Prison Islands:
Government's inhumane refugee policy

by Marcus Browning

Censored videos of boat people in the ocean; racist slurs by government 
ministers demonising asylum seekers; a new Australian refugee prison camp, 
this time on PNG — so the Howard Government continues to hold Australia up 
to ridicule before the international community, all with the ringing 
endorsement of the Labor Party.

The Government has refused to make public the full and unedited video 
footage which it claims shows asylum seekers throwing their children off a 
boat near Christmas Island. The 220 Iraqi refugees were finally taken 
aboard the "HMAS Adelaide" but not before the warship had fired across the 
bow of their boat (details of which are also being kept secret).

Prime Minister John Howard, Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson, 
Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock and Defence Minister Peter Reith have 
gone for the jugular with vicious slanders.

Ruddock's statement gives the drift: "One can only assume they did sink the 
boat deliberately. These people have behaved abominably right from the 
start. The disgraceful way they treat their own children. Any civilised 
person would never dream of treating their own children in that way".

Well, it's certainly true that, as Reconciliation Minister, Ruddock has had 
first-hand experience in dealing with the abuse of children, on a massive 
scale, being the prime mover behind the Government denying the existence of 
the stolen generations of Aboriginal children who were taken from their 
families by successive "civilised" governments.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees demanded details of the incidents 
involving the "Adelaide", saying that regardless of what had happened it 
"does not give any state the right to deny them access".

The Government has given PNG $1 million as the first payment of about $12 
million to process the 220 asylum seekers in a new Australian refugee 
prison camp. The transfer of 233 refugees already on Christmas Island to 
Australia's Nauru prison camp for processing will cost around $20 million: 
in total the Government's policy has cost taxpayers more than $100 million.

The point about the money involved is that all the asylum seekers could be 
processed in Australia in humane conditions at a fraction of the cost. But 
this is opportunist electioneering at any cost, monetary or human. As 
Greens Senator Bob Brown noted, people jumping or being thrown overboard is 
a direct outcome of the Government's policies, which have made refugees 
election fodder.

Penal colony

In a letter to The Age newspaper last week, Sherron Dunbar painted a 
picture of Australia as having become, again, a penal colony. "We have 
become a network of penal colonies for asylum seekers of which we, the 
Australians, are the administrators:

* In remote areas of Australia we have large "immigration reception and 
processing centres" (IRPCs: Curtin, Port Headland and Woomera — all full 
of asylum seekers and no one else).

* In Melbourne (Maribyrnong), Sydney (Villawood) and Perth we have 
"immigration detention centres". These are full of people who have breached 
migration laws. Some of them are asylum seekers.

* In Brisbane and Darwin we have IRPCs built with monies provided in the 
1999 federal budget; and more recently, Port Augusta has been suggested as 
the next site for development.

* There are asylum seekers being held in state prisons in various parts of 
the country.

* In Indonesia, which is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention, there 
are a few hundred people who have already been granted refugee status by 
the UNHCR, being held in an Australian-funded, makeshift detention centre 
that used to be a large, old hotel. That operation is proving to be 
extremely expensive.

* On Nauru, also not a signatory to the Refugee Convention but, like 
Indonesia, desperately short of cash, there are some hundreds of asylum 
seekers housed in hastily constructed detention areas, and a second 
facility is now being built there by Australia.

* Kiribati has offered to emulate Nauru's involvement.

* On the Ashmore Reef, Cocos Islands and Christmas Island, there are 
potential temporary facilities that can now be used just like the centres 
in Indonesia and Nauru.

* Some of Australia's naval vessels, including the "Manoora" and the 
"Tobruk", and no doubt others to come, are being used as floating detention 
centres, and also to confront little boats that enter Australian waters and 
force them back — leaky and unsafe or not — into international waters.