COMMENT: Baxter Detention Centre

Mike Carlton in today's Sydney Morning Herald:

The media straighteners and punishers who push the Howard Government's appalling refugee policies tend to foam at the mouth when you call the Baxter immigration detention centre a concentration camp.

But this is precisely what it is, as any dictionary will confirm. The Macquarie Dictionary: "Concentration camp, n, a guarded enclosure for the detention or imprisonment of political prisoners, racial minority groups, refugees, etc ..."

That is Baxter to the letter. The Macquarie goes on to give the example of the Nazi camps, but I have no intention of playing that card. It is enough to say, this Easter, that Baxter, in all its inhumanity, is a black stain upon a supposedly civilised society.

Federal cabinet's decision this week that some long-term prisoners should be released until they can be deported is the smallest of mercies. Everything suggests that the Government was dragged to it reluctantly by a handful of its own backbenchers who had the courage of their convictions and voiced a growing community revulsion at the indefinite detention of people without trial.

But even this sop is nothing in the scandalous case of Peter Qasim, a refugee from persecution in Indian Kashmir, who has been banged away behind the razor wire for nearly seven years. Qasim has committed no crime. He has been given no trial. He is incarcerated partly because the Indian Government refuses to take him back but most singularly because, in the disgraceful view of the Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, he is refusing to co-operate.

For crying out loud, co-operate with what? Presumably with an immigration bureaucracy which has now sunk to such a level of bullying arrogance that, as we learned this week, it thinks nothing of barging into Stanmore Public School, unannounced, to carry off two Korean primary school kids and throw them behind the wire at Villawood. (my emphasis)

I still think that the "concentration camp" appellation for Australia's detention camps is wrong, dictionary definitions notwithstanding. But the fact remains: no other comparable country IN THE WORLD treats asylum seekers like this. And the "growing community revulsion" might be more wishful thinking on Carlton's part than anything else - it would be instructive to refer back to the last federal election results, a mere 6 months or so ago, where the majority of Australians emphatically supported the current government's policy towards asylum seekers.