David Corlett

The federal government maintains that it has no obligation to monitor the fate of non-citizens removed from Australia’s shores. In fact, it argues that it is better not to monitor returnees, since surveillance by a Western government might put them at greater risk. In certain circumstances this may be true: in a theocracy such as Iran, for example, where the very act of leaving renders a citizen suspect. In the main, however, the government’s argument is self-serving. The fate of Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon, left to decline slowly in a Philippines hospice, shines a more revealing light on policy. It shows that Australian authorities have cultivated a determined indifference to the fate of deportees on the basis that ignorance is bliss. No care, no responsibility.

Some time before the sun set on the British empire, ‘British justice’ took on an ironic meaning. In the colonies, we knew it was a charade, like that doled out to ‘Breaker’ Morant during the Boer War. The dice are loaded in favour of a prosecution that nevertheless insists on carrying out its cold-blooded retribution in an apparently value-free legalese, thus preserving the self-righteousness of the empire and tormenting the condemned. Yet, as Robert Manne and David Corlett make clear in this latest Quarterly Essay, the larrikin land of Australia can now, through its treatment of asylum seekers, fairly be said to lead the world in the practice of traditional British justice.