3. Experiencing Exclusion

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ROGER SLEE

3. EXPERIENCING EXCLUSION

Since the dismantling of a US military installation and the hosting of Japanese war crimes trials in 1950-51, Manus Island, with a population of around fifty thousand people off the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, has had infrequent Australian media and political attention (Sydney Morning Herald, February 22nd 1950). This changed when Australian governments saw it as a suitably removed outpost for people seeking political asylum in Australia. The then Labor government’s announcement of returning asylum-seekers to Manus Island as another solution for the intractable challenge of stopping the flow of asylum seekers by boat and the collateral drowning of displaced people returned it to the Australian broadsheets and tabloids. A reinstalled Prime Minister Kevin Rudd secured an agreement with Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister Peter O’Neill to re-commission an immigration detention and processing centre on Manus Island for those he called “economic refugees” (The Australian, July 15th 2013). In its makeover for the September 7th 2013 federal election the Labor government presented itself after having served six years in government office, ironically, as a new choice for the Australian electorate. New referred to both its leadership switch from Julia Gillard to Kevin Rudd, and with it to an election-directed policy ensemble. Not surprisingly the lexicon of the reinstalled Rudd leadership and policy offerings was deliberate. Following Fairclough’s (2000) analysis in New Labour, New Language?, Ball elaborates the purposes of political discourse: Slogans, recipes, incantations and self-evidences … are part of the process of building support for state projects and establishing hegemonic vision … the statements and fragments do make a coherent joined-up whole. They do not have their effects by virtue of their inherent logic. Discourses often maintain their credibility through their repetition, substantive simplicity … and rhetorical sophistication. (Ball, 2007, p. 2) Political discourse eschews uncomfortable truths, to coin a phrase, to reassure the collective disposition. The Rudd government (Mark II) gave no quarter either to people smugglers, or to so-called immigration queue-jumpers. “Asylum-seeker” and “refugee” are established pejoratives in Australian public discourse. The major political parties attempted to outflank each other announcing tougher stances on boat arrivals and temporary immigration visas. David Marr suggests that we have got ourselves into a panic:

We are in a panic again. This golden country. So prosperous, so intelligent, so safe and orderly, is afraid of refugees arriving in fishing boats. This is the great Australian fear, one that never really goes away: the fear of being overrun by dusky fleets sailing down from the north. Every time refugee boats appear on the horizon in any numbers, we panic. Facts then count for little. Hearts are hardened. Terrible things are done in the name of protecting the nation. Though this is not the first wave of boats and won’t be the last, the politics are more rancorous than ever. Panic has been with us from the start. It’s so Australian. Panic over the Chinese was the midwife of Federation and we have been swept by panics ever since. (Marr, 2011, p. 1) While the moral imperative of the asylum seekers debate is for this observer straightforward, let me not be reductive; the issues that surround it are complex. They warrant deconstruction, albeit brief and incomplete. Conservative politicians, representing both the Labor Party and the Conservative Coalition parties, are insistent that opposition to the dangers of people trafficking underscores their stance on the asylum issue. The growing inventory of drowning at sea of men, women and children made good their case. People do perish namelessly and the acceptance of payment to dispatch desperate and displaced people to treacherous seas in unseaworthy vessels is unconscionable. Staying put in hostile and dangerous conditions is not an option for these people either. Prime Minister Rudd declared that stringent measures were necessary to dismantle the people smugglers’ business plan. Opposition leader Tony Abbott offered the trump card of taking away existing provisions for people seeking to appeal administrative decisions against their submission for asylum and withdrawing the hitherto right to legal advice and representation. The debate about political asylum in Australia for displaced people should neither be distilled to a mode of transport, nor to the dangers of people trafficking. Like other complex social phenomena it comprises a matrix of interconnected elements that form the whole. Nikolas Rose (2007, p.9) reminds us that this is the principal lesson from Michel Foucault’s analysis in The Birth of The Clinic: … understanding the epistemological, ontological and technical reshaping of medical perception at the start of the nineteenth century came about through a series of dimensions, some of which seem, at first sight, rather distant from medicine. Lateral analysis aids more complete understanding of the assemblages that constitute public life. Let’s dissemble asylum-seeking policy. As Marr (2011) attests the long shadow of racism lurks behind questions of immigration in Australia. Ours is a history of:  Colonial invasion and genocide committed against the indigenous inhabitants of the continent (Reynolds, 1999, 2013).