Radio Australia Today Editorial

Vale Mandatory Detention

30 July 2008

It’s been the most contentious immigration policy decision since someone decided to keep out the hordes with the White Australia policy early last century.

Mandatory Detention was a scheme, devised by the Paul Keating government to try to stop the flow of boat people coming from the north and landing on Australia’s barren shore. The policy basically called for all such asylum seekers to be taken and locked away in prisons while their applications for refugee status were (very slowly) assessed. This meant that many people who had desperately tried to flee death or persecution found themselves locked into detention centres in deserts, often with inadequate care and facilities.

It was a policy that belied Australia’s self-pronounced ‘caring’ attitude to those in need.

The policy was continued under the succeding government under John Howard, and as the years of detention stretched on, the inmates in some of these centres started, understandably, to get a little ropey. They knew they had entered the country illegally, but at the very least, they hoped that they would be treated humanely, not stuck away endlessly, and treated like murdereers.

Soon the message started to get through to the wider community, and we had examples of the public being at odds with this policy. In country towns all the place, people were coming forward, offering accommodation for the asylum seekers. These caring people were having not a bar of the fears that the boat people were terrorists, trying to get into the country so they blow up the Shepparton or Bendigo Town Halls. These people knew that there was good reason for people wanting to escape the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the regime of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Yes, mandfatory detention brought out the best of Australian people, if not the Australian government.

Mandatory detention is ending. The Rudd government has announced that soon asylum seekers will be treated like the people they are: people just trying to live.

Australia is not the biggest country in the world, but it knows that humanity starts with one act in one place. Australia did that one act yesterday.

– Phil