Image by Ben Thomson
Last week, the Senate passed the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment bill, allowing it to sail confidently through the House of Representatives.
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On the surface, the bill may seem like real progress: 108 children will be removed from detention and brought into the community, and the refugee intake will be increased from 13,750 to 18,750. This looked a lot like the Coalition finally softening its hardline stance against those who have come to Australia seeking refuge.
Dig a little deeper, and the story is quite different. That refugee intake number was actually lowered to 13,750 by the Coalition when they took office, and was originally 20,000. The new number is still less than it was just over a year ago.
The bill also did a number of other things: it removed the Australian government’s obligation to comply with international law in regards to asylum seekers; it fast-tracked refugee status determinations, which will see some returned immediately to the country they were fleeing; it blocks asylum seekers’ right to claim protection on national interest or character grounds without further explanation; it removes references to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, redefining the word “refugee” in a way that no longer prohibits them from being returned to a place where they have been persecuted.
It basically grants an unprecedented amount of power to Immigration Minister Scott Morrison.
So why on Earth did the Senate pass it? The reason was this: Scott Morrison said that if the bill would passed, it would allow hundreds of children to be released from detention before Christmas. Senators torn between their dislike of the bill and their desire to see children removed from detention as soon as possible found themselves making a very difficult choice.
And in the end, it came down to one person.
The deciding vote belonged to Senator Ricky Muir, who said he was “choosing between a bad decision and a worse decision”. Not wanting to half-arse it, he went for the worse decision, clearly putting the full force of the mandate handed to him by the 0.51 percent of the electorate who voted for him. (Electoral reform is desperately needed in this country, but that’s for another time.)
But what prompted Muir to go in this direction given his party, the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party (not a joke), has aims largely based around “developing innovative and inclusive motoring policy“? It seems Ricky might have received a few compelling phone calls.
According to Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s speech, children on Christmas Island were being instructed to phone Senator Ricky Muir and beg him to let them out. “If that is not treating the children as hostages,” said Hanson-Young, “what is it?”
Muir’s spokesman denies the Senator spoke to any of the children, but Muir admitted that he had spoken to “crying staff” from a Christmas Island detention centre.
But if Senator Hanson-Young’s claims are true, it’s important to note that having children phone a politician is not bad in and of itself. It can be a way of humanising an issue that seems largely abstract, and humanising issues for politicians is almost always a good thing. So what exactly makes this situation abhorrent?
If the directive to give the children Muir’s number came from Morrison’s office, as it seems incredibly likely it did (Morrison has not denied this claim), then it came from the man who already has the power to free them.
That fundamentally changes everything. It means it is not simply children calling a politician to convince them that a change in policy would free them. It is fare more akin to a terrorist getting their hostage to phone a list of demands through to their family, promising that they won’t be released until the family gives into said demands.
This is pretty much the plot to the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, with Morrison as Scrooge, if instead of being visited by three ghosts, Scrooge had spent Christmas Eve imprisoning Tiny Tim and holding him to ransom until Bob Cratchit gave him what he wanted. Let’s call it A Christmas Island Carol.
The word “terrorist” may sound like an inflammatory exaggeration, but this behaviour sure does sound like terrorism. It sounds enough like terrorism for us to research the exact definition of the term to see if it qualifies.
To determine if it is, we need a rigid definition of the word, and that’s something we don’t have. The international community has been struggling to define “terrorism” for a long time, and the last fourteen years have only made things more difficult. If anything, the War On An Abstract Concept has only made it more abstract.
But maybe the international definition doesn’t matter. After all, Morrison is determined to habitually ignore what the international community has to say, so let’s look at the Australian Government’s own definition.
The Commonwealth Criminal Code Act of 1995 defines a terrorist act thusly:
“An act or threat, intended to advance a political, ideological or religious cause by coercing or intimidating an Australian or foreign government or the public. This action must cause serious harm to people or property, create a serious risk to the health and safety to the public, or seriously disrupt trade, critical infrastructure or electronic systems.”
Let’s parse this out. If the “act advancing a political cause” is Morrison’s Migration Bill, the “intimidation” is guaranteeing that children will only be released from detention if the bill passes, and the “serious harm to people” is the asylum seekers either being murdered whilst in custody, dying from negligent behaviour, or being sent back to a country that may execute them, then it’s not difficult to see how Scott Morrison qualifies.
Perhaps you think that this argument is a bit of a reach, and that Morrison’s tactics were perfectly acceptable. Or that the people whose safety he was playing with don’t qualify because they’re not Australian citizens. Or that the safety of the Australian public would be at risk if we let undocumented refugees in. Perhaps you think that Morrison’s actions don’t technically make him a terrorist.
It hardly matters. If you’ve reached the stage where you must dig into detail and qualifiers in order to prove that you, a Minister representing Her Majesty’s Government, are not technically a terrorist, then you’re already too far down a path you should be absolutely nowhere near.
Follow Lee on Twitter:@leezachariah
