not the motorcycle diaries

Last night, Tony Jones asked the Commonwealth Ombudsman, John McMillan, if:

“the political climate and the politicians that write that legislation radiate that culture [of racist assumptions about immigration status, ignorance towards basic indicators of mental illness and systematic incompetence] downwards, or does the culture just exist in the system when it’s not properly monitored?”.

His question was regarding the latest evidence of stupendous prejudice and idiocy in Australian governmental practice.

In first year sociology we often ask students to contemplate whether or not the bureacratic systems of social welfare, child protection, prison, immigration, mental health, policing et cetera are de facto systems for sorting out and doing away with people who do not fit a particular notion of ‘normal’, ‘Australian’, ’sane’, ‘reasonable’ and so on. The cases of Rau, Alvarez and Mr T show that this is no abstract question. It shows the policing, immigration, prison and mental health systems intersecting, like a well-oiled machine, to consistently uphold the notion of ‘an Australian citizen’ as English speaking and Anglo-Saxon.

As John McMillan put it:

“… the similarity in three cases indicates that the cases prompt - not just the Department of Immigration I think, but … all of us to ask some deep questions about how well our society handles mental illness and even about who we regard really as Australian. Say in each case, two of the people were Australian citizens and one was a long-term permanent resident, and the fact that the Department of Immigration was called in as part of the solution raises some worrying questions about national identity”.

Yes and yes is the answer to Tony Jones’ question. The police force, immigration department, mental health system and private security company staff have been shown up as racist, neglectful, incompetent and ignorant in 220 cases of ‘wrongful detention’ investigated by the Ombudsman. And that’s not even starting on the rest of the people wrongfully incarcerated in Australia under immigration detention policies. That story is much, much worse - all the more so for its invisibility, which itself reinforces the sorting-out mechanism of ‘Australian’ and ‘non-Australian’. Tony Jones alluded to it:

“There are, of course, thousands of people who’ve been through the detention system, most of them not legal at the time that they are put into detention and yet the same things presumably apply to them - the disregard for mental illness, for example. We’ve just seen the outcome of the Shay Badreye case in which the Government admitted the little boy was psychologically damaged by his detention. Today there’s anecdotal evidence of mentally ill people in Baxter Detention Centre, so ill they can’t come out of their rooms…”

Welcome to Shame Town, kids.