Shakespeare on refugees

Shakespeare had some fine things to offer politicians and judges on refugees and how to treat them ... Procrustes says it should be compulsory for ministers of the crown to read Measure For Measure ... More bribes on the way for PNG following the Supreme Court decision on the Manus Island detention centre 

Goodness me, we've just celebrated 400 years since the Bard's  death (23 April also marks his birthday). As if to celebrate, unintentionally, the ABC gave us a Four Corners on Monday, April 25, that was utterly scarifying: the tale of the death of an Iranian refugee applicant, Hamid Khazaei. 

Hamid had the misfortune to attempt to enter Australia as a prospective refugee applicant after compulsory off-shore processing for boat arrivals had been established.

Off he went from Christmas Island to Manus Island, where he was incarcerated in our off-shore detention facility. There he cut his leg, infection and then sepsis set in, and in a drawn out agony from late August through to September 2014 he died. The point of the Four Corner's program was the outrage of various senior Australian doctors as to the process employed by the Department of Immigration in dealing with Hamid's plight.

There came a point where it was obvious that he could not be adequately treated on Manus Island, and required removal to Pt Moresby. The request, made very late in Hamid's decline, was sent to the department in Canberra, where a day was lost while the email languished, before permission was granted to have him removed. By that time, it was apparent that the civilian flight on which he'd been booked the previous day was no longer adequate: he required medivac.

Hamid was duly flown to Pt Moresby, in a condition that indicated that he already needed to be flown to high quality intensive care in Brisbane. After a day in Pt Moresby that was arranged, but all was now too late.  Hamid died some days later of the septicemia that had taken hold, and which could have been treated properly if he had had proper medical treatment from the time he presented with symptoms. 

Of the sequelae from this fatality, most alarming was the emollient drivel from then Minister for Immigration Morrison, to the effect that Hamid had received the best possible treatment from the top team of medicos on Manus. The tone was that this was all just a misfortune for whom no one was responsible. 

Morrison: drivel

What can be gleaned from the ABC program is in accordance with what one might expect from a highly bureaucratised system, attuned to the political tone of government, which had no inbuilt sub-system for dealing with anomalies or emergencies.

That failure to allow for the unexpected was congruent with a departmental mind-set that, a decade after the event, still reflected the July 2005 Palmer report on Cornelia Rau. Palmer, a former commissioner of the AFP, observed a departmental determination to keep people detained as a top priority. Letting them out, on any basis at all, was not part of the group-think.

Governments that want to play with the fire of removing liberty for other than conviction for a crime known to law need to think through the process rather more carefully than Australian Governments have done since mandatory detention came into law in the reign of Paul Keating, and was so thoroughly embraced by John Howard.

The detention process rests, at least in some instances, on the "reasonable suspicion" of grade z officials who are empowered to assess travel documents as to their authenticity. That level of suspicion, unlike that at arrest, is open to no systematised review. And despite any number of internal immigration department policy directives requiring monthly reviews of detainees, as to their legal status and whether they might be accommodated outside a detention centre, nothing of the sort is ever carried out.

Could those entering the Commonwealth ministry be made to read a little Shakespeare before they make the trip to Yarralumla to be sworn in? Perhaps some of Measure for Measure could be made compulsory, and examined, as a necessary reminder to ministers of the public service wood out of which they must fashion practical policies. 

Measure for Measure should be compulsory for ministers

I refer to the following from Act, 2 Sc. 11, where Isabella is debating the absolute mechanical application of the law: should a judge impose penalty without reference to individual human failings, including those of the judge.

But man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.

As for the larger picture on our detention of refugee applicants, the whole nation might like to read the portion of Sir Thomas More (co-written by Shakespeare, but too politically hot to be produced in Shakespeare's lifetime), dealing with refugees. In Act 2 Sc. 1V, Shakespeare (it's his handwriting in this portion of the manuscript) has More say:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise 
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th'ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I'll tell you. You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

Having warned of the consequence of the survival of the fittest approach, Shakespeare then puts the following in More's mouth:

Should so much come to short of your great trespass 
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers' case;
And this your mountanish inhumanity.

A bit of dog-spurning took place the day after the Anzac Day Four Corners program, when a five member bench of the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court, including Terry Higgins, lately Chief Justice of the ACT Supreme Court, found the existence of the Manus Island gulag to be contrary to both the PNG Constitution's requirements for human rights, and the standards of various human rights conventions to which PNG was a signatory. The centre was ordered to be closed forthwith.

Minister Dutton was quick to a microphone to froth over the continued determination of the Australian Government to keep boat arrivals off-shore.

The options are poor - Nauru is too small to take the Manus rejects. No doubt another Pacific Island can be bought by our unlovely government. But the track record is clear - they will not bow to international opinion. 

In A v Australia (1997) 4 BHRC 210, the UN Human Rights Committee determined that the four year detention of refugee applicant A without any review during that period was contrary to the terms of Article 9 of the ICCPR concerning loss of liberty only for causes known to law and not arbitrary.

In the best traditions of South Sea sulk, the UN HRC ruling was ignored, and, of course, the Commonwealth refused to pay the compensation ordered by the Committee. All in the best traditions of international citizenship.