SBS TV screened a documentary tonight which detailed efforts by Phil Glendenning from the Edmund Rice Centre to track what happened to some of the asylum seekers deported by the Australian government earlier this decade – many after prolonged pressure and imprisonment in detention centres in Nauru and Australia. 

Glendenning reckons that they’ve documented the deaths of nine returnees at the hands of the Taliban, but he believes the figure is actually 20. He points out that asylum seekers we have specifically rejected have been accepted as refugees by New Zealand, Canada, the USA, the UK and Sweden.

The documentary included some disgraceful – although not new – evidence that travel documents used by the Australian government to ‘return’ some of the asylum seekers were either fake or inadequate to ensure the safety of the returnees.

Australia’s Parliament pushed through a range of laws in September 2001 which allowed asylum seekers to be removed from Australian territory and sent to Nauru, where their refugee claims could be ‘assessed’ by Australian government immigration officials outside any legal framework or independent review. 

Although the Australian Parliament took this action, I was the only Parliamentarian who travelled to Nauru to visit and talk to the asylum seekers who were detained there as a result of those laws being passed.  I did so four times between 2003 and 2006.

Despite my inclination against absolutist statements, I am 100% confident in saying that the standard of ‘assessment’ of many of the asylum claims made by those forcibly sent to Nauru was error riddled and almost certainly tainted by political pressure.

I also have absolutely no doubt that a specific part of the strategy of the former Australian government for dealing with asylum seekers whose claims were rejected was to try to crush their hopes and their spirit so they would agree to be deported, regardless of the risk.

But the question is not about the failures of the past which allowed such dismal and dangerous processes to occur outside the rule of law. In my view that is beyond any reasonable dispute. The question is what happens now? Do we just say “bad luck”, “too bad” or “blame John Howard” even though the laws were only passed due to ALP support and had the support of a majority of the public?

The documentary shown on SBS TV showed a small part of the unnecessary human suffering that ensued as a result of the laws rushed through the Senate in the pre-election haste of 2001.

No doubt the next week or two of ABC TV’s Howard Years will show comments from a range of Liberal government Ministers about asylum seekers, refugees, the Tampa, children overboard, the Pacific Solution and the rest.  I wonder how many words we will hear from the refugees who were the direct target of these politically motivated and administratively corrupt processes?