The Daily Telegraph is peddling an asylum seeker mythology in which there are only two choices; deaths at sea or playgrounds on Nauru.
In an article published last Friday, Daily Telegraph columnist Joe Hildebrand argued that the question of sending 267 asylum seekers back to offshore detention is a grey area, an “impossible moral quandary,” while simultaneously painting the most black and white image of the situation one could imagine.
Although the article is not alone in its defence of offshore detention, I could find no better example that encompasses popular opinion.
To Hildebrand and the majority of the Australian public, the issue of Asylum seekers comes down to a binary choice in which there is no clear compassionate answer, as every conscientious action is
met with an equal and opposite reaction of suffering.
Hildebrand stipulates that if you save the 37 babies from Nauru, “you know that you are depriving another baby [in overseas Refugee camps] … of that very same future.” It is simply a one-for-one swap.
He goes on to suggest that the previous “impact of well-intentioned compassion” was deaths at sea, and that the only alternative is offshore processing.
This point of view does have some internal logic, but only if you commit the outrageous error of not seeing further than the narrow spectrum of ALP and LNP policy, which is clearly evident in Hildebrand’s discussion.
This is a point of view that the Daily Telegraph repeated on Monday with a front-page image of an asylum seeker vessel sinking, juxtaposed against the image of an inviting playground, supposedly found on Nauru, with the words “you choose” printed ominously underneath.
According to Hildebrand and the Daily Telegraph, the choice is clear; it is deaths at sea or it is detention camps with playgrounds; you can choose to save an asylum seeker here but in doing so, sacrifice an asylum seeker elsewhere.
Most outrageously, in this article entitled “This is the Devil’s choice, and may God help those who make it,” Hildebrand insinuates that the only clear decision is that we afford Politicians such as Mr. Dutton and Mr. Turnbull our sympathy, rather than our anger, for having to face problem at all.
Hildebrand considers the reality of the topic to be “complex” and “vexing,” but anyone with integrity would find the idea of sympathising with politicians who subject innocent people to collective punishment by indefinite detention the most ‘vexing’ prospect of all.
This is compounded by the testimony of the Paediatricians who assessed the health of the 69 children in the group, finding that they were some of the most damaged children with which they ever had to work.
Even the Immigration department’s own top Doctor has conservatively echoed their views and asserted that detaining children is harmful to their wellbeing.
Furthermore, Hildebrand agonises over the threat of “inadvertently [creating] a cruel incentive for people to feign illness or commit acts of self-harm in order to win a chance at freedom” if the Government were to abstain from sending them back to Nauru.
Perhaps, Joe, the answer is to remove the incentive by closing the camps.
For Hildebrand and those readers who are stuck in the Quagmire of two-party politics, this does not mean that we must again resign ourselves to the prospect of a northern sea graveyard. There are serious alternatives.
For example, using some of the many findings from the Houston Panel’s 2012 report on Asylum seekers, the Greens party has outlined a plan that would see an increase in humanitarian intake (which to his credit, Hildebrand himself advocates) and refugee processing in Indonesia to prevent the likelihood of people risking the high seas.
Assuming this kind of plan or any other alternative fails to stop the stream of people smuggling, we can learn an important lesson from the Italian Navy on what to do about it.
In response to the drownings of 150 asylum seekers in the Mediterranean in October 2013, the Italian Government enacted a policy of search and rescue in the waters between Italy and the coast of Libya.
The operation dictated that a boat in distress was to be towed back to the Italian coast for processing and the refugees on-board given the aid that international law stipulates.
This operation is widely considered to have saved the lives of approximately 130,000 African asylum seekers, while 3,000 drowned over the 12 month period.
It was only when the $12 million a month ‘Operation Mare Nostrum’ was replaced with the cheaper ‘Operation Triton’ in October 2014, which had a far smaller search and rescue range, did the body count begin to run wild.
It was in the very first week that Operation Mare Nostrum was abandoned and Operation Triton began that over 1000 refugees drowned, which amounted to a third of the previous year’s body count in only a seven day period.
But not only did the death toll rise tenfold from 4.2 to 46.5 per 1,000 refugees over comparable periods, there was a similarly a rise in the amount of asylum seekers that attempted to make the journey despite the decreasing prospect of success.
This showed clearly that it was not the pull factor of Operation Mare Nostrum that explained the tide of refugees, rather it was the nature of the push factors that were sending them fleeing.
To bring the discussion back to Australia, it is clear that the recommendations from the Houston Panel and the example of Operation Mare Nostrum provide alternatives we can adopt to find the “greatest possible good” that Mr. Hildebrand is looking for.
Joe can continue to champion the cause of the ‘worthy’ refugees in overseas camps, who he refers to as the ones we do not see, but the undeniable fact is that he does not know, in fact nobody knows, that the fate of those who are dissuaded from braving the journey over the sea is any different from those remaining in the camps.
It would be a cliché to suggest that Joe should stick to entertainment journalism, and nor do I think he should; anyone with a voice should speak up in defence of those who cannot defend themselves.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hildebrand seems to have drowned in the quagmire of two-party politics and public opinion and ended up regurgitating the mythology that there is no escape from our current reality.
It takes some courage to be a contrarian and to stand against the masses, but when faced with those who would say ‘I know that detention camps are a human rights abuse, but…’ it becomes our moral obligation to speak out in protest.
