Just as Labor candidates are breaking ranks on asylum policy Burnside launches a new book on offshore detention … Former appeals judge Stephen Charles says Manus and Nauru are “concentration camps” … Madeline Gleeson examines what happens to refugees when they are out of sight, out of mind
A blistering speech from Julian Burnside last night at Sydney’s Walsh Bay, as he launched down the slipway of sales success Madeline Gleeson’s book Offshore – Behind the wire on Manus and Nauru.
Madeline is a researcher at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law and her book takes us behind the first three years of offshore detention and examines what life is like in these wretches camps.
It’s a carefully documented eye-opener into what is really going on behind the wire.
In his launch speech Burnside said the book should be the first exhibit in the “indictment of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton for crimes against humanity”.
We all know that it’s now a criminal offence for staff or contractors to report what happens at offshore “processing” centres. As Burnside put it:
“If it’s a criminal offence to report a crime, then you known the place is being run by criminals.”
The aim of the policy is to brutalise people who come to Australia seeking protection. This is to make them think it would be better to be persecuted at home, rather than at the hands of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
As one Rohingya asylum seeker put it:
“In Burma they shoot you. In Australia they destroy you slowly.”
Burnside’s version is:
“If you don’t drown at sea, we will punish you.”
Only the other day, blue ribbon Melbourne type and former judge of VicAppeals, Stephen Charles QC, had a piece in The Age where he didn’t beat around the bush:
“The camps in Manus Island and Nauru have long since ceased to be mere detention centres. They are now concentration camps.”
In the case of Reza Barati, the Iranian who was murdered at Manus in February 2014, Morrison claimed that he had escaped from the detention centre and so had only himself to blame for getting killed.
That was one lie among many that came from Morrison as minister, which makes you wonder how many he’s peddling as Treasurer.
His even bigger lie was to foment the myth that boat people are criminals. And each Sunday he goes to his happy-clappy Shirelive Church.
Morrison’s faction in the seat of Cook was also behind defamatory smearing of a rival Liberal candidate, Michael Towke. Lies about Towke were peddled to the Telegraph, the upshot being the Lebanese Christian had his preselection disendorsed and Morrison took the seat and the paper was forced to settle a defamation claim.
Burnside’s fear is that Turnbull will only be returned with a reduced majority, which will cause disquiet in the party room and eventually he’ll be rolled by Morrison.
He added that we should regard Gleeson’s book as his political epitaph.
The author said that despite studying the topic intensely for years she has failed to find where the government has thought through this policy to the end. If Australia won’t take those held in detention and no one else will, where do these people go? It’s simply not feasible, in most cases, that they will return to their homes, so what is the end game?
Among the admirers were: