I know that
politicians do not read their email and that they take advice
only from insiders, but still I offer them gratuitous advice.
Occasionally I get an answer of the form: thanks for writing, I
very much appreciate your input, our policy is as
follows…, if you have any questions please do not hesitate
to write again. Someone may have crossed out the formal address
at the top and written in “John”, and the letter may be signed
in blue ink with the politician’s given name, but obviously it
is entirely the work of a staffer.
Dear Mr
Turnbull,
I would like
an appointment with you to discuss the closing of the Manus and
Nauru detention centres. ….
Kevin Rudd’s
decree that no one sent to Manus and Nauru would ever settle in
Australia may have seemed a good idea at the time because it
removed incentives to take the dangerous voyage, but Mr Rudd did
not anticipate that it would lead to indefinite detention in
conditions of abuse.
There are
several possibilities. One is the bold solution, to announce
that since things have turned out differently the
detainees will be settled in Australia after all.
Another,
which would be consistent with Rudd’s decree, is to make an
arrangement with the European countries now trying to
accommodate large numbers of Syrian refugees. Australia
should offer to take (consenting) refugees the Europeans send
if in return they accept for settlement the people from Manus
and Nauru. (Compare PM Gillard’s “Malaysia solution”,
where Australia promised to take 4000 processed refugees in
exchange for Malaysia’s accepting 800 asylum seekers.) Refugees
now in Europe might well consent to be sent to Australia because
it is an English-speaking country; in most parts of the world if
people know a second language it is English.
A third is to
negotiate again with New Zealand. Mr Key has recently offered to
accept some of the asylum-seekers now in Australia slated to be
returned to Nauru. We are concerned not only for the people
currently in Australia, but for all the detainees. Retaining
here only some of them would be a cop-out. However, Mr Key might
be willing to make again the agreement he made with Julia
Gillard. Mr Abbott rejected that arrangement, saying that
“People ought not think that New Zealand is some kind of a
consolation prize if they can’t come to Australia”, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-12/nz-unable-to-accept-nauru-refugees/7082764.
On this view nothing short of lifelong misery
would do—any kind of “happy ending” would be a consolation prize
and an encouragement to people smugglers. Unfortunately you have
already echoed Mr Abbott in rejecting the NZ offer, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-17/visa-cancellations-on-agenda-for-turnbull-key/7176516.
You should reconsider.
The Gillard
and Rudd governments tried to find other Asia-Pacific countries
to accept the detainees for permanent settlement and you have
continued their attempts. It is clear by now that there is no
realistic prospect of success. Similarly there have been efforts
to improve the living conditions of detainees and protect them
from abuse, but money and good staff are short. To think that
with a bit more time and effort all will be well is a delusion.
The whole point of detaining people on Manus and Nauru is to
prevent any effective supervision of what happens to them, Refugees.html#conf (my speech at
the 2014 ACT ALP Conference). They must be brought to where
their treatment will be properly supervised.
I endorse
your intention to run a genuine “cabinet government”, but
cabinet members are chosen by the Prime Minister and cabinet
decisions are not made by counting heads. A Prime Minister in a
strong political position can and should shape cabinet
decisions. Your political position is very strong at present.
There is no possibility that you will be replaced before the
coming election, or afterwards, unless you lose public support.
The public will not be forgiving if you do not offer
firm leadership and instead allow so-called conservatives to
determine government policy.
In one way or
other the detention camps on Manus and Nauru, and any similar
camps in Australia, must be closed in the near future. Decent
people abhor violence against women and are shocked at what is
being revealed by the Royal Commission into child abuse. Abuse
of men, women and children is happening also in these detention
centres. The reason why critics of government policy focus on
the children is that no one can argue that the children are
guilty of any wrong-doing. The detention of people—men, women
and children—who have not been convicted of any crime is a
violation of the rule of law.
The various
arguments you and other politicians use to justify the harsh
treatment of these people—in terms of border security,
drownings, people smugglers, etc.—are not convincing. Against
all of them there is the decisive objection that it is wrong to
use harsh treatment of innocent people as a means to any end.
This is
a follow-up to an email I sent yesterday.
This is
what I would like you to do:
(1) As
soon as possible hold a cabinet meeting about Manus and Nauru.
Begin by telling the cabinet what you want to do, listen,
modify, then at the end tell them what you will do. None of them
will quit.
(2) As
soon as possible after the cabinet decision get a video link to
Manus and Nauru and tell the detainees what you will do and what
the time frame will be, giving a date.
You
should tell them that all who are assessed as genuine refugees
will get permanent residence in a country with a
reasonable economy and a reasonable level of safety and
political freedom, that they will have there the right to
work for their living and the right to access education and
medical services on the same terms as other residents.
You may
not wish to say, but you should have in mind, that if they can’t
be resettled to that standard in the specified time frame, they
will be settled in Australia. Meanwhile you should talk to New
Zealand and to European governments.
Some
brief comments on some commonplace arguments for “harsh”
treatment:
Securing the borders: People without visas coming
by boat do not threaten border security. They are not armed.
They do not land surreptitiously and vanish into the
countryside. Boat arrivals contact authorities and ask for
asylum.
Preventing drownings: People in desperate and intolerable circumstances have
a right to take risky means to change their situation. It’s up
to them to decide what risks to take. We have no right to
punish people who have done what they have a right to do, even
if it’s dangerous, to deter others from doing what they also
have a right to do. There are other ways of reducing the
incentive to take dangerous voyages—see my emails to Andrew
Leigh MP, Refugees.html
Putting people smugglers out of business: The
argument is sometimes framed in terms of a “business model”.
People fleeing an intolerable situation are imagined considering
the smugglers track record. If he can say, “Here is a list of
people I got through to Australia, after a few years of pleasant
detention on a Pacific island”, then the customer signs up. If
the Australian government can make sure that detention is
“harsh” and that the customer never gets through, then there
will be no sales.
This
seems a very unrealistic model of most of these transactions.
Some
(not all) people smugglers are unscrupulous wicked people who
rip off asylum seekers and care nothing about their survival—or
even cage them in the jungle and extort money from their
relatives. But it is perverse to try to destroy people-smuggling
by inflicting additional injury on asylum-seekers. No one would
think that financial fraud should be discouraged by fining the
victims of fraudsters to make people more cautious.
The
logic of the anti-people-smuggler argument is that people who
use people smugglers not only must never get to Australia, but
must never get any “consolation prize” or happy ending at all.
Life-long suffering must be their fate.
Kevin Rudd’s massive social science experiment:
You frequently use this language (http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/malcolm-turnbull-defends-harsh-boats-policy-as-necessary-20140507-zr66s.html,
and often since). At the same time you promise to modify your
own government’s policies if they “don’t work” (http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/oct/23/the-malcolm-turnbull-interview-if-something-isnt-working-chuck-it-out),
which
is an appropriately experimental approach. Every government
action is an “experiment”, since no one can predict with
certainty what its effects will be.
You
also say (on a different topic) that “Fairness has got to be the
key priority” (ibid.) Justice, humanity, respect for human
rights are also key priorities. Be fair to Rudd. In doing away
with the “Pacific solution” he was not experimenting to see what
might happen, as a contribution to social science. He was trying
to achieve a more humane, fairer, juster treatment of
asylum-seekers, more respectful of their human rights. This was
a worthy end, which a Turnbull government should also seek.
Ethics: The arguments about border security,
drownings and people smugglers are in terms of means and ends.
Any policy of deterrence means inflicting or
threatening bad things to some people as a means of changing the
behaviour of others. (Terrorism is doing this to
innocent people.) Some users of such argument invoke
Utilitarianism. For example, Andrew Leigh MP, http://www.andrewleigh.com/5944:
“I’ve come to the view that which
approach you prefer depends on whether you think in
categorical or utilitarian terms… Utilitarian reasoning looks
at the greatest good for the greatest number... In answering
most problems, I tend to use utilitarian reasoning. That leads
me to believe that we have to deter a sea journey with a
one-in-twenty chance of death.” Similarly a correspondent in
the Canberra Times, 11 February: “Is the evil
of killing the innocent child [referring to “baby Hitler”]
justified by the saving of those lives? For English
utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill,
the answer would have been obvious — weighing the costs and
benefits on each side tells you how to proceed. But others,
among whom we can number John Blount (Letters, February 8),
are not so sure. Mr Blount believes the ends don’t justify the
means: that we cannot knowingly harm those in our offshore
detention centres simply because it saves the lives of those
who would otherwise die taking a people smuggler’s boat to
Australia.”
This
interpretation of Utilitarianism was demolished long ago, in
1953, J.O. Urmson, “The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy
of J.S. Mill”, https://books.google.com.au/books?id=CmueQnjmQIMC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=urmson+mill+utilitarianism&source=bl&ots=YvgV_PBa3B&sig=kEBmIA-UeuqZjG6os7Uzvf3ckVo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjAnfrA0fDKAhVj3KYKHfGrCmgQ6AEISDAG#v=onepage&q=urmson%20mill%20utilitarianism&f=false
“Instead of Mill’s own doctrines a travesty is discussed”.
Urmson pointed out that besides the Utility Principle Mill
stressed the importance of other moral principles, which he
called secondary principles. Secondary principles include
prohibitions against lying, against killing innocent people,
against the imprisonment of people not convicted of any crime,
etc. Such principles put constraints on what we can do to
further legitimate or even praiseworthy ends, such as preventing
drownings, securing borders, stopping people-smuggling.
Utilitarians do not believe that the end always justifies the
means. If they did, Utilitarianism would not be an
interpretation or rationalisation of morality but the rejection
of morality. See also my article in Ethics, 1983, "Utilitarianism
and virtue".
Users
of these “utilitarian” arguments must ask themselves whether
they believe there are any ethical constraints at all on the way
governments treat people. Mill and other classical Liberals
certainly believed there were.
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