Hessom Razavi

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The split state

Australia’s binary myth about people seeking asylum by Hessom Razavi

People 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.’

Splitting is a psychological mechanism that allows people to tolerate difficult and overwhelming feelings. Often, the mixed aspects of a messy whole, both positive and negative, are replaced with all-or-nothing absolutes. Split thinking is common among infants and adolescents; beyond these ages, it becomes a pathological feature of certain mental illnesses. In Australia, split thinking has conjured two kinds of refugees: those who are ‘real’ and ‘good’, or the ‘fake/queue jumper’ who are ‘bad’. ‘Good’ refugees are those we have chosen to invite. For the past twenty years, we have accepted up to 22,000 of them each year, under a humanitarian program administered by the Department of Home Affairs. Julian Burnside QC thinks this figure could be substantially raised. ‘We could easily cope with 250,000 a year,’ Burnside told me. ‘Make it 100,000, and no one would bat an eyelid.’ Still, Australia since 1977 has ranked only behind the United States and Canada in terms of the number of people accepted.

My Auntie Ashraf is one such beneficiary. In Tehran, she was subject to a regime that imprisoned and executed our family members. On this basis, she received protection from Australia in 2013; six years later, she became a citizen (as I did in 1991). ‘When I was younger, I never had the confidence to think that I could change my life,’ Auntie reminisced. These days, she volunteers at a community agency in Fremantle and sells homemade pickles at a farmer’s market. ‘Compared to Iran, my problems here are the size of a pinhead,’ she remarked.

Ashraf’s experiences reflect Australia’s discretionary hospitality. Humanitarian arrivals are greeted with an airport pick-up, on-arrival accommodation, and food supplies. Case managers help with access to housing, Medicare, Centrelink, and education. Crucially, these people receive permanent protection, the key to starting a new life in Australia.

In January, I met with Dr Aesen Thambiran, Medical Director of the Humanitarian Entrant Health Service in Western Australia. ‘People who have come through the “queue” are given a good deal – access to health, transport, language and community services,’ Dr Thambiran affirmed. He contrasted this with the hostility reserved for uninvited arrivals, though most of these are also ‘genuine’ refugees. ‘Despite Aussie larrikinism, we really like order. There’s an element of racism and a fear of being overwhelmed.’

Thambiran reflected on his upbringing in South Africa, where his Tamil grandfather was imprisoned for resisting apartheid. Legislated in 1948, apartheid postdated Australia’s White Australia policy; some have suggested that the South African regime emulated the Australian model. ‘In Australia, there’s a sort of Great Unknowing, or Great Forgetting,’ Thambiran suggested. We speculated on the psychic link between Australia’s colonisation and its treatment of asylum seekers – one boat people barring another, on ancient Aboriginal land. As Thambiran observed, ‘Apart from Aboriginal people, most Aussies don’t get human rights, because they haven’t needed to.’

X’s boat reached Christmas Island on 31 March 2013. X was detained there for two months, then transferred to Darwin, before relocating to Perth via Sydney. Despite being a ‘genuine’ refugee, X has only received temporary visas. In Perth, a five-year ‘Safe Haven Enterprise Visa’ (SHEV) has allowed X to work as a stonemason and to study Project Management at TAFE. X, eloquent and hard-working, presents as a ‘good’ refugee but is tossed into the ‘bad’ basket. X struggles with this dichotomy: ‘At the beginning I was quite active … now I find myself with a sense of pessimism about the future,’ he admitted. When X’s SHEV expires, X can only apply for another temporary visa.

X’s story is not unique. As of February 2021, there were 31,189 people like X in Australia; they had sailed here between 13 August 2012 and 1 January 2014. Most were fleeing from persecution in countries such as Iran, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Others, such as the Rohingya from Myanmar, were stateless. Thousands of children were included. All had risked boat journeys on the rough assumption that, as a developed nation, Australia would protect them. (Strictly speaking, they were correct; as a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Australia is prohibited from punishing people seeking asylum, regardless of their mode of arrival.) This proved disastrously out of step with Australia’s chosen policies.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott dubbed these people the ‘Legacy Caseload’, signifying them as an inheritance from the Rudd government, which had banned people who arrived by boat from ever settling in Australia. Instead, they were to be incarcerated on Christmas Island or in mainland facilities, since those on Manus Island and Nauru were at full capacity or simply not operational. The government then released many into our suburbs and permitted them to apply for a three-year Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) or the five-year SHEV. A nominal pathway to a more substantive visa was created, though it was almost unattainable. Scott Morrison, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection in the Abbott government, conceded that these visas were not designed to provide durable solutions for most refugees. ‘Good luck to them,’ he stated at a 2014 press conference.

To better understand the Legacy Caseload, I spoke to Esther Deng, Client Services Manager at the Centre for Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Detainees (CARAD) in Perth. ‘I realised that the government had created two classes of people,’ Deng said. ‘Australia’s program for humanitarian entrants is among the best in the world. Those who arrived by boat are the most vulnerable and the least resourced. They’re not included in anything, which is frustrating.’

Deng explained that, from 2014 onwards, applications for TPVs and SHEVs have been processed under new measures, which she described as a ‘perversion of natural justice’. Funded legal support and translation services have been withdrawn. Unsupported applicants have been subject to a ‘fast track assessment and removals’ system, so that most people who are denied visas cannot submit new information or re-interview. Instead, a new Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA) provides a limited review. The few that can afford court fees may apply for a judicial review, which serves as a revolving door, sending them back to the IAA. Failing this, an appeal may be made for ministerial intervention. To date, this has been a virtual dead-end.

The ‘fast track’ has set new records for slowness. People have waited almost three years to apply, only to wait for another three

and a half years, on average, for a decision to be made on their case. By February 2021, 4,530 people were yet to have their initial claims finalised. To date, this wait has consumed roughly one-tenth of an applicant’s expected lifespan, in what Dr Omid Tofighian and Behrouz Boochani have called the deliberate ‘weaponisation of time’ in Stealing Time: Migration, temporalities and state violence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). The system’s screws have been tightened here and slackened there, coinciding with a drop in successful claims from roughly ninety to seventy per cent. People have thus been rejected, slowly and more often, with fewer procedural safeguards.

In May, the Department abruptly announced that, by 30 June, 1,100 people would be interviewed for their refugee claims. While this surge is long overdue, the lack of notice requires applicants to scramble for legal support, or face the risk of deportation. ‘Fast’, then, has become the risky speed at which people must navigate this administrative minefield, before attending the most important interview of their lives. So far, the Department has declined requests to extend the timeline.

This bipartisan ‘no advantage’ policy has sought to recreate the conditions (precarity, inefficiency, etc.) of transit countries such as Malaysia or Indonesia. I discussed this with Sarah Dale, Principal Solicitor at the Refugee Advice and Casework Service (RACS) in Sydney. ‘The lack of a solution to the bigger problems shouldn’t lead us to cruelty,’ she remarked. To level the playing field, Australia has split and dropped its standards for ‘bad’ refugees. The idea of bolstering conditions throughout the Asia Pacific, in partnership with our neighbours – so that people needn’t board boats in the first place – has not been seriously countenanced. X asked me: ‘What person gets on a boat if they have alternatives?’

Temporariness confers variable rights and risks. Many, like X, have the right to work and receive Medicare, while others don’t. ‘Anecdotally, twenty-five to thirty per cent don’t have Medicare or work rights,’ Esther Deng told me. Most are disqualified from funded support for TAFE or university. Those who are unemployed may, or may not, be eligible for ‘Status Resolution Support Services’ (SRSS) funding. Even when granted, these payments fall under the poverty line. Housing assistance and schooling for children vary from state to state and are often restricted. In the era of Covid, no temporary visa holder has been eligible for NewStart, JobSeeker, or JobKeeper.

Like a game of snakes and ladders played in the dark, this system seems opaque and arbitrary. To help understand it, I spoke with Associate Professor Mary Anne Kenny, a leader in the teaching of migration law at Murdoch University. She confirmed that I was ‘asking some complicated questions’. I pored over a spreadsheet of hers that listed the entitlements of temporary visas. It was cryptic; how were non-English speaking asylum seekers meant to decode this? ‘Constantly shifting policy and law have created a host of different classes of people,’ Kenny noted.

This merry-go-round of temporary visas can only be costly. ‘The Department’s budget is squeezed,’ Abul Rizvi, former CFO at the Department of Immigration, told me. ‘Under Dutton and [Secretary of the Department] Mike Pezzullo, there has been an enormous increase in the number of ministerial staff. They’re saving money by getting people off Manus and Nauru, and out of hotel detention.’ Once refugees are out, the costs are shifted onto the community. Charities, community legal centres, church groups, and individual donors have come under strain to make up the gap. In March, Dr Judyth Watson, retired politician and co-founder of CARAD, told me about an Iranian asylum seeker whom she supports. ‘I no longer ask him if my payments are enough,’ she told me. ‘I know they aren’t.’

In our suburbs, a hidden underclass has emerged. ‘We have created an unprecedented risk of destitution,’ Paul Power told me. Refugees are kept in a state of subsistence, at substantial cost to taxpayers. This paradox, nine years old and well past its useby date, can no longer be exploited, even for conservative votes. Maintaining it, the Coalition has argued, deters others from getting on boats. This split thinking suggests that slow-bleeding one group is the only way to keep another out; alternative blueprints have not been imagined.

Far from being exempt, children in the Legacy Caseload are focal points of policy and deserve special mention here. Most of the babies born in Australia didn’t exist at the time of their parents’ boat journeys. Nevertheless, they have been classified as ‘unlawful maritime arrivals’, ineligible for permanent protection or, in some cases, any protection at all.

To discuss them, I met with Katie Robertson, a human rights lawyer and Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne. In 2014, Robertson undertook a rapid tour of Australia’s detention centres in order to lodge requests for babies and their families to remain in Australia. ‘It was hairy,’ she recalled. ‘I was running against the clock, playing cat and mouse with the government.’ Robertson, herself a mother, met with more than one hundred families over ten days. ‘I saw babies being nursed in concrete cells, with nowhere for kids to play or crawl, no toys or books,’ she recalled. In the end, she lodged requests on behalf of 113 babies and won an exemption for them to stay in Australia with their families and to apply for TPVs. Characteristically, the government reserved a sting in its tail: retroactive legislation was implemented to prevent other babies from being eligible for protection in the future. They would be sent offshore to become ‘nowhere children’, as the Guardian’s Ben Doherty would call them.

‘We won’t know the damage we’ve done to these children for years to come,’ Robertson observed. ‘Many that I know continue to display regressive behaviours, like bedwetting and nightmares, stemming from their time in detention.’ This regime now detains the likes of the so-called ‘Biloela’ family (known by their former home town, not by their actual surname: Murugappan). Along with their two young daughters, these Sri Lankan Tamils have been incarcerated for more than 1,000 days in a one-bedroom cabin on Christmas Island, at a cost of $6 million. Alex Hawke, the current Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, has admitted that he has the discretionary power to grant the Murugappans asylum, should he deem it to be in the public interest. So far, he has declined to do so.

In Australian schools, an estimated 4,000 children are now recognised as being refugees or as seeking asylum, all as temporary visa holders. Many of those in Western Australia are known to

Associate Professor Sarah Cherian, Clinical Lead of the Refugee Health Service at Perth Children’s Hospital. ‘Everyone from a refugee background can access our service – all are welcome,’ she told me. Cherian cited the challenges faced by the children, including interrupted education, latent and lived trauma, and difficulties with social integration. With multidisciplinary support, these setbacks were often overcome. As Cherian put it, ‘Our families are amazing, they’re resilient, they’re positive about their new lives. The impact of temporary status on children is profound,’ she continued. ‘All our families want to contribute, and so many benefits have come from families from diverse backgrounds. Our current processes don’t embrace this richness.’

In Perth, when I asked X about their well-being, they said: ‘I have zero hope in the near future. That keeps me awake for hours at night.’ X has battled with depression and anxiety. ‘I’m actively trying to avoid and manage it, but sometimes it overcomes me … sometimes, I’m basically a mess.’ Since temporary visas do not permit reunions, X has not seen their family in eight years. For some, this is too much. In 2015, a friend of X’s committed suicide on Perth’s railway tracks. ‘He was one of the brightest kids I’ve known … [this situation] kills the spirit of anyone,’ X reflected. ‘You know about separation because of Covid. Just put yourself in the shoes of people living away from their kids for ten years.’

Since the early 2000s, Australian researchers have known about the corrosive effects of temporary visas on the mental health of refugees. Suffice to say that in 2015, Juan Méndez, a UN special rapporteur, found that Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum violated the UN’s Convention Against Torture. What follows is a selected tour of the evidence, starting with Professor Angela Nickerson, Lecturer in Psychology and Director of the Refugee Trauma and Recovery Program (RTRP) at the University of New South Wales.

According to Nickerson, ‘one of the strongest predictors of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder among refugees has been TPV status’. She then detailed her team’s research. ‘Those on temporary visas have shown significantly greater psychopathology, and thoughts of being better off dead, compared to those with secure visas,’ she told me. ‘Interestingly, temporary visa holders were more socially connected with the Australian community.’ This engagement could be because TPV holders were less likely to have family here. ‘The take home is that these people are contributing – they are resilient.’

These effects on mental health have been found to be as strong, if not stronger, than those of refugees’ past traumas. Australia, it could be argued, has damaged people at least as much as, say, their experiences in wartime Iraq or Sudan. I discussed this phenomenon with Dr Annie Sparrow, Special Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization, who has worked in Australia and in international conflict zones. ‘I’ve never worked anywhere so miserable,’ she said, referring to the Woomera detention centre. ‘I’d never seen people sew their lips together. There was no media, so it wasn’t a publicity stunt.’ It’s no wonder that Professor Patrick McGorry, a former Australian of the Year, has described our detention network as ‘factories for producing mental illness’.

These observations align with my own. While I was on Manus Island, a psychologist told me that ‘asylum seekers arrive here with trauma, and we give them anxiety, depression, and psychosis’. This resonated with my family’s experiences, where past traumas were compounded by a subsequent state of limbo. My Uncle Abdullah, for one, fled Iran after his brother was executed by the regime. Stranded in Turkey with his young family, he developed telogen effluvium, or anxiety-related hair loss. Like a cancer patient, his body shed all its hair; he was sicker in Turkey than in Iran. Today, resettled in Germany, he is bemused by the regrowth of his eyebrows.

In Australia, proponents of temporary visas argue that refugees are not mentally ill or that they are exaggerating their problems. I put this to Professor Nickerson. ‘Some refugee studies have measured blood pressure and heart rate variability, which reflect emotional regulation,’ she explained. ‘These were worse in refugees who reported higher distress.’ The physiological measures, then, have validated refugees’ claims. Pursuing this, I spoke with the Deputy Director of the RTRP, Dr Belinda Liddell. In collaboration with the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS), Dr Liddell has conducted brain research on refugees using functional MRI (fMRI) scans.

Nearly twenty years ago, fMRIs showed that social exclusion lit up the same parts of the brain that mediated physical pain: rejection literally hurt. Dr Liddell’s team has built on this foundation. ‘What we found is that refugees with [more] past trauma had “dysfunctional fear circuitry”,’ she said. This showed, in essence, a ‘dose-response’ relationship, where those with more past trauma had more neural disruption going forward. ‘Our other finding was that post-migration stress was linked with hypersensitivity to perceived threats,’ Liddell continued. In other words, stressful experiences in a refugee’s new host country, such as visa resolution, compounded their past trauma, particularly in a part of the brain that regulates social relationships.

Flipped around, these findings appeared to present an opportunity: supportive policies, like our Humanitarian Program, could enable refugees to socially engage and better contribute. Over time, they more than pay their own way, a proposition that is backed up by economic data, including some commissioned by the Department itself. From as far back as 1975, resettled refugees have started to make a net economic contribution to Australia from between five and twenty years after their arrival.

While identifying vulnerabilities, the RTRP’s work also attests to resilience among refugees. When I spoke to him, Behrouz Boochani discussed his durability. ‘When I was in Manus Prison, I was determined to protect my brain,’ he told me. ‘I did this through writing, through film making, and working with people.’ This was affirmed by David Keegan, CEO of HOST International, who has worked on Nauru. ‘Detainees who were coping knew that their situation sucked, but kept their brains active,’ Keegan said, calling this a ‘mindset of reasonable hope’. ‘Their mentality was “I’ll do whatever I can to survive”.’

One such survivor is Elaheh Zivardar, an Iranian refugee formerly detained on Nauru. Zivardar is a thirty-five-year-old architect, visual artist, and writer who fled the city of Ahvaz. ‘Iran is not a place for women with aspirations,’ she told me.

A boat journey from Indonesia landed her in detention for more than six years. ‘My wellness depends on the friends I have around me. In detention, I was always hosting people in my nylon tent!’ Despite the risks, Zivardar worked as a service provider with HOST, and made friends with local Nauruans. In February 2019, she was resettled in Los Angeles as part of the US resettlement deal.

For a time, Zivardar was a contact tracer with the Center for Disease Control in LA County. She is now working on a documentary with This Machine Media, a New York-based production team. ‘It’s a forensic architecture project, called “Searching for Aramsayesh Gah”,’ she told me. (In Farsi, this translates to ‘Abode of Serenity’.) ‘We are creating a 3D model of the detention centre on Nauru, and how it was designed to torture people.’ In Aramsayesh Gah, Zivardar proposes a radically different architecture, one that seeks to support those seeking asylum.

As models of resilience, the cases of Boochani and Zivardar are extraordinary, and troubling. That it takes brilliance – an award-winning writer, a forensic architect – to survive, testifies to the system’s inherent menace and perniciousness. Meanwhile, a wealthof human talent has been lost to places like New Zealand and the United States.

In late 2020, Dutton, before his shift to the Defence Ministry, released detainees from hotel detention, acknowledging that it was ‘cheaper for people to be in the community’. This raises long-standing questions about costs; it also raises the question as to why they are only now influencing decision-making. The answer might be ‘a blank cheque policy, paid by you, the taxpayer’ – something like the following.

Published in 2014, a report by the National Commission of Audit found that expenditure on the processing of people seeking asylum had increased from $118 million in 2009–10 to $3 billion in 2013–14, representing a twenty-five-fold increase in five years. This is analogous to my baby daughter becoming an 88 kg five-year-old; frightening, especially if your taxes are spent on feeding her. Under Minister Dutton, ‘many senior staff left, and the Department commissioned less research’, Abul Rizvi told me. The ‘baby’, in other words, became bigger, not necessarily wiser. In part, this growth stemmed from the surge in boat arrivals under the preceding Labor government, making the Department the fastest-growing government body at the time.

In 2016, a report by UNICEF and Save the Children estimated a cost of $9.6 billion, from 2013 to 2016, for offshore processing, onshore detention, and boat turn-backs. This was followed up with a 2019 report by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, GetUp!, and Save the Children, with costings by Equity Economics, quoting a similar figure of $9 billion from 2016 to 2020. Taken together, this totalled $18.6 billion spent on our borderindustrial complex from 2013 to 2020, at an average of $2.66 billion per year. These were conservative estimates, excluding the cost of regular inquiries, High Court challenges, and financial compensation paid to employees and detainees.

For context, consider a concrete example from the same era. In 2014, Perth’s new Fiona Stanley Hospital opened, with 783 patient beds, eighteen operating theatres, and a total floor area of 150,000 square metres. The campus resembles a future metropolis,

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with features like an outdoor courtyard for ICU patients and a fleet of service delivery robots. The price tag? $1.76 billion. Since 2012, the Department’s expenditure could have funded ten stateof-the-art hospitals, one for each Australian capital city, with two hospitals to spare and a billion dollars in reserve. Make-believe though it is, this scenario invites re-evaluation of the opportunity cost of $18.6 billion in terms of lost public good.

When I spoke to him, Behrouz Boochani discussed his durability. ‘When I was in Manus Prison, I was determined to protect my brain’

In late 2020, Walkley Award-winning journalist Michael Green reported the data on costs for the Guardian. Combing the government’s budget papers, he had calculated that offshore processing alone had cost more than $12 billion between 2012 and 2020. I asked Green about his analyses. ‘This financial year, we’ve budgeted nearly $1.2 billion for offshore processing, for fewer than 300 people on Nauru and Manus Island,’ he explained. This reflected an increase in the annual cost of offshore detention, from a previous estimate of $573,100 per person to $4 million per person.

The cause of this price hike wasn’t clear, but ongoing infrastructural costs and limited tender contracts are probable factors. ‘I asked a detailed set of questions – with references – about the costs and the reasons for them, but Home Affairs didn’t answer,’ Green said. ‘I wasn’t surprised. I’ve found it difficult to get any substantive response to any question I’ve asked.’ Canstruct, a Brisbane company (and Liberal party donor) managing the centre on Nauru, has received $1.4 billion over the past five years, despite no new detainees arriving. ‘High as these costs are, they’re almost certainly underestimates,’ Green noted. These mind-bending figures mirror my own observations on Manus Island and Nauru. A basic grasp of mathematics provides any number of absurd analyses; one is as follows.

Absurd Analysis: Australia is more worried about the cost of oranges than it is about the cost of detention. While I was working on Nauru, I was reprimanded by a guard. ‘Only one piece of fruit per meal,’ he scolded me. Due to its limited arable land, Nauru imports much of its food from Australia and New Zealand. Based on advertised cargo fees, it costs about $6.75, less on-costs, to fly in a kilo of oranges from Brisbane. This contributes to a final price tag ($15.20 per kilo of bananas, for example) that makes fresh produce unaffordable for most refugees. It also reveals the penny-rich, pound-poor mindset of the department. While spending thousands of dollars on contractors like me, they appoint guards to ration the oranges.

In contrast to offshore detention, the government’s own cost estimates of allowing someone to live in the community on a bridging visa, while their claim is being processed, is $10,221 per year (the figure that underpinned Dutton’s abrupt release of detainees). Even if this number were doubled, and compared to the outdated cost of $573,100 per year, community living would deliver a twentyeight-fold saving over offshore detention. In other words, for every $100 of your taxes spent offshore, $96.40 would have been refunded to you, had people been kept in the community.

These savings have been rejected for years. Both Coalition and Labor governments have referenced virtuous causes: breaking the people-smuggler trade, etc. More plausibly, the dollars reflect the high cost of split thinking in a complex world. A binary mandate that requires adherence ‘at any cost’ means that rational alternatives are subsumed by black-and-white, vote-winning rhetoric. Ethics and human rights be damned, this is proving unaffordable over time.

Australia’s five policy pillars on boat arrivals are unique among developed nations. Polls and elections have shown a mixed understanding of them. Australians have variously known, not known, or sort of known. In the end, most voters have accepted them, whether through the perceived lack of choice imposed by bipartisan support or by overt agreement. Despite the damning evidence of their unsustainability, and the lack of any exit strategy, these five pillars have proven unshakeable. Why have Australians swallowed this mess?

For a balcony view on this question, I spoke with Dr David Corlett. Between 2011 and 2018, Corlett was the host of SBS’s Go Back To Where You Came From. On the show, he took Australians with a spectrum of political opinions on a refugee’s journey. He recalled the participants who had surprised him. ‘Even those who seemed the most rusted on, could move,’ Corlett told me. ‘The research has shown that Australians are split three ways. Onethird are supportive of asylum seekers, one-third are hostile, and the rest are in the middle, and can go either way.’ In addition to misinformation and xenophobia, Corlett cited political, powerbased motives for these positions.

One such motive, which underpins the genesis of the Legacy Caseload, may be traced back to Pauline Hanson and the Liberal party. In 1998, One Nation proposed temporary protection visas as part of their ‘social cohesion’ policy. Philip Ruddock, then immigration minister in the Howard government, condemned the idea as ‘highly unconscionable’, before promptly co-opting it for the Liberals. ABC Radio’s Phillip Adams told me that, on finding out, he had walked into Ruddock’s office to demand, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ And Ruddock’s reply? ‘I’ve waited twenty years to become minister.’ A xenophobic brainchild was thus adopted for political gain, starting a race to the bottom with Labor. Cruelty became synonymous with national security – and electoral success. As Sarah Dale from RACS told me, ‘Fear is the greatest enabler of power.’

Befuddling as it is, this social history has been widely examined. Historians, including Deakin University’s Professor Klaus Neumann, have cited the primacy of the White Australia policy. On this, Jana Favero, Director of Advocacy and Campaigns at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, told me about her conversations with Malcom Fraser. ‘The problem is, we never had a debate to end White Australia,’ the former prime minister observed. This developmental arrest is of interest to Julie Macken, a doctoral candidate on ‘Torture and the Australian State’ at Western Sydney University. When I spoke to her, Macken posited ‘a backward collapse into a regressive national psyche’ hinged on the unpreparedness to recognise, or fully mourn, the ‘violence at the heart of the colonisation of Australia’.