The Gillard government, its Malaysian deal, and the UN Convention on Refugees

'If you take a bunch of innocent people and throw them into gaol indefinitely, they will eventually break...When they break, we punish them.'
Julian Burnside on the academic blog site < conference.edu.au > on 9 May 2011. Burnside again is articulating the anger so many of us feel. The Gillard Labor government is becoming quite as brutal to asylum-seekers as was Howard's Coalition and, as Burnside points out, is seemingly abandoning compassion in an electoral panic driven by the Right's escalating rants of intolerance. It's a political reality that ill-informed and self-serving rants by people in power will always gain some kind of audience: ethical politics must move beyond them.  Sadly however the PM's dialogue is increasingly cruel, alienating, and flouts human rights. The policies breach international law. Deals are being done with nations who have not ratified the UN Convention and Protocol on the Status of Refugees. Australian media has documented, and disseminated, the conditions of the detention centres to which Australia will send people who have fled here for help in crisis. In those centres, people who have been granted refugee status by the UNHCR may have that status removed by the simple expedient of stealing their official card. There is no doubt what is going on there. So to what are we consigning people, and with no right of return? What in the name of any gods does this Prime Minister think she is doing? Will this Australian Government need to be threatened with the Hague and the International Court of Justice before the 'Good Global Citizen' returns. Or will Julia Gillard now say, as John Howard so famously did 10 years ago when confronted by the UNHCR on mandatory detention of asylum-seekers "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come"?