Richard Ackland Friday 20 February 2015
Turnbull’s supporters love his peacock performances. But his defence of Philip Ruddock and the government’s asylum seeker policy are no improvement on Abbott
‘Malcolm Turnbull’s peacock performance on Monday night’s Q&A kept his adoring audience spellbound.’ Photograph: STEFAN POSTLES/AAPIMAGE
Malcolm Turnbull’s peacock performance on Monday night’s Q&A kept his adoring audience spellbound. Surely, though, he was having a lend of us. In particular, he expected us to swallow two unswallowable assertions: Philip Ruddock was an outstanding minister of the Howard era, and it is the Coalition’s humanitarian policies that are rescuing hundreds of children from immigration detention centres. As Tony Hancock would say on Hancock’s Half Hour, “turn it up”.
Ruddock first. Tuesday’s decision by the Court of Military Commission Review to overturn the verdict and vacate the sentence in David Hicks’s case could not have been more apt.
Here was the final nail in the coffin of a carefully constructed “legal system” run by politicians rather than lawyers. The US’s military commissions flouted every convention of fairness and decency. They were designed to get convictions – read Michael Mori’s book, In the Company of Cowards, to find out how.
We know Hicks was stitched-up with a newly invented war crime that was retrospectively applied: material support for terrorism.
Ruddock insisted this was a valid offence, even though by 2007 the process and the charge were widely regarded in legal circles as illegitimate. In late 2006, then-prime minister John Howard admitted that he could have fetched David Hicks home at any time, but choose not to do so.
Mori, who was Hicks’s Pentagon-appointed Guantanamo defence lawyer, says this was a misstep by Howard, because it showed politicians had usurped the rule of law and had control of the situation.
Ruddock, with his gleaming Amnesty International lapel badge, refused to sign the Fremantle Declaration, a document signed by all the attorneys-general of Australian states and territories affirming the right to a fair trial, access to the Geneva Conventions, prohibition of indefinite detention and affirmation of commitment to protections under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
According to Turnbull, Ruddock is “esteemed by all of the Liberal party right across the country”.
Ruddock’s spiritual descendant, George Brandis, was doing his best on Thursday to keep the flame alive, issuing a statement on Hicks from Washington, saying: “The review was about the validity of the US law under which he was convicted, not about whether he carried out the activities of which he was accused.”
In other words, the charges against Hicks are the main game, forget the fact that his conviction is null and void.
As immigration minister, Ruddock was instrumental in the creation of the “Pacific Solution”, the dumping of asylum seekers on client states where their rights were abrogated.
He’s not only father of the house, he’s the father of this wretched “solution”. Thereafter he always had the look of a man who’d sold his soul to the devil.
Which gets us to Turnbull’s claim that it is virtuous Coalition policies that account for the rescue of children from immigration detention. This was raised in the context of the Human Rights Commission report on The Forgotten Children.
This is what he said on Q&A:
At its peak, under Labor, there were 2,000 children in detention. At the time of the election, when we came into government (September 2013), there were just under 1,400. Now there are 136. So we, with our policies, have reduced the number of children in detention by 90%.
Leaving aside the fact that there had been a 31% drop in the number of children in immigration detention in the last three months of the Labor government (excluding Nauru), if we drill down a bit we’ll discover the agenda behind the Coalition’s virtuosity.
There are a couple of factors at play. One of them was the government’s eagerness to secure passage of the amendments to the Migration Act and the Maritime Powers Act. These were the amendments that changed the definition of refugee and gave the minister extraordinary powers to hold, to refoule, to decide the outcome of asylum applications and, in the process, to shred Australia’s international obligations.
The other was the fact that the Human Rights Commission’s report on the way children were being treated in immigration detention was lying around the attorney general’s desk from 11 November last year, undisclosed to the public for three months until 11 February, when it was tabled.
Both these factors drove the government’s decision to accelerate the rate at which children were removed from detention facilities.
Between October 2013, just after the Abbott government took office, and the end of August 2014, the Coalition had removed 24.8% of children from immigration detention – a smaller percentage than Labor’s last three months in office.
What is important about August 2014? That is the time the Migration and Maritime Powers Act’s amendments were being planned, largely in response to high court decisions that went against the minister earlier that year. The legislation was introduced a month later, on 29 September.
As we know, former immigration minister Scott Morrison used the children as pawns to get those measures through a difficult senate. He said children would be given temporary protection visas if the legislation was passed – even though he could have released them on bridging visas the day he became minister.
This is why the last hold-out senator, Ricky Muir from the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, voted for the amendments. Muir said it was a choice between a “bad decision and a worse decision”.
In the period the legislation was in contention and immediately afterwards the government released 651 children from detention. That was a reduction of 82.5% – not quite the 90% claimed by Turnbull.
This rapid response also enabled a chorus of government ministers to say the Human Rights Commission’s findings are “out of date”.
However, while the raw number of children detained in camps was going down, over the same period the average length of time they were being held was going up.
After the Abbott government came to office in September 2013 the average number of days children and adults were held in immigration detention shot up from 115 to 438 days (nearly 15 months) as at the end of last December.
In July 2013, when Labor was in office, the average days in detention was 72. Morrison was keeping adults and children in detention on average six times longer than the lowest average period under Labor.
The government is not reporting the release of any children from Nauru, probably because none have been removed.
It is not to be found in any departmental statistics, but refugee workers on the ground say that some of the children removed from Australian centres and Christmas Island have actually been sent to Nauru.
One thing we do know is that if someone goes to Nauru, even if they have to come to Australia for medical treatment, they will always wind up back on the phosphate outcrop.
Judging by the figures and the timing, the rapid removal of children from detention camps by the Coalition was much more to do with politics than humanity.
If this is Turnbull’s idea of progressive Liberal policies, don’t expect any serious changes should he ever steal the crown.
