Open letter to Australia’s Senators

NO STATUTE in this country compels you to care for asylum seeker children.

In fact one statute allows you such breadth to act against them, to so great an extent, it takes one’s breath away.

This message is to all you – the veritable cornucopia of factions – who voted AYE to legislation depriving children of their human rights.

Like those who excised Australia from the migration zone. A motion which removed children from our sunny shores to islands such as Manus and Nauru, and potentially anywhere else the Minister for Border Protection so deems.

This band of AYES is just one in a long line of motions, cementing the fate of the children.

Motions that removed the Minister for Border Protection as Guardian of the children. Because the courts deemed that no guardian could send a child to a malaria-infested island.

You may have been involved in other motions. Like the one that gave the Minister power unencumbered by international law or domestic statute. Even the whisper of natural justice silenced.

Or you may have voted yes to placing power in the hands of one person: the Minister. Regardless of whether any other person or agency involved has anything to say about it.

Or you may have ayed the motion which allows the indefinite detention of children. Giving them fewer rights than a murderer or a terrorist.

Yes indeed you have underwritten what will be seen in the dusty pages of history as an act of state-sanctioned abuse against children.

When Amanda Vanstone stood at Villawood, her ministerial foot poised on the hilt of a spade she launched what would become Villawood, ‘Alternative Place of Detention’, Labor leaders cried foul.

Under both Liberal and Labor-led governments 50+ people have been detained in Villawood for years, including young children, and will remain so indefinitely. Without charge or the ability to see accusations made against them. 

By your acts of parliament you dig that hole ever deeper.

When Labor came to power then Immigration Minister Chris Evans presented New Directions in Detention: Restoring Integrity to Australia’s Immigration System.

When then new immigration minister Chris Bowen first visited Christmas Island and played with the detained children in the sandpit he said, these children must be free, and soon.

Today Ministers Bowen and Evans are no more. But over 700 children remain locked in secure facilities. Those New Directions shredded, beyond recognition. Integrity all but set adrift.

Now we have war on our hands. A military led, operationally secret, full scale conflict primarily against children.

Only now it does not suffice to send children to remote onshore locations.

With your AYES we send them to Nauru. An island of 21-square kilometres with a population of 10,000, only ten percent of those working for wages. From us, poor Australia, only the 12th largest economy in the world by GDP.

After all, we here in Australia only have limited plains to share. With only 7.7 million square kilometres it makes sense that we should send children to a tiny island prison straddling a rubbish dump and phosphate mine.

But! You cry – dear politicians – you cry. For all those poor drown-ed children.

But where are your tears for the poor damaged children?

For the nine-year-old who attempted suicide in Darwin detention?

For the children assaulted on Nauru, where staff have no working with children checks. A country with no local child protection laws.

For those who self-harm in their ‘alternative’ detention holes? Not counted as attempted suicide by the corporations paid billions to keep them in ‘care’.

And even if that child does die that death will not be considered a death in custody.

For of course, you may accept the Party line, children ‘are not held in immigration detention in Australia’. Despite the fences, sensors on doors and windows. The armed guards. And the inability to move out of their non-prison-like home.

A damaged child is better than a drowned child you say.

Please do go and say that to the face of a damaged child on Nauru.

Go and look in the eyes of a five-year-old. Then go again and visit him when he’s ten.

Say to him, ‘You’re here, but not for your own good, for the good of all the children who would have drowned had we not imprisoned you.’

Look into his face and say ‘Those lost years in Nauru – those non-drowned children you saved – were worth the price of your childhood. I cannot give you those years back. I’m sorry. As we were sorry for the Stolen Generations. For those who were taken from the hands of loving mothers and placed in state care. History repeats itself. I did not know then what I know now.’

If you cannot imagine his face look to his words and the pictures he draws. Look to his letters imploring you not to forget him.

Oh ‘but we must be cruel to be kind’ you say. We must build walls to protect children from drowning.

But our kindness does not extend to those who live.

Not to children languishing in an Indonesian cage.

Or those destitute in an impoverished corrupt nation, with its non-existent child protections.

Nor from the slow cruel death of hope in detention.

Nor death in another country’s waters.

I am telling you this; all you of the AYES. Because we have been to fortress Australia before.

The hole was dug first by the Keating Government. Expanded by the Coalition. Banished as immoral then re-embraced by the Labor Party. Then fortress Australia, with its four-star generals was re-envisaged by the Coalition government. Turning an already anti-refugee policy into a war against vulnerable people.

For all Australia’s riches, the moral depravity of this statute, what it has become, is astounding, to my eyes, a person reading statutes for over 15 years.

And now, you are all poised to do it again. To inject more hatred into an already hateful policy, where the minister already has the power to detain at whim. To extend his powers to make life or death decisions without court oversight. To ‘legally’ as well as practically ignore the Refugee Convention. To reduce life or death decisions to the flick of his pen and to – in true Alice-in-Wonderland fashion – deem babies born in Australia ‘illegal maritime arrivals’.

Senators let me ask you, does any one man or woman deserve such power?

Is any man or woman immune from the truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely?

Look at the Migration Act and what it has become; there you will find your answer.   

So perhaps MPs, senators, you of the AYES, you will have saved a few children from drowning.

But without a doubt you have turned your hearts and backs on those who still live.

It’s time to turn around now. To stop the assault inflicted on the rights and lives of children. Remove the blindfolds from your eyes and see the truth; this is no war. You have the power to demilitarise this discussion and help people realise, yes, this is about protecting children’s lives. Stopping children drowning at sea is but one side. Protecting those who live is a whole other story.

This is not an ‘and/or scenario’. You need not damage children to protect others.

Start by saying ‘no’ to the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014.

If you truly care for children, all children then build a framework that protects children.

Start with an independent guardian; one who is not their gaoler.

Apply Australian child protection laws to asylum seeker children.

Help protect children in languishing in gaols and slums in source countries, like Malaysia and Indonesia. Take the absurd masses of money – $400,000 to detain EACH child – and put that towards assessing refugee claims in source countries.

Exercise your creativity; don’t just pay a gaoler.

Then listen to groups like the Human Rights Commission, ChilOut, the AMA, the paediatricians, the psychologists, and thousands of others who have spoken for the children.  All children. Not just those who might die at sea.

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