One of Australia‘s greatest pastimes is scouring the international media for any scant mention of our humble island, so that we can experience the adrenaline rush of national pride that the Northern Hemisphere has noticed us, albeit fleetingly.
Unfortunately, most of the mentions we get these days tend to be about how much our detention centre scheme sucks and exists outside international law. So it blunts the pride, somewhat.
No one is more accustomed to hammering us on border security than the world’s very own paper of record, The New York Times. The NYT has given quite a bit of attention to our unique approach to detaining asylum seekers, and they’re back at it again. Today’s tut-tut comes from Roger Cohen, a longtime foreign correspondent who is currently in Sydney:
The Australian treatment of refugees trying to reach this vast, thinly populated country by boat follows textbook rules for the administering of cruelty. It begins with the anodyne name for the procedures — “offshore processing” — as if these desperate human beings were just an accumulation of data.
Australia’s border regime is getting so much international attention not only because it flouts international law – it’s because hard right operators in Europe and beyond see us as a model for approaching the refugee crisis currently afflicting many parts of the world. So it’s more than just a brutal curiosity for international reporters.
But this is an unusually strong condemnation:
Australia’s “offshore processing” is falling apart and must end. The Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled in April that the Australian-funded detention center on Manus Island was illegal. In Australia, only retroactive parliamentary legislation enacted after a plaintiff filed suit granted legal support for a policy in effect pursued illegally since 2012.
Yikes. The final para invites us to “scrap a policy that shames a nation with its pointless cruelty.”
Look, if the basic, basic requirements of human dignity and empathy aren’t enough to motivate our paralysed bipartisan system into reform, then maybe being shamed by the Americans is enough. The Americans. Come on, guys.
Source: New York Times.
Photo: Getty Images.
