Human Rights in Australia: Whose lives do we grieve?

Rev. Elenie Poulos, National Director, UnitingJustice Australia

Human Rights: Current issues from local, national and international perspectives, The Corner Uniting Church SA, 20 May 2009

I’d like to begin with the story of what some would call my radicalisation but which I prefer to refer to regard as a conversion experience. I have been committed to social justice and human rights for a long time, but this is the story of how that commitment turned into a driving passion.

One day, years ago now, I woke up to hear that a Norwegian boat which had rescued a few hundred people needing care and safety had been denied entry into Australia. Not long after that I saw images of those rescued people being herded onto a military vessel and taken to a place named after the season of peace and goodwill from which they would be taken to a failed state in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific.

I had seen the images of the fences around the persecuted before, and it had disturbed and unsettled me, but not until then did it start to make me angry. These faces behind the fences were not the persecuted in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan where brutal regimes and dictators ruled, but the persecuted ones from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, here in Australia, locked up behind our fences. And not just any fences, razor wire fences. And there were children behind the razor wire.

We were told that there were fences around these people because they had broken the law. They had come to our country by boat – uninvited. We heard that they were probably terrorists. We were told that we should be afraid because there were hordes more of these people coming and they would be dangerous. And we knew that they were dangerous and mad because we saw them throw their children into the sea. And I heard people around me calling for the persecuted ones to be kept behind the razor wire because they didn’t deserve to be here and they would take away all the things we valued in life, all the things that were ours – our homes, our jobs and our feelings of security. And I looked at the people around me as they looked behind the razor wire and into the face of the children. But it wasn’t children they saw – they saw the enemy who would one day rape their daughters and kill their sons. They looked behind the razor wire into the faces of ‘illegals’, worse than criminals and deserving of treatment harsher than criminals.

The Rev. Bev Fabb was the Uniting Church Chaplain at the Port Hedland Detention Centre. One of the stories she tells of those times only about 6 years ago was about the Centre Christmas concert. There were about 120 children in the Centre at that time.

This is what she wrote:

A stage is set up and various… groups have prepared items for the concert. The children all sit in the middle of the quadrangle, surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire. They are dressed in their best clothes - girls in frilly dresses with bows in their hair, and boys in long pants and ironed shirts. They are very excited because tonight Christmas presents, donated by Mission Australia, are to be presented. The time finally arrives to give out the presents, and the children are called forward to get their presents by number.

Children were born in detention and grew up in detention. They had numbers not names. There was nothing about their experience which was not dehumanising, deliberately dehumanising.

Human Rights Overboard, the report from the People’s Inquiry into Detention, written by Linda Briskman, Susie Latham and Chris Goodard, is the most recent publication documenting what happened to people in Australia’s immigration detention centres. The authors write that over 2000 children have been detained for “an average of one year and eight months, including ‘one child locked up for five years and five months before he and his mother were deemed to be refugees’”.

Australia is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Article 37 says:

No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.

Children were detained not as a measure of last resort but as first course of action. Asylum seekers, fleeing persecution, torture, imprisonment and death, who arrived here by boat were immediately imprisoned. Many spent years in centres that were harsher than our most secure prisons. The vast majority were eventually issued protection visas. They came here for our help and we locked them up as a matter of public policy purely for political gain. There was no reason to detain them. They had committed no crimes, they are entitled under international law to seek asylum, and Australia was by no means being flooded by refugees.

Most of us did not see asylum seekers in detention centres as people whose human rights were being abused by public policy and its implementation. We did not see it until we saw Cornelia Rau.

In a brilliant essay which reflects on the post-September 11 world entitled ‘Violence, Mourning and Politics’, the philosopher Judith Butler, in her book Precarious Life, reflects on grief and loss and explores what basis for community we might find in our ‘vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows’ .

In the violent context of today’s world, she asks who is that we mourn for? who is it that we don’t mourn? She writes, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?... what makes for a grievable life?” .

I think it’s fair to say that most Australians did not grieve the lives that were being decimated in our detention centres, not because of any intended malice but because we have so internalised the idea that some people in the world are less worthy than others that we couldn’t decipher the politics or deconstruct our own responses. The losses suffered by asylum seekers did not figure in whatever we understood as a community to be our shared human vulnerability to loss. We did not believe it was necessary to take account of their experiences of loss. In fact, without much fuss, we were quite comfortable allowing them to be punished for the losses they already experienced.

Butler’s questions are a challenge for us when thinking about the kind of society we might want to be and I believe that, at its heart, human rights discourse is the best universal answer we have been able to come up with to her questions: who counts as human? whose lives count as lives?

I believe that the example of children in detention centres, on its own, is enough to convince that we cannot always be trusted to act justly merely by virtue of our own sense of being a decent, fair and civilised society. It is not a fair, decent and civilised society that allows a popularly elected democratic government to lock up children for years in complete disregard for their wellbeing and then rewards them with re-election.

There are other examples too, numerous ones that demonstrate the sometimes less than stellar values we exhibit as a society and to the inadequacies of our laws. The Uniting Church, for example, has drawn the attention of church members, the public and politicians to policies which that have had a discriminatory and detrimental effect on distinct segments of the population, for example, people who are homeless, low-income workers and Indigenous Australians and other policies which have been implemented with inadequate attention given to civil and political rights including policies that have impaired the right to a fair trial and to freedom of speech and association. While we may have believed that such human rights were safe in Australia, it has become clear that they are not adequately protected.
We need to do everything we can to help ourselves. We need systems and structures and language that support the growth of communities which are vibrant, inclusive and safe places, places where people experience dignity and respect and are enabled to flourish as individuals.

Human rights discourse is the universal language we have developed (out of the worst chapter of human history) to talk about our shared values and to describe the conditions necessary for the ensuring that we keep our eyes on the idea of the ‘common good’. It is expressed in law because the law is one of the best tools we have for describing a society’s values and keeping us accountable to each other.

When considering human rights then, you have no choice but to also reflect on questions of values, morality, and shared and individual responsibilities and accountabilities. When people’s human rights are abused, their dignity is abused and the common good is threatened. When we allow public policy to allocate levels of dignity according to a person’s perceived worthiness, then we have answered Butler’s questions in this way: not every life is equal; there are some who are not worthy of our grief.

Australia is the only developed democratic nation without some form of national legislative or constitutional human rights protection.

I find it interesting that the most vocal opponents of human rights legislation in Australia are those whose human rights are among the least likely to be abused – white middle-aged, well-educated, rich men, some women, but mostly men.

Some of them criticise the development of human rights legislation because it will give power to minorities and legitimacy to their voices. They are right. It will. This is the point of human rights legislation. It will demand of the government and the public service and the institutions and organisations that implement government policy, that they pay heed to the effects of legislation on those most vulnerable, those whose needs are usually ignored.

It will also, over time, serve as a common language that helps us to refine, articulate and live out the values that underlie how we live together as a nation committed to our common welfare.

The Uniting Church has, since its inception, voiced its commitment to human rights. In its Statement to the Nation at its inauguration in 1977 the Church promised that it would “oppose all forms of discrimination which infringe basic rights and freedoms”. It promised to work for an end to poverty, racism and injustice and to stand up for such rights as religious liberty, civil and political freedom, education and adequate healthcare for all. In March 2008, the Uniting Church National Assembly formally committed itself to support the development of a national human rights charter for Australia. It is the only Australian church to do so.

The Uniting Church supports a Human Rights Act for Australia because it will provide greater protection for fundamental rights and freedoms, promote dignity, help address disadvantage and exclusion, provide protections and remedies for the most vulnerable in our community, and help to create a ‘human rights’ culture in Australia. It will serve to promote Australia’s commitment to human rights in the Asia-Pacific and globally and strengthen the expression of our commitment to the United Nations.

It is the responsibility of all of us to seek the common good: to help build a just, peaceful, inclusive and prosperous society, where all people are valued, where the first peoples of this land are respected as the precious soul of the nation, where civil liberties are taken seriously and where the diversity of religions, languages and cultures is regarded as a great gift; where everyone has a home, decent work, access to a good education and good healthcare and the opportunity to live meaningful lives free from fear, prejudice and violence.

In this endeavour, federal human rights legislation is just one important tool at our disposal. But it is a necessary tool.

Human rights is an expression of shared hope and shared values, a language which enables people to talk across the usual divides of culture and religion and ideology about what it means to be human, about the values inherent to our very humanity and how we might be accountable to each other for upholding our humanity and the common good. It is not perfect and it’s far from sufficient but it does matter and it can make a difference. The time to do something about it is here. A culture of fear and division has held the soul of this country for long enough. We must recover our capacity to count everyone’s life as valuable and worthy. Life will be better this way, for all of us.