognition that people exist, even if she can’t see them. Celebrating the ‘end’ of the boats is analogous to an infantile regression. The passengers have simply been pushed elsewhere; an estimated 14,000 now languish in Indonesian camps, even though many have long been recognised as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). ‘There’s a growing number of suicides in the shelters,’ journalist Nicole Curby1 told me. ‘What leads them there is a sense of desperation and hopelessness.’ Far from solving the problem, Australia has shoved it upstream. ‘Suffer or die there, not here,’ we seem to have said to people seeking asylum. Beyond Indonesia, eighty million people are currently displaced around the world. This number surpasses the displacement caused by World War II. Most have escaped state violence or persecution. In January 2021, I met one such person, whom I shall refer to as X. X is a young Hazara person who hails from Ghazni province in Afghanistan. In 2012, X fled their homeland after the Taliban murdered a friend of theirs. Abductions and shootings of Hazara people were on the rise. ‘A horror movie was unfolding every night,’ X told me. X’s friend was reportedly flayed alive and then impaled with a note to intimidate other Hazaras. The writing was literally on people’s bodies. X fled to India, Malaysia, and Indonesia before boarding a boat for Australia. X didn’t risk this journey to jump an imagined ‘queue’, because there isn’t one. Globally, less than one per cent of refugees are resettled through the UNHCR. This is due to a lack of countries that are willing to take them. Many will live out their whole lives in refugee camps, where their chances of being resettled are not determined by how long they have waited. The so-called ‘queue’ is akin to ‘passing an elephant through the eye of a needle’, to borrow from a pre-biblical Farsi proverb. ‘Australia has failed to
come to terms with what asylum means,’ Paul Power, CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia, told me. ‘We see it in the same light as immigration control.’ Cynically perhaps, we have stopped the boats. It is also true that drownings have been prevented, as both our major parties like to remind us. When we reflect on their abandonment of refugees in Indonesia and their hostility towards those who have arrived on our shores, this prevention of drownings appears less a primary aim and more like a convenient side effect of Operation Sovereign Borders. We have set out to repel people who seek asylum; any grandstanding about their welfare reeks of political opportunism. Still, the horror of deaths at sea must be acknowledged. Paul Toohey, in his Quarterly Essay That Sinking Feeling (2014), described one such tragedy: a mother holding her drowned five-year-old. Today, most former boat arrivals, comprising more than 30,000 people seeking asylum and refugees, are trapped in legal limbo on Australian soil. A small number (roughly 120 in Port Moresby and 90 on Nauru, as of 17 May) remain offshore. Those on the Australian mainland are the members of the so-called ‘Legacy Caseload’, a group that includes families, children, and infants. They are not eligible for permanent visas here, nor for resettlement elsewhere. This paradox renders them conspicuous through their exclusion yet invisible within society. All the while, a human-shaped trophy reading ‘I Helped These People’ is absent from the federal parliament. As a member of a family that fled post-revolutionary Iran in 1983, and as a doctor who has visited the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, I have written elsewhere in ABR about the who are we? of people who seek asylum. The where are we now? of Australia’s responses, with their attendant human and financial costs, are the focus of this article. This is a story about problems, not solutions; the latter will remain shelved for now. Our starting point is the bipartisan support, from Labor and the Coalition, for Australia’s five policy pillars on people who have arrived by boat: mandatory and indefinite detention; offshore processing; temporary protection visas; boat turn-backs; and a ban on settling in Australia. This regime is deformed by paradox, oversimplification, and absurdity. This ‘split state’, as I will dub it, has nonetheless been widely lauded; as President Donald Trump told then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, ‘You are worse than me.’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021
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