Asylum in Arcadia: Detaining Refugees in Australia

It’s a curious scene for a country of immigrants. Woodside, one of Australia’s more provincial areas in South Australia, is abuzz with animosity. Australia’s neuroses regarding immigration is a perennial condition, occasionally afflicting its citizens like a vicious, sweat inducing fever. The Federal government, albeit a Labor minority government, is keen to show that it is being ‘tough’ on trafficking and the cruelties it entails for those who flirt and tinker with it. It is also keen to show that it will detain those naughty ‘illegals’ who keep insisting in arriving on boats that are often more likely sink than not. Governments have changed, but the myth makers rarely do, sprucing up the narratives for the next political turn and the next high dosage of fear.

The discussion about a detention centre in the Adelaide Hills has not gone well for the government. A defence housing estate in Inverbrackie is the destined site for up to 400 asylum seekers, mostly Afghan and Sri Lankan. The opposition leader Tony Abbott descended on the residents of Woodside a few weeks ago to find a town meeting boiling with rage. Commentary on this verges on the idiotic. Detention housing with fencing and high level security is made to sound like the Ritz. Consider Abbott’s less than insightful words. ‘This is obviously quite an idyllic part of Australia. I think bringing asylum seekers to an area like this is basically saying to the people smugglers and their customers that the welcome mat is out, and that the red carpet treatment is available and it’s the last thing that the Government should be doing.’ (ABC, Nov 3).

Abbott does have a point. The policy on this is skewed. The government is not entirely sure what it wants. It will permit security guards to observe the residents, but adults will be allowed to engage with the local citizens. Their children will be allowed to attend school. The residents are similarly puzzled. One is encouraged to be tolerant, but can tolerance be encouraged when asylum seekers are made to resemble the highest security threats Australia fears?

There must be, or so goes the old conservative approach, ‘order’ instead of red carpets and hospitality; steps must be taken to ensure that individuals who arrive are ‘suitable’. Under the Howard government, the notion of a queue, a mythical trail of processed asylum seekers, dominated discussion. There is little new at Abbott’s end on that score, and the feeling from his advisors is that offshore processing is the old and trusted technique. (There were the good old days of the Pacific Solution, when asylum seekers were exchanged for bird shit and infrastructure bribes.) ‘This is the problem. I mean it is a queue jumping issue.’ There are the ‘right’ people working within the rules and those working without them.

The more one looks at the security regime being suggested; the more one gazes at the residents agitated by the lack of consultation in this particular part of South Australia, the more one realises how rich the well of fear is. From it, the draught is heavy with prospects – most of all for the political establishment. The locals play up to the image of the redneck. The hillbilly personae is cultivated. The banjo is procured. Cultural drag is encouraged as statements of indignation sound. ‘If one of them jumps the fence,’ argues a bald headed man with nose ring and tattoos, ‘they will go for the car, then the wife.’ Bourgeois property rights are, of course, fundamental. The car, then the missus.

There is a tacit understanding amongst all the residents at these meetings, including the political brass who descend upon them like vultures feasting upon carrion - new arrivals are criminals or, at the very least, criminals in waiting. The Immigration officials claim that these people are ‘searching for a better place to live’. The Immigration Minister Chris Bowen has little courage to explain to residents in person that they will have to face the prospect of having such a centre on their doorstep. He prefers, instead, to talk to the Mayor of Adelaide Hills, Bill Cooksley, who is bristling at the idea that he was not consulted. ‘I need to see the fine print. I need to see the detail’ ( Advertiser, Oct 22).

The legal categories are what matters in the end. The assumption of criminality is made the moment the arrivals dock in Australia or on Australian territory. Possessing no papers, or possessing false papers, is all the officials need to draw upon their argot of international criminality.

There is a double effect here. The residents fear the ‘throat-cutting’ darkies; the government fears the local residents; the asylum seekers fear both the government and the locals. The result is a stagnant consensus: we all need the security, the fences and the walls, if for no other reason than to protect the asylum seekers from suburban, rural and national lunacy. There is no community engagement; there is no blending in more sensitive cultural surrounds for the new arrivals as their claims are being assessed. This is a world of walls and suspicion, with nose-ringed residents worried first about their cars and second about their wives. Priorities must be, and will be, maintained.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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