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Australia's shameful Guantánamos

This weekend Australia hosts the G20 Conference.    It's no more than a talk fest with some 20 so-called leaders coming to Australia for a two-day gab-fest - and some 7000 flunkies of one description or another there too, Brisbane (the host city) in effective lock down and the Australian tax payer footing a bill of something in the order of half a billion dollars.

Whilst some Australians may bask in some sort of glory in having the likes of Obama in Oz for 48 hours, the focus on Australia by the world ought to be on its truly shameful treatment of asylum seekers 

“Australia’s ‘boat people,’ immigrants who arrive in fishing vessels and makeshift boats, have been made scapegoats for the country’s racial and cultural anxieties,” she writes. “By demonizing asylum seekers as lawbreakers and terrorists, Australia’s politicians are able to use xenophobia as an effective wedge issue, while maintaining a politically correct veneer of support for multiculturalism on other issues.”

The most egregious manifestation of these anxieties is the aforementioned detention camps. As Ian Lloyd Neubauer explains in a March essay for Time: “In 1992, Australia introduced a mandatory detention policy for non-citizens entering the country without a valid visa. It was intended to be a risk-management tool, enabling the health and security status of refugees and illegal immigrants to be checked while preventing such arrivals from simply vanishing into the general population. While that sounds reasonable on paper, the reality is that there are today around 10,000 men, women and children detained indefinitely, without hope of release unless they agree to return to the countries they risked their lives to flee in the first place.”

They’ve been labeled Australia’s answer to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. But the crimes allegedly committed aren’t plots against national security — merely desperate attempts at a better life.

About half of new undocumented entrants to Australia are stowed away in detention centers that aren’t even within Australian borders. Two of the most infamous are in neighboring Papua New Guinea and on Nauru, an island nation in the South Pacific. These centers are “squalid,” Mr. Neubauer says, “breeding grounds for rape, rioting, malaria and mental illness, and that bear the look and feel of concentration camps.”

These centers are a dirty secret Canberra doesn’t want the world to know about. “Australian doctors are increasingly troubled by the treatment of children in offshore processing centers and the gag clauses that prevent them from talking about it, Australia’s human rights commissioner says,” according to a report for The Guardian by Melissa Davey. “More than 80 percent of almost 150 pediatricians surveyed thought the mandatory detention of children was abusive,” she reports. And only after national and international outcry, the Australian federal government has announced it will launch an investigation of reports of “abuse and sexual misconduct of staff against children on Nauru.”

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