The Australian government’s asylum seeker policy is problematic on many levels. The very notion that we accept brutalising a desperate minority in order to “send a message” to others should cause us to reflect on what we have become. The utilitarianism that pervades our discourse on the issue bodes ill for our future – if we rationalise our barbarism by counting “the number of boats that have been stopped”, how far are we prepared to go in dealing with vulnerable others in our society such as the disabled and the elderly? All our talk of “queue jumpers” is rendered meaningless in light of our average intake of fewer than 200 UN-registered refugees from Indonesian camps per year since 2000. It is not a proud moment for our nation.
On a more pragmatic level though, I find our approach to be simply absurd – just look at the economics. There are a number of camps, including Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island, as well as others on the Australian mainland. The story for each is the same, so let’s look at Manus Island to illustrate the point. Each taxpayer in Australia is contributing over $100 to fund the Manus Island detention centre – over $1.2 billion in total for the next 20 months – all paid to the multinational Transfield. That’s a lot of money. For the same fee we could fly them all business class to Sydney from the UN camps in Indonesia ($5,000), pay them the Australian average full-time income ($75,000), put them up in a four-star hotel in Sydney with breakfast ($73,000) and still have enough left over to put them through a degree at Sydney Uni, paying full international student rates ($45,000). When our treasurer and prime minister are lecturing us about austerity, how can they justify this largesse for the shareholders of G4S, Serco, Transfield, et al?
Currently, asylum seeker policies attract bipartisan support. It is unlikely this will change unless we demand it of our elected representatives.
