‘To Watch, to Never Look Away’

Abstract

In June, the Australian government celebrated six months without a boat reaching Australian shores from South East Asia. Consequently, demand for people smuggling has decreased, and there has been no loss of life of asylum seekers at sea. According to their stated aims of 'stopping the boats', and disrupting the people smuggling business model, 'Operation Sovereign Borders' and Australia's policy of processing asylum seekers offshore have been a success. It is not difficult to disrupt this narrative of success by pointing to the breaches of human rights associated with pushing boats away from the border, or to the intolerable conditions in offshore detention centres leading to widespread mental illness, riots and death, or to inadequate fasttrack processing which leads to people being forcibly returned to countries where they face the real prospect of political persecution and death. In this article we disrupt the narrative of success in a different way. We argue that the concealment of the measures required to achieve this policy outcome damages our democratic institutions, and thereby diminishes the Australian polity. In Roy's terms, 'Operation Sovereign Borders' has simplified what is complex, and taken from the Australian people the opportunity 'to try and understand' and 'to never look away'.