Don’t forget the asylum seekers

Tony Dewberry

“You can judge politicians by how they treat refugees; they do to them what they would like to do to everyone else if they could get away with it.” — Ken Livingstone, lord mayor of London

It seems the Howard government wants to prove Livingstone’s claim true, going by its so-called anti-terror laws that give the state vast new powers over the life and liberty of everyone in this country. We know from its treatment of refugees that this government is not restrained by any considerations of inviolable human rights, and it cannot be trusted with these new powers. In fact, a key element in defending our own civil liberties must be to strip the government of those powers it has misused against asylum seekers.

Pauline Wright, vice-president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, says the new laws’ provisions on control orders and preventative detention orders “are completely inconsistent with the rule of law as it should exist in a democracy like Australia”. She refers here to the power to detain people secretly, indefinitely and without laying criminal charges.

The government will be able to detain and disappear witnesses, and other people who have not committed any crime. There will be a penalty of up to five years’ jail for telling anyone about the detention. Wright points out the government is overturning important norms of the justice system such as presumption of innocence, the need to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt, the right to a fair trial and rules of evidence fair to all parties.

Resistance to these attacks on our rights is emerging, but the struggle does not start with a clean slate. Human rights abuses are being committed here and now against asylum seekers. What they do to the refugees they could do to any one of us. After all, the first attorney-general to oversee the new laws will be Philip Ruddock.

Imprisonment without trial is not something to fear in the future — we have it already with mandatory detention, to which the government remains committed. The fate of the recently arrived asylum seekers from West Papua shows this.

The government is building new detention centres. This is especially frightening now that Howard and Peter Costello have initiated public debate on stripping people of their citizenship on national security grounds. In this they were abetted by Labor leader Kim Beazley, who said anyone who supported a revolutionary cause, be it communist, Nazi or Islamic, should not be allowed into this country.

Secrecy around detentions will ensure the anonymity of the disappeared and detained, undermining public sympathy for them. Who are more anonymous in Australia today than asylum seekers? Under Liberal MP Petro Georgiou’s “reforms”, hundreds of men, women and children were released to grinding poverty, unable to access adequate social welfare benefits.

Living under “removal pending visas”, in fear of deportation, they are unable to protest any aspect of their mistreatment because of the terrible power the government holds over them. Even children born here have no legal hold on their country of birth. This is social apartheid, acceptable because the government has kept it invisible. Now Howard and Ruddock want the same kind of secrecy for those detained under the “counter-terrorism” laws.

What the government gets away with in its mistreatment of asylum seekers is a threat to us all. In the fight for our civil liberties and human rights we must not forget the asylum seekers. Everyone concerned about human rights should support the protests at Villawood detention centre this Easter (see ).

The protests will run from April 14-17. There will be rallies outside the detention centre, a multicultural concert and a conference. Get yourself to Villawood at Easter and demand freedom for the refugees. Stand up for your rights!

[Tony Dewberry is a member of the Socialist Alliance-Green Left Weekly editorial board and the Refugee Action Collective in Melbourne.]

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