Barbarism and boats

History's judgment will be to vindicate our treatment of boat people ... IQ2 debate on May 6 ... Sydney Recital Hall packed to the beams ... For the proposition Philip Ruddock and Tom Switzer ... Against, Carina Hoang and Richard Ackland ... Simon Longstaff in the chair ... Here's the case put by Justinian's editor 

WHAT have we heard so far from the pro-vindication team? 

Some of their vindications seem to come from a parallel universe, in which Australia is a magnificently generous country flinging open its arms to the dispossessed; saving people from drowning at sea; putting evil people smugglers out of business; and shoring-up our sovereignty from an invasion of wooden fishing boats (which at some stage we promise to buy back). 

We'll interrogate those arguments in a moment, but none of them goes to the heart of the subject of this debate: history's judgment will be to vindicate our treatment of boat people. 

From the point of view of us on the non-vindication team the most important word is this topic is history. 

How can history vindicate a political response that is predicated for its effectiveness on cruelty, inhumanity, offensiveness to our largest and most important neighbour, offshore gulags in godforsaken dumping grounds, detention of children - all with the attendant consequences of mental illness, suicide, self-harm, murder, and the slow suffocation of detainees in an extenuated processing regime that goes nowhere. 

Don't take the idle word of a journalist for this.

Day after day we've had evidence first-hand from people who work at these gulags: former security guards, charity workers and real live footage from Manus showing people in the pay of the Australian government running amok with clubs, machetes and guns. 

It's three months since the death of Reza Barati on Manus and still no one is accountable. 

Independent investigations have been blocked by Australia and Papua New Guinea and we will never see the report from the government appointed investigator Robert Cornall. 

In fact, the whole theatre of border protection and sovereignty is wrapped in the most absurd official Kremlinesque secrecy. 

*   *   *

Manus: history's triumph?

THIS is what the two speakers for the affirmative ask you to accept. That this will be history's triumph. 

Yet all of history since the Enlightenment has been a gradual retreat from a world were inhumanity was common-place.  

Has history vindicated the White Australia Policy; or the subjugation of women; or the stolen generation; or slavery; or public executions; or all the other cruelties perpetrated down the centuries in the name of sound policy making? 

Will future generations of school children open their history books to chapters that celebrate the noble works of Scott (No Exceptions) Morrison? 

Probably, if Christopher Pyne has anything to do with the syllabus. 

Will there be spread through the halls of leaning busts hewn from marble of Philip Ruddock wreathed in laurels?

In fact, we don't even have to wait for history. The judgment is being made here and now. 

We might remember the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley: 

My name is Ozy-Man-Di-Us, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away ...

Legacies decay and none more quickly than those who prosper on the wretchedness of others. 

*   *   * 

BACK to what we have been told by Philip Ruddock and Tom Switzer. 

We had the drowning argument. No more deaths at sea because the boats have been stopped. 

Don't be lulled into accepting the notion that these people are bleeding-heart Liberals. 

Deaths at sea were cynically and cruelly exploited by the Coalition when in Opposition because it became the basis of the justification to apply every brutal, inhumane, nasty remedy that could be conjured - all in the name of being humane. 

Swapping deaths at sea for a slower form of annihilation on land is not what I would call a humane improvement. 

The key argument of the vindicationists is that we are already generous enough. 

This is a long-standing furphy, and it depends on how you massage your statistics. 

If you just take offshore resettlements , then yes, we are generous on a per capita basis. We rank number three in the world, after the US and Canada. That is people resettled through the UN program.

Sounds good. 

However, if you look at what we call our onshore intake, that is people who have been found to have refugee status after arriving by plane or boat seeking asylum, our per capital ranking rank drops from number three to number 32 on 2012 figures. 

We fall below Sudan, Afghanistan, Gambia, Chad and of course Burundi. 

Our raw numbers are miniscule. 

The UN data used by the Refugee Council of Australia shows we took 8,367 onshore asylum seekers as refugees in 2012, which is 0.61 percent of the global total of asylum seekers recognised as refugees. 

Since 1978 an average of less than two boat people a day have arrived in Australia. 

This explains our clogged roads, a problem skilfully identified by Liberal MP Fiona Scott. 

*   *   *

Nauru detention centre

IS there something better that can be proposed? 

There are more humane alternatives, but both sides of politics are embedded in a race to the bottom so invariably they are quickly dismissed. 

One suggestion floated in the report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers chaired by Angus Houston was to put greater focus on taking more refugees from Indonesia. 

Currently there are about 5,000 refugees and asylum seekers registered with the UNHCR in Indonesia. 

In truth, there are many more unregistered. 

There are people, and I'm one of them, who would urge a much more radical approach. 

Why not our entire humanitarian program in Indonesia? Have a queue, because Australians love a queue, and have the UNHCR run the queue in Indonesia. 

There is an argument that Africa and its refugees are more directly the responsibility of the old colonial powers of Europe. 

You switch our humanitarian intake from Africa and the Middle East and you put it all on our doorstep where we have a direct responsibility. 

The reason people get on boats from Indonesia is because they have no hope of being part of an orderly resettlement program. 

If you give them hope with a place in the queue, there is a chance they will not get on boats. 

Our refugee intake from Indonesia has been woeful.

In the nine years to 2009, we took an average of 59 UNHCR refugees a year from that country. In 2010-11 it spiked to 480, a tiny 3.4 per cent of our humanitarian program.

Of course, it would attract more seeking refugee status to Indonesia, but at least they would know there was a queue and a processing procedure that was working. 

And then you could legitimately say, if you get get out of the queue and get on a boat you would end on on Christmas Island. 

*   *   *

WHAT does seem so clear is that Sovereign Borders, the Pacific Solution, however it's known, has a specific purpose. 

It is designed to deter dark-skinned people with funny religions reaching these shores. 

Do you think for one minute there would be a policy that contains the word "Solution", attended with all its dreadful historic resonance, if say after an invasion of England by cruel, sporren-wearing Scots, boatloads of lily-white Poms were heading to Ashmore Reef seeking refugee status? 

In those circumstances not for a second would there be a Manus or Nauru Solution. That solution is centred on race. 

*   *   *

IN 1604 Christopher Marlow's play Dr Faustus was published.  

It is the story of the Faustian Pact - a man who sells his soul to the devil for short term power. 

For a defined term of 24 years he is given power, knowledge and success. 

But, when the time's up he is carried-off by the devil. 

Our refugee policy has been on a steadily downward track for 24 years. By now, you'd have thought we'd have learnt the lesson of Dr Faustus. 

History tells us: If you sell your soul, you'll never get it back.