10]21]12 DeIeated In a crueI game

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llustration: Ed Aragon.
In Kafka's AustraIia, chiIIing bureaucratic vioIence against asyIum seekers breaks them down sIowIy.
SO THS is what ''no advantage'' looks like. We have barely started sending asylum seekers to Nauru and already there has been an attempted
suicide. By hanging, according to the psychiatrist who reported it. The end result was that three more asylum seekers opted to return home rather
than face our immigration system.
That brings the tally of voluntary returns to about 40 - 40 people who decided the situation was so grim, so hopeless that they were better off returning
to the place they were fleeing.
There's something chilling about the government citing these as ''steps forward'', but that's the logic of deterrence. t means we have to take the
misery that produces asylum seekers, then raise it. And since we can't simply inflict direct violence on detainees, we have to do it in more subtle
ways, namely by destroying their sense of hope. That's why people are attempting suicide so quickly, because we're telling them they are going to
Nauru to languish, not to be processed.
But it turns out that's not all we are telling them. We are also telling them they should just give up. This week, ABC radio's 30revealed that
mmigration Department officials are rejecting some asylum seekers on the basis of an informal verbal interview. No application. No lawyer. No
hearing. No process really. Just the uninformed, premature judgment of a bureaucrat trying to dispense with an irritant.
t's the very definition of insidious. So insidious the department has even given it a euphemistic, bureaucratic name, ''screening out'', as though it's a
routine classification process. ''Any person who is screened out progresses towards removal from Australia,'' a media release from the department
says. Progresses. Like they're getting somewhere. Sounds better than ''shunted back home without a hearing'' or ''dumped in detention limbo'', which
is what it actually means.
The idea is so brazen: to trade on the ignorance and powerlessness of asylum seekers. t's not that asylum seekers lose their rights. They don't. At
least in theory they retain the right to apply for refugee status. They have the right to a lawyer. But if you are ''screened out'', you are not told this. f
you happen to know it, and have the inordinate confidence to call an immigration official's bluff, good for you. f not, your rights are pretty much
rhetorical. ''f anyone in immigration detention requests access to a lawyer, we facilitate that request,'' the department says. You just have to assert
rights you don't know you have.
Welcome to Kafka's Australia, where rights are guaranteed, but preferably forgotten. So we maintain that we respect due process and human rights,
even if it's clear we don't always like them very much. We have been doing this for ages. ''Screening out'' has been around for the best part of a
decade; long enough for the department to call it a ''long-standing policy over successive governments''.
And if you believe the lawyers who work in this area, it's part of a number of bureaucratic practices designed to prevent asylum seekers accessing
October 19, 2012
Opinion
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10]21]12 DeIeated In a crueI game
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the few rights they have.
You can't ban asylum seekers from having access to lawyers, but you can insist they fill out a specific form if they want one, and then refuse to give
them the form. You can limit the time lawyers have with their clients to make their work impossible. And if they manage to apply, you can delay the
process by using translators who speak the wrong language, or who belong to rival ethnic groups. t's like the dictation test of the White Australia
period, which could be in Swahili if the immigration official wanted you to fail.
What explains this bureaucratic violence? Telling asylum seekers their claim is rejected without a hearing doesn't ''send a message to people
smugglers'' or ''break the people smugglers' business model''. Obstructing access to a lawyer doesn't deter people from getting on boats. t just
breaks them slowly. These are not policies that have been debated in Parliament and have clearly articulated purposes. They don't need to be. They
arise by osmosis.
Reflecting on the infamous Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo observed that such things become possible
when the perpetrators feel anonymous, when they don't have a sense of personal responsibility for their actions, and have tacit approval from
authority figures. And the obvious differences between Nauru and Abu Ghraib aside, isn't that what's happening here?
This is a culture of belligerence, trickling down from the political leadership. Again, just like White Australia. t's a culture that sees the sneaky denial of
rights as a virtue. A culture that sheds tears for those who die at sea trying to get here, but barely blinks when people are killed after being sent home.
A culture that watches a detainee attempt suicide, and dozens of people give up on the idea of asylum, and then chalks it up as a win.
WaIeed AIy writes fortnightIy. He hosts Drive on ABC Radio NationaI and is a Iecturer in poIitics at Monash University.
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