Two items of interest have tickled the airwaves and triggered some commentary over the last few days. The first was an ABC Four Corners program covering the fate of refugees in the detention facility on Nauru, known euphemistically as a “processing centre” costing $35.3 million a year to the Australian tax payer.
It sounds tedious, but the point is no less awful. Nauru has ceased being a country, a state of any worth. It has assumed value as only one thing: a (non)processing centre for asylum seekers and refugees Australia does not want. A camp designed for criminalising rather than exempting; for condemning rather than assessing, has become the cruellest exemplar of modern treatment and disposition to the refugee.
Institutionalised brutality is a rather easy thing to replicate. It begins with a selected language, and ends up justifying monstrous conduct. It pardons behaviour, and it condemns victims. The global debate on refugees is characterised by its distinct lack of humanity, and Australia, leading the charge, knows no limits on how far that lack of humanity can go.
I remember Nauru from the time I was a pre-teen stamp collector. It was-- still is-- just a speck of a South Pacific Island, about 8 square miles and less than 10,000 people. Earlier, it had been a German colony that was taken over by the Brits after World War I-- like Tanganyika (which, coincidentally, also has a village named Nauru). I haven't thought about Nauru in half a century until last night.
Transfield Services is a diversified corporation with fingers in many a pie. This month, it was announced that Australia’s Abbott government had awarded a $1.22 billion government contract to the company to run detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. The ethicists moaned as the shareholders cheered: shares rose by 20.81 per cent on the announcement.
