Operation Sovereign Borders
ADF/Andrew Dakin
Click to enlarge
There’s a time-tested ‘law’ in the history of modern self-government:
when a bounded nation-state democracy prosecutes war abroad, the spirit
and institutions of its democracy are usually vandalised at home.
The Life and Death of Democracy
analyses many historical instances of a rule that most definitely
applies to the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders. Let us
not mince words. In waters well beyond Australia’s north-west shores, it
is now prosecuting a form of war against people who have already
suffered rape, torture, war, poverty and humiliation. At taxpayers'
expense, with guns at the ready, the war involves physically pushing and
shoving these unfortunate people back towards the places where they
suffered injustice in the first place. Those who are captured are locked
up in ‘detention centres’. There they become victims of military speak:
renamed ‘transferees’ and ‘customers’ of law-breaking ‘people
smugglers’.
At home, the government directing the military operation behaves no
better. It grows more arrogant by the day. As if dressed in battle
uniform, the macho men of arbitrary power handle the truth carelessly.
They peddle the misleading impression that our Southeast Asia neighbours
are happily content with the whole risky military operation. The
government talks tough: ‘budging’, ‘rolling over’ and suffering
‘intimidation’ and ‘defeat’ are not its thing. It prefers the cavalier
abstractions of ‘national interest tests’
directed at ‘illegals’ said (somehow) to threaten domestic order and
public safety. With the recent announcement that the government will
establish ‘a single frontline operational border agency’
known as the Australian Border Force, matters of immigration and
customs are about to be put on a war footing. That is why government
ministers refuse to answer questions at press conferences; and why, by
default, they reveal their hidden contempt for citizens presumed to be
drongos (idiots) who’ve long ago given up on politics, hence willing to
let their rulers get on with the business of keeping the country safe
from unwanted invaders.
ADF/Sgt Rob Nyffenegger
Click to enlarge
In a fighting mood, the government meanwhile seems quite happy to annoy the UNHCR,
even to violate Australia’s legal obligations to the Refugee
Convention. In defiance of a rebuff in the Senate, it now seems to be
preparing to deploy its troops against the High Court. And why not? Soon
the generalissimos will be trying to win a re-election campaign by
claiming that their Operation Sovereign Borders campaign has been an
unqualified success.
If democracy is about humility, public openness, equality and the
non-violent refusal of arbitrary power, then all these bellicose efforts
to ‘stop the boats’ are anti-democratic, in every way. I tried to
explain this point in an earlier posting on the concentration camps
of Manus Island and Nauru. The piece examined the political
implications of the decision by the Abbott government to award
Transfield Services a $1.22 billion contract to manage these camps. It
targeted Mr Belgiorno-Nettis, and the newDemocracy Foundation
he runs, showing how both are implicated in the whole dirty business of
Operation Sovereign Borders. It asked Mr Belgiorno-Nettis several
political questions, to do with double standards: for instance, why he
hasn’t divested his interests in Transfield Services, and whether he’d
be willing to fund a deliberative democracy session in the camps, to
give its inmates a public voice?
ABCNews
Click to enlarge
What has been the result? Silence. Sullied silence, even from the scholars involved in its work.
The Foundation continues to snub calls for a public reply to the
questions, which to many thousands of readers seemed straightforwardly
reasonable. Behind the scenes, following the publication and
re-publication of the piece on many web platforms, the newDemocracy
Foundation played rough. In effect, it alleged the piece was written out
of sour grapes: never having received a cent from their coffers, ran
the story, I plotted revenge. Then they alleged that the whole issue was
a case of vox pop spin, crude media hype designed to raise a rabble
against their good reputation as champions of reasoned public
deliberation.
These cooked-up ad hominem allegations are diversionary.
Seen from a public relations point of view, the allegations are just
plain daft, in essence because by its silence the newDemocracy
Foundation runs a high risk of reputational damage. Who will take
seriously a privately-funded foundation that refuses to explain its view
of a company that has taken on the dirty business of running offshore
concentration camps? Sadly, those who run the foundation seem
unconcerned with the dangerously anti-democratic effects of Operation
Sovereign Borders. For an organisation whose charter speaks of the need
to find ‘a better way to do democracy’ it’s all rather surprising, and
more than a bit politically curious.
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