With the release of the Nauru Files recently, the revelation that Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has known about the horrific allegations within the Files for months, and the announcement this week that Manus Island detention centre will be shut down, you’d be forgiven for having hope that maybe, just maybe, we’re nearing the point where the wheels on Australia’s offshore regime finally fall off.
There have even been signs of life from the Labor Party, who normally respond to any mention of offshore processing by curling up into a ball and hoping the conversation goes away. Shadow Immigration Minister Shayne Neumann has begun pushing for a Senate inquiry into the allegations contained in the Nauru Files, saying the allegations were “disgraceful” and that “the veil of secrecy around what’s happening needs to be pulled away”. At a community forum in the Blue Mountains, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten suggested he and Turnbull could take a trip to Nauru to “go and have a look” themselves.
Appearing on Insiders that morning, Labor Senator Sam Dastyari railed against the government’s dismissiveness, declaring: “We as a nation are not a people who turn around and turn a blind eye to human rights violations and abuses, and I don’t believe that’s the country Australia wants to be.”
But any optimism that Labor might finally come out against offshore detention and really put the government on notice is wishful thinking. Labor’s approach to anything detention-related is a lot like your New Year’s resolutions: you solemnly promise to do better than before, you give up after about ten days when the buzz wears off, and every few months you guiltily remember your long-extinguished resolve to get fit and cut back on drinking while you’re halfway through a late-night kebab. Labor’s demand for a Senate inquiry is little more than the party having another one of its periodic twinges of guilt about their utter woefulness, and trying to look busy without actually doing anything.
"Labor’s approach to anything detention-related is a lot like your New Year’s resolutions"
It’s so obvious that it shouldn’t need pointing out, but we don’t need another inquiry to tell us what offshore detention is like. Besides the Nauru Files giving us a front-row seat, we’ve had inquiries and reports up to our ears already. The Forgotten Children report, released by the Human Rights Commission in November 2014, found that “children in immigration detention have significantly higher rates of mental health disorders than children in the Australian community”, and that kids “detained indefinitely on Nauru are suffering from extreme levels of physical, emotional, psychological and developmental distress”.
The Moss Review, commissioned in October 2014 by the Immigration Department after similar revelations of inmate abuse and mistreatment on Nauru, found evidence of rape, child sexual assault, and “a level of under-reporting by transferees of sexual and other physical assault”.
In August last year, a Senate inquiry into conditions on Nauru found that the centre was "not adequate, appropriate or safe for the asylum seekers detained there" and was especially unsafe for children, and called for a full audit into every allegation of abuse.
"Will this new inquiry magically turn up new evidence?"
What more do we need? What could we possibly learn at this point that we don’t know already? Will this new inquiry magically turn up new evidence that, actually, everything on Nauru is fine?
The truth is, it’s a tactic. Labor can’t afford to come out against offshore detention for fear of the government painting them as “soft” on border protection. But they have to be seen to be doing something; they’re the Opposition, after all.
So we get this new inquiry; a doomed, cynical exercise in distracting from Labor’s inadequacy. We’ve been through this so many times before, the story has become predictable.
Here’s how it’ll go. If the inquiry goes ahead, the government will do all it can to kick the can down the road by delaying it for months on end as public attention moves on. We know this because they’ve done it before. The Moss Review was handed to Dutton’s office in early February 2015, but wasn’t publicly released for more than a month—coincidentally, only a few hours after Malcolm Fraser died. Last year’s Senate inquiry was originally scheduled to take less than three months; it ended up taking more than five. Attorney-General George Brandis sat on the Forgotten Children report for three months after receiving it.
When the inquiry’s findings are finally released, the government will do what’s done before: dismiss the inevitable allegations of abuse, assault and mental anguish as overblown hearsay, attack the report’s authors on the grounds of “bias”, or, like Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald, simply flat-out refuse to read it.
Most insultingly, Labor knows all this. They know that yet another inquiry into Nauru is just giving the government a free pass. They know that they’re giving up yet another opportunity to disavow offshore detention and make the case for a viable, humane alternative. They know that tinkering at the edges of a profoundly broken, damaging detention system won’t do a thing to ease the human suffering that system industrialises.
The sad reality is, the government can afford to shrug when news like this comes out, because they can rest easy knowing that Labor will never do anything to seriously challenge them. Until Shorten, Neumann, Dastyari and others in Labor are willing to do that, the least they can do is either have the grace to admit they’re not serious about this, or shut up altogether.
Alex McKinnon is a journalist based in Sydney. Most recently he served as political and opinion editor of pop-culture website Junkee and editor of the Star Observer, Australia's longest-running LGBTI newspaper.
