Shame, Australia, Shame 

The Australian people I meet going in and out of Baxter each day are also victims of the insanity of Australian concentration camps. Every day I work with and hear from many ordinary people, old and young, who write to or phone detainees or work with those out on temporary visas. We might be in a minority, those of us who worry and try to help refugees, but we are hundreds of thousands in number - lawyers, artists, public servants, teachers, nurses, doctors, grandparents, cricketers, even a few politicians. We are all "bleeding hearts" and we are suffering because of this inhumanity.

This issue has deeply divided Australia and I don't think our politicians and everyday Australia have any idea of how deeply this unbelievable cruelty has touched our lives. We are in grief. Many of us sadly may never feel the same about Australia again.

Many people I meet just don't believe what is happening. Others shrug it off and say, "We can't help everyone!" As Robert Manne pointed out, you cannot help every bashed and raped woman in Australia either but his does not give you excuse to refuse to help the one who happens to come to your door one night in the midst of her distress.

We are about 40th in the world in the numbers of asylum seekers we take (worked out on a per capita basis) and in 2001 we took 1600 less than the quota of 12000 the government set itself. In the eighties we managed to take 20,000 a year and to process them with kindness. And we also make it so hard for people to prove their cases. One man I know is so desperate to prove one point of his case that he has contacted a friend in a neighbouring country to his own asking him to travel secretly to his country and try to bribe someone in a specific office to give him a copy of a document. How extreme, I think.

"Yes," he says "but they do not believe me here. How I prove it? I want this much to have my family live is safe place not be in prison and persecuted or killed. Trouble maybe I have not money enough for bribe."

Yet even if we can't take these people, why do we have to treat them so cruelly? Is there any moral standard in the civilized world that could justify the treatment we meet out to innocent men, women and children in our detention centres? Why aren't more Australians objecting? As I left Baxter on the last day of my visit, I had one immediate wish. I just wanted to forget all I had heard and seen. I wanted to block it out of my mind and heart. I wanted to block out the faces, and the images of suffering now and suffering to come for the friends I have in Baxter. I wanted to go to sleep, and wake up four years ago before all this happened. I wanted my old loved Australia back. I wanted to be part again of a country I could be proud of. I felt a great anger at Philip Ruddock, John Howard and Greg Wallis. I felt anger at Simon Crean and the Labor Party for not providing an alternative that would make any real difference to my friends in detention. I have scanned Labor policy so carefully but I can find not one single thing that will make an iota of difference to any of my friends in detention or out now on temporary Protection Visas. I felt anger at those in DIMIA and ACM who collaborate day by day with this cruel torture of fellow human beings. I felt shamed of being Australian.

When I was born fifty seven years ago, my father was fighting the Japanese. Years later, I read and watched all the stories and films about Australians in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. I could never understand how people could be so cruel and sadistic. Thinking about Baxter, it is these images that come to me - of Australian soldiers being put out in the sun all day, weak and exhausted; of the brutality of some guards; of some being made an example of and put in cages in isolation; of the lack of medical help; of Japanese soldiers using their power to belittle and goad defenceless prisoners, and even of the occasional kindness or mercy. To me, Baxter is a modern day version of this. The torture may be more sophisticated, the food may be better, but the breaking of spirits is still the intent and outcome. Yet the victims this time are not soldiers - they are persecuted men, women and children, desperate people who risked their lives to escape and who came to Australia for help.

Shame, Australia, Shame!

Jane Keogh, February 2003