Asylum seekers are being abused on our watch. It's time to put detention under surveillance
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Version 0 of 1. Australia has become an international pariah. Our policies and treatment of people fleeing persecution, war and torture are infamous for their cruelty and selfishness. The number of refugees that Australia takes is trifling and shameful when compared with the rest of the world. Australia hosts 0.3% of the world’s refugees and places 70th when ranked by wealth (2014 figures). Related: Fact check: do refugee claims made by Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton stack up? The largest migration of people since the end of the second world war is happening right now. The number of displaced persons has reached 50 million. Australians will have a lot of explaining to do to future generations on why we stood by idly watching yet another humanitarian tragedy play out. The paltry offer of 12,000 places for Syrian refugees leaves me incredulous. Commentators praise the government in an attempt to encourage this sudden about-face. They add phrases like “it’s a good start”, like some form of positive reinforcement for a badly behaved child. What a sad reflection of the state of affairs, especially when considered in conjunction with the eager rush to join a bombing campaign. We have all seen, after all, how successful previous bombing campaigns have been in resolving humanitarian crises. The current crisis has become symbolised by the image of a drowned three-year-old boy, Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach: an image that has galvanised the western world to acknowledge more must be done. To this effect, the people of Iceland, by the thousands, are offering to take Syrians into their homes. Germans have thrown the borders open and people are welcoming refugees with cheering on the streets and train stations, with food, and with song. The Pope is calling for Catholics to shelter refugees. It is a moving spectacle of how humanity should be. In Australia, there are those that have looked at that same image and used it as an excuse for our barbarous border policies. The repugnant irony is that there could be no stronger counter argument to the “stop the boats” dogma than that image. All our draconian boats policy has succeeded in is having people drown in other oceans, conveniently out of sight of Christmas Island. But it is worse than that. People are fleeing what Tony Abbott has repeatedly referred to as a “death cult”. Those that do make it to our shores are horribly mistreated. We persist in demonising these most vulnerable of human beings and placing them in unsafe, uncertain and inhumane conditions. Australia’s mistreatment of asylum seekers is now a fact. We have over a decade of inquiries, reports, documents, testimony, whistleblowers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, guards and humanitarian workers crying out to prove it. We spend billions locking up men, women and children that have exercised their human right to seek asylum. We have being found in breach of the convention against torture. We have seen allegations of a sitting Senator spied on. We have seen an attempt to silence whistleblowers speaking up with threats of imprisonment. We have seen the reporting of child abuse successfully voted down. The Senate inquiry into Nauru has also heard accusations of torture, including waterboarding. This is happening on our watch. This is our responsibility. Everyday I wake daring to be hopeful that maybe today the rhetoric will change, maybe today there will be a shift away from the politics of divisiveness, fear, selfishness and bigotry. Maybe that day is soon. I have spent this year working to gather the concern that exists in the healthcare sector about the lack of transparency in detention. This has centred on the endorsement of a joint statement calling for the government to uphold a bipartisan commitment to the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (Opcat). The joint standing committee on treaties in 2009 signed Australia up to the Opcat, which parliament has since failed to ratify. The Opcat is a United Nations treaty that would allow for monitoring of detention centres by national and international bodies. Its effect is broader than immigration detention, giving protection to prisons, police lockups, juvenile detention centres, locked psychiatric facilities, and secure disability and aged care facilities. It is a lot harder to abuse people when you are being watched. There is no argument of any substance against the Opcat. It is a mechanism put in place by 78 other countries including the UK and New Zealand. At its heart is transparency. The Opcat is a robust way to ensure that the human rights of people in detention are respected in Australia. Related: Australia's generosity to Syrian refugees ignores those still languishing offshore Personally, I would like to see an end to mandatory immigration detention. However, if it is going to happen, it must be open and everything done to minimise its harm. This joint statement I have been working on already has broad representation from across the health sector calling for the Opcat to be ratified. Never, to my knowledge, have so many peak health bodies endorsed a single statement. It is a credit to all the organisations and those they represent that they have chosen to take this stand. We need the Opcat, we need it now. Until we learn to act decently in the face of human suffering – perhaps by watching the example of our European brothers and sisters – this is the least that we can do. This might be a small step on the path to reclaiming what Australia could be and should be; if we are brave enough to let go of fear and border hysterics; if we embrace compassion as we have successfully done in the past, resulting in great enrichment to ourselves, our culture and our nation. If you would like to give your personal support to Australia’s ratification of the Opcat, sign this petition and join the thousands calling for ratification. |