Anti-refugee policy can be abolished
Prime Minister John Howard and immigration minister Philip Ruddock stood firm throughout the two-week hunger strike by asylum seekers in the Woomera detention centre. Some said this was proof that the government will never change its policy. Yet their cold determination to stand firm in the face of profound human suffering is precisely what has horrified and outraged large numbers of people.The editorial in the February 2-3 Weekend Australian captured the incredulity that many felt: In his [Ruddock's] Orwellian world, the prospect of death in custody is an 'unfortunate outcome' or 'mishap', lip-sewing and threats of suicide are 'inappropriate behaviour', and an asylum seeker who has fled a tyrannical regime is a person making a 'lifestyle choice'... Ruddock disputes the centres are part of a 'punitive' regime of imprisonment. Next he will be calling them 'joycamps' the word used to describe forced-labour camps in Orwell's 1984.
Six-and-a-half thousand people took part in refugee rights rallies on February 2, the biggest ever mobilisation of people against the government's appalling refugee policy. That's significant, not because those rallies alone forced any immediate changes in government policy, but because they signalled the potential for this issue to mobilise large numbers of people demanding justice for refugees.
The Woomera hunger strike marked a real crisis for the government. This is because, for the first time, it opened the eyes of large numbers of people to the horrifying reality of life in refugee detention centres. It also cut through some of the lies the government has used to maintain support for its policy of detention and its demonisation of asylum seekers.
Yet more cracks in the bipartisan Coalition-ALP consensus are appearing every day.
In the space of a week, criticisms and concerns were voiced by the UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson; former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, former immigration department secretary under Whitlam and Fraser, John Menadue; the Pope; Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan; former human rights commissioner Chris Sidoti; former Liberal minister Ian McPhee; UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers and Oxfam-Community Aid Abroad.
The fact that prominent people, both liberal and conservative, are speaking out is a positive thing. It gives further momentum to the public debate, and helps to shift ordinary people's attitudes, but this alone is not enough to convince the government that it has a crisis on its hands.
So long as large numbers of opponents of the government's policy remain passive, the legitimacy of the government's policy is not fundamentally challenged. When people like McPhee and Whitlam speak out, it places some pressure on the government because it breaks the stifling consensus and draws the government's refugee policy into question. But it is mass protests which escalate that pressure dramatically because they demonstrate unambiguously that opposition to the government's refugee policy is getting a mass hearing.
Two years ago, during the post-election massacres in East Timor, the Australian government was prepared to stand by and do nothing in order to protect its cosy relationship with the Suharto dictatorship. Public horror and outrage among ordinary Australians grew rapidly. People were prepared to come out to rallies in their tens of thousands.
In the space of a few weeks, the government faced a complete crisis of legitimacy. It held out for as long as it could in order to safeguard its relationship with the Indonesian dictatorship, but at a certain point it was more costly to risk a loss of political legitimacy in Australia as people watched their government, with the capacity to stop people from being killed in their thousands, refusing to respond.
The rapid rise in mass protests in solidarity with East Timor forced the Howard government to do something very much against its wishes to break the bipartisan policy of collaboration with the Indonesian military and send Australian troops to assist the East Timorese people's struggle for national independence.
The lesson of this experience is that mass protests can force a change in government policy.
Minor changes to the treatment of refugees could be won fairly quickly given the current climate, if the current momentum can be sustained. Perhaps Australasian Correctional Management will lose its contract to run the detention centres. It is possible that Woomera detention centre will be closed, if we can mount sufficient mass pressure. But that would be a very partial victory. By all accounts, Curtin detention centre is as bad, if not worse than Woomera.
An end to the mandatory detention of refugees will take a more sustained campaign, however. But it is a campaign which has better prospects of winning than at any time since the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992.
There are many disparate groups organising in defence of refugees' rights, but the strength of this campaign lies in the unity between these groups. The February 12 protest, for example, is a joint effort between a wide range of these groups.
While Canberra convergence on February 12 is likely to have a substantial impact, it is only one step in a protest movement which must continue to build and grow in the coming months.
The Commonwealth Head of Government Meeting will be held near Brisbane in the first week of March, which offers an important opportunity for protest. Refugee groups are organising a protest around the demand to suspend/expel Australia from the Commonwealth for human rights abuses.
Refugee campaign groups in many cities are planning big public meetings in the coming months. Palm Sunday protests on March 24 will be a focal point for protest in some cities.
Over the Easter weekend, there will be a protest at Woomera, with a national day of refugee solidarity coinciding with it on March 31, including protests in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. The Sydney protest, to be held outside Villawood refugee prison, will be an international protest, involving hundreds of guests and participants attending the Second Asia-Pacific International Solidarity Conference.
May 1, the traditional day for marking international workers' struggles, will offer another opportunity for protest on the refugee issue.
From Green Left Weekly, February 13, 2002.
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