Human rights and the white saviour pattern in Australia’s immigration detention industry

ABSTRACT

For seven long years, the refugee men imprisoned at the Manus Island detention centre (prison) had their rights denied under Australia’s harsh border security policy. They did not appear into public view as the worthy subjects of human rights. However, when the Sri Lankan Nadesalingam family were finally released in mid-2022 and returned to their former home in Biloela, a small town in the Australian state of Queensland, it was celebrated as an example of Australia’s fundamental generosity and its underlying humanitarianism. Their release is a temporary fracture in Australia's story of preventable deaths, physical violence, torture, mental illness and despair, and the mundane violence of its border system. Using Makau Mutua's analysis of the human rights system, we reflect on how the Australian government presents itself as the saviour of particular individuals. The cruel paradox is that this reveals a familiar pattern: the government grants freedom with one hand, and jails with the other. Nothing changes for most of those who remain incarcerated or on temporary visas, either offshore or in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• human rights
• offshore processing
• Manus Island
• ‘Biloela family’

For seven long years, the refugee men imprisoned at the Manus Island detention centre (prison) had their rights denied under Australia’s harsh border security policy.¹ They did not appear into public view as the worthy subjects of human rights. This reality remains for many of them, and the trauma of that place is not over for those who suffered there. During the same period that this experience of abandonment and brutality was endured by those at Manus prison, another story was unfolding, for a young family in Australia who were seeking permanent settlement in this country but who were later subjected to four years of detention.

When the Sri Lankan Nadesalingam family were finally released in mid-2022 and returned to their former home in Biloela, a small town in the Australian state of Queensland, it was celebrated as an example of Australia’s fundamental generosity and underlying humanitarianism. Under Australia’s strict border security laws, the family did not meet Australia’s harsh visa requirements, and so were subject to potential deportation back to Sri Lanka.² The community celebration at their return to Australia was evident amongst political leaders, local community members and legal advocates, many of whom had long campaigned for their release. As a report by The Guardian suggested, their release showed that love had ‘conquered all’.³ That is, the love that had developed for them amongst the community where the family had made their home in Biloela, broke the inhumane system that led to their subsequent incarceration.

The strong community activism that sought their freedom was underpinned by a call for their human rights to be respected, not simply in a specific legal sense, but as an overarching right to human dignity and freedom. Appeals to human rights have become, in many respects, part of the ‘ideology’ of the West.⁴ They are called upon in countless moments of actual and perceived injustice, violence and discrimination. In these moments, human rights are invoked as if they are concretely experienced as universal. Yet this belief in the narrative of human rights as a solution to suffering and harms is risky and misleading. It masks the actuality that human rights are more likely to attach to persons and communities who are deemed worthy of them. Rather than universal, human rights are ‘parochial’: they are the ‘rights of certain citizens’.⁵ The ability to enjoy human rights is also conditional upon the willingness of the state to grant them. For the men imprisoned for over seven years at the Manus Island Detention Centre, human rights were like an apparition that never fully materialised, despite the 2016 judgement by the PNG Supreme Court that imprisoning men there was unconstitutional, comprising a breach of their right to liberty and freedom of movement.⁶

Celebration: Nadesalingam family return to Biloela

The Nadesalingam family were living on temporary protection visas, in the small town of Biloela, in rural Queensland, more than six hours drive from the state’s capital, Brisbane. The two parents, Priya and Nadesalingam Murrugupan—both born in Sri Lanka—came to Australia separately in 2012 and 2013. After marrying and starting a family, they planned to settle in Australia, but remained on temporary visas as they were not recognised as ‘genuine’ refugees.⁷ Later, in 2018, Australian Border Force officers executed a raid on their home while the couple, with their Australian-born daughters, Kopika and Tharunicaa, were still asleep. They were arrested and taken to Melbourne Immigration Detention Transit Accommodation—a detention centre thousands of kilometres south, pending deportation to Sri Lanka. ⁸

The 2022 announcement to suddenly release them from prolonged detention was made by interim Federal Home Affairs Minister Jim Chalmers, who declared that that he had exercised his ‘power under section 195A of the Migration Act 1958 to intervene in the case of the Murugappan family. The effect of my intervention’ he remarked:

enables the family to return to Biloela, where they can reside lawfully in the community on bridging visas while they work towards the resolution of their immigration status, in accordance with Australian law … This decision will allow them to get ‘home to Bilo’, a big-hearted and welcoming Queensland town that has embraced this beautiful family.⁹

The response by the Minister to act on the discretionary powers exercisable personally by him to release them, was greeted with applause and gratitude. News outlets remarked that mother Priya Nadesalingam is ‘softly spoken but radiates strength’.¹⁰ The report added that ‘ … the town has become famous for the uprising of unlikely advocates—kind, country folk who have fought long and hard to bring the Nadesalingams home’.¹¹ Their arrival home was greeted with tears and celebration to a town that welcomed them when the Australian government had failed to do so. In the same moment though, that there was celebration of their release, it was framed as a response that had been enabled, and generated by, the kindness of the community in which they had lived.

Yet even at the moment when their rights were being ‘secured’, the government continued to use human rights and refugees as part of an agenda to frame itself as the good state. That is, the collective celebration functioned as a form of temporary relief for the state—and indeed the Australian public—that it is not an inhumane society, despite its long history of brutal border policies. This was reinforced by public proclamations of the Biloela residents as good, kind and caring citizens. Of course, it is important to see such actions taken to secure a better future for the family. However, following the ‘release’ of the family, these responses of relief and gratitude distracted from the violence and contradictions of the government’s border policies, as well as from the persistent community narratives that demonise refugees.¹² They also distracted from the refusal to grant such a welcome to men imprisoned for over seven years at Manus Island, as well as to apologise for the deaths of refugees that occurred there. The release of the Nadesalingam family has enabled the state (in this case, Australia) to (re)cast itself in the image of the saviour. As the ‘saviour’—despite evidence of over three decades of inhumane border policies—it seeks to claim that it is the ‘good’ state, the humanitarian state.¹³

Other commentary saw their release as heavily symbolic, with the Australian Prime Minister's sympathy ‘with people who have been cruelly treated by the implementation of policies and regulations by government [implying] that each person matters’.¹⁴ Yet the images conveyed of the family’s release, with a smiling Prime Minister Albanese later embracing the family, comprised a public display of the jailer posing with former inmates of the immigration prison system.¹⁵ The irony of this is profound. While it was subsequently noted that such an intervention to support the family ‘goes beyond what is strictly owed to people and enters the territory of gift’¹⁶ to describe this as a gift is also to fail to interrogate who has the capacity and desire to give it,¹⁷ exemplified in the images of the Prime Minister posing with the family.

We need to consider the cruel paradox of these dynamics, even while acknowledging that the Nadesalingam family were clearly the ‘victims of a cruel policy’.¹⁸ This paradox is clear given that many still remain, largely invisible, in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, as an effect of harsh border control policies. At the moment that the Australian Government was arranging the release of the Nadesalingam family, it was also entering into an agreement with the Sri Lankan government to provide assistance to track ‘irregular vessel movements’ and prevent asylum seekers from leaving Sri Lanka.¹⁹ Additionally, as at December 2022, there were also 19,693 refugees who are on Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) or on ‘Safe Haven Enterprise’ Visas (SHEVs) within Australia. Although not incarcerated within the physical walls of Australia’s immigration prison complex, they remain trapped, either in uncertainty about their future, by the precarity of their existence, or by the horror of their memories of prolonged and indefinite imprisonment in this system. The paradox is that the Australian government grants freedom with one hand, and jails with the other.

In contrast, the circumstances of the Nadesalingam family rendered them capable of attracting support and attention, through how they were perceived as human rights bearing subjects. As a family, with young children who were embraced by community as productive, generous figures, their eligibility for human rights recognition was significantly enhanced. Yet with isolated exceptions, others—typically single men who have also come by boat using people smugglers—tend not to attract similar levels of public support, instead regarded as criminal, threatening figures. Human rights are not naturally available to all: they do not attach seamlessly, unless those claiming such rights are recognised (by the state) as worthy or ideal subjects of human rights. These moments of ‘rescue’, such as that involving the return of the Nadesalingam to Biloela, are best described as moments in which the state is both able, and desires to recuperate its image as saviour. White saviour culture²⁰ requires worthy victims, and the Nadesalingam family fulfilled the image of the worthy victim: good, supportive, engaged and friendly members of community, who did not ask too much, who did not exercise too much agency.

White saviour culture, savages and the Manus Island prison

In his damning critique of the human rights system, Makau Mutua argues that the entire human rights ‘system’ rests upon a—fundamentally colonial—narrative that requires the existence of three key figures for the system to work. This grand narrative, he says ‘contains a subtext that depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviours’ on the other.²¹ Although examining human rights in the context of development, self-determination and humanitarian intervention exercised by the West in states it targets for such intervention, Mutua’s metaphor also provides important insights into how the refugee system often functions. Frequently, human rights are used by states to legitimise their actions, as successive Australian governments have done by arguing that inhumane border protection policies ‘save lives’.²² Yet the narratives about particular individuals and groups have become a strategic tool in the denial of human rights.²³ Australia’s policy of mandatory immigration detention and offshore processing has resulted in extensive and systemic human rights breaches for over three decades.

The three key figures or metaphors of Matua’s conceptualisation of the human rights triptych—the savage, as a figure of barbarism; the victim, whose human dignity has been ‘violated by the savage’, characterised as ‘powerless, helpless’; and the ‘saviour or redeemer’, as the ‘good angel who protects, vindicates, civilizes, restrains, safeguards’—are central to the way this functions.²⁴ However it is the figure of the victim that is most crucial, he argues, since it is the ‘giant engine that drives the human rights movement’.²⁵ Without it, ‘there is no savage or saviour, and the entire human rights enterprise collapses’.²⁶

As men, without families accompanying them, and in exercising their own agency and power, the potential for the refugee men at Manus to be deemed as worthy subjects of rescue was arguably diminished.²⁷ They were the ‘uncountable’.²⁸ Even though, on Mutua’s analysis, they might be fleeing a ‘savage state’ or ‘savage culture’, they were punished for exercising too much agency. This is whilst, ironically, they have enacted the persona that is championed by the liberal state: that of the risk taker, the entrepreneur, the one who seizes opportunities for their own future. But in Mutua’s terms, this agency is punishable by the refugee system because refugees, it seems, must necessarily be characterised as vulnerable, powerless and weak, as compliant, if moral empathy is to be engaged. In contrast it is ‘virtually impossible’ to evoke such support for those who are framed as demonised, or ‘villainous’.²⁹

As Mutua comments:

A basic characteristic of the victim is powerlessness, an inability for self defense against the state or the culture in question. The usual human rights narrative generally describes victims as hordes of nameless, despairing and dispirited masses. To the extent that they have a face, it is desolate and pitiful. Many are uneducated, destitute, old and infirm, young, poorly clad, and/or hungry.³⁰

Such characterisations also fuel an industry resting on sympathetic condescension.³¹ The paradox of human rights is that the victim must be articulated as being in need of the intervention of the state in order to receive/claim human rights.³² Further, those who are ritually subordinated must rely on the articulation of their injuries as individual matters, and rarely as claims that ‘articulate or address the conditions producing or fomenting that violation’.³³ The structures that produce the harm against which redress is sought, remain.³⁴

The release of the Nadesalingam family is a temporary fracture in this history of systemic, preventable deaths, torture and the mundane, structural violence of this system. Australia has a long-standing law that requires that all those seeking refugee protection who arrive in Australia without a visa (typically by boat and termed irregular or illegal maritime arrivals), are subject to mandatory immigration detention in offshore processing centres. However, the culture of the West deviates from human rights even while it claims to uphold them. The Australian government, and its media and its public—in general terms at least—has been able to sustain a policy that harms individuals seeking protection, because it is able to narrate itself as saviour and protector of those it harms in the same moment that it inflicts hardship and punishment. It punishes on the one hand, while granting welcome and humanity on the other, and is able to occupy both positions simultaneously, based on how particular individuals are framed by government either as victim, or as criminal/demon. This paradox is also enabled by the arrogance of the Western state:³⁵ with enormous structural and discursive resources at its disposal, it can avoid being held to account for the violence it enacts. In reality, the Australian government itself is the savage.

Despite this, while imprisoned on Manus Island, the men actively resisted the torture and annihilation of their identity that the system attempted to enforce upon them.³⁶ Although the Australian government routinely refuses to give a face to those named by it as illegal, or as criminal refugees, it has largely been through acts of resistance, of art and writing by refugees, that the faces and names have appeared of those that the state attempted to erase. As active participants in the stories told about them, refugees work to contest this erasure and to challenge the binary categorisation of the ‘good’ or ‘evil’ refugee, to assert themselves as neither victim nor savage.³⁷ Of the film Remain, produced by Hoda Afshar, with Behrouz Boochani and other men detained at Manus Island, Boochani reflects that the film rejects such binaries:

refugees are not depicted as angels or evil beings, rather they are regular human beings who are able to laugh, cry, love and sing. Throughout this work one is confronted with an image that is in total opposition to the picture of refugees solidified in western world; that is, a romantic and angelic image or one that equates refugees with violence, terrorism and horror.³⁸

Both images, whether romanticised or demonised, are a form of violence. The desire to save some (romanticised, vulnerable) lives over others, also assumes that they cannot save themselves, a view that is ‘steeped in Western and European history’.³⁹ So in every case of redemption, the redeemer (the Australia government) can only do so by saving others who are seen as ‘inferior’ on a racialised hierarchy.

The contrast between the rightlessness endured by the refugee men at Manus Island, and the sympathy directed towards the Nadesalingam family, not only shows how this works, but reveals a ‘familiar pattern’.⁴⁰ That is, that:

a particular refugee or family’s story becomes known by the public, they are eventually released from detention, the public celebrate this release as an achievement but there is no fundamental change. Other asylum seekers are not released, no policy is changed, nor does it prevent the government from incarcerating other asylum seekers.⁴¹

This epitomises white saviour culture, a culture that drives the immigration policies in Australia. When the government targets a particular individual, or a particular family, it is engaging in an act of self-redemption.⁴² This enables the ‘public [to] feel they have saved lives, have righted an aberrant wrong, and can now return to everyday life having done a good job’.⁴³ But such an act of self-redemption by the government does nothing to change the lives of thousands of others who suffer under this regime, including through the incarceration and precarity of existence forced upon them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker who has produced award-winning publications and creative works, documenting the violence of immigration detention prisons. Boochani was imprisoned in Papua New Guinea under by Australia under its ‘offshore processing’ policies for six years. He holds a number of honorary positions, including as Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne. His book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018) has won numerous awards including the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, and Boochani has recently published an edited collection of his articles in Freedom, Only Freedom (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), edited by Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi.

Claire Loughnan

Claire Loughnan is a Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Her research examines diverse sites of confinement and the carceral expansion accompanying border control practices. She has published in journals such as Incarceration: An International Journal of Imprisonment, Detention and Coercive Confinement, Globalizations, and Australian Journal of Human Rights. She is a research partner with the EU-funded Comparative Network on of the Externalisation of Refugee Policies, and committee member of the Carceral Geography Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers. Her first book on the institutional effects of immigration detention is under contract with Routledge.

Notes

1 Although the men were transferred to an ‘open’ centre in 2017, this did not signal the end of detention, and it continued to be experienced as punishment. See Maria Giannacopoulos and Claire Loughnan, ‘Closure at Manus Island and carceral expansion in the Open-Air Prison’ (2020) 17(7) Globalizations 1118.

2 For more detail on this case, see Rachel McGhee and Katrina Beavan, ‘Biloela Tamil asylum seeker family make tearful return home after four-year struggle against deportation’ ABC Capricornia (10 June 2022) <www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-10/biloela-family-home-in-central-queensland-after-four-years/101137816> accessed 24 March 2023.

3 Eden Gillespie, ‘“Love conquered all”: Biloela welcomes home Nadesanlingam family after four years’ The Guardian (10 June 2022) <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/10/love-conquered-all-biloela-welcomes-home-nadesalingam-family-after-four-years> accessed 24 March 2023.

4 Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Hart Publishing 2001).

5 Hoda Afshar, ‘A Conversation Between Hoda Afshar and Behrouz Boochani’, Collecteurs (Omid Tofighian tr) <www.collecteurs.com/interview/a-conversation-between-hoda-afshar-and-behrouz-boochani> accessed 14 March 2023.

6 Giannacopoulos and Loughnan (n 1).

7 Victoria Pengilley, ‘Tamil asylum seeker family from Biloela could be undone by father’s travel and refugee activism, immigration lawyer says’ ABC News (2 September 2019) <www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-02/biloela-tamil-family-melbourne-federal-circuit-court-hearing/11468874> accessed 27 April 2023.

8 McGhee and Beavan (n 2).

9 The Guardian, ‘After four years, the Murugappan family begin journey home to Biloela’ The Guardian (7 June 2022) <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/08/after-four-years-murugappan-family-begin-journey-home-to-biloela>.

10 Gillespie (n 3).

11 Ibid.

12 Behrouz Boochani, ‘We pretend there has been a change under Labor but hundreds of refugees are still in detention’ The Guardian (26 July 2022) <www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/27/we-pretend-there-has-been-change-under-labor-but-hundreds-of-refugees-are-still-in-detention> accessed 12 March 2023. On the demonisation of those with a refugee background, see also Claire Loughnan and Philomena Murray, ‘Policy Paper: Combatting Corrosive Narratives About Refugees’ (2022) Comparative Network on the Externalisation of Refugee Policies, University of Melbourne <https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/4231587/CONREP-Policy-Report-3_Narrative_Loughnan-and-Murray_final.pdf>.

13 Jordana Silverstein, ‘Refugee children, boats and drownings: a history of an Australian ‘humanitarian’ discourse’ (2020) 17(4) History Australia 730 (Silverstein, ‘Refugee children’); Jordana Silverstein, Cruel Care: A History of Children at our Borders (Monash University Press 2023) (Silverstein, ‘Cruel Care’).

14 Andrew Hamilton, ‘The grace of courtesy’ (2022) 32(12) Eureka Street 19 <www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/the-grace-of-courtesy> accessed 24 April 2023.

15 Rachel McGee and Tobi Loftus, ‘Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets Tamil asylum seeker family after their return to Biloela’ The Guardian (15 June 2022) <www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-15/nadesalingam-family-meet-pm-after-return-to-biloela/101154338> accessed July 1 2023.

16 Hamilton (n 14).

17 Maria Giannacopoulos, 'The Nomos of Apologia' (2009) 18 (2) Griffith Law Review 331, 342.

18 Boochani (n 12).

19 Anton Lucanus, ‘On Sri Lanka, the New Labor Government Balances Border Security and Humanitarianism’ (2022) Australian Outlook <www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/on-sri-lanka-the-new-labor-government-balances-border-security-and-humanitarianism/>.

20 Boochani (n 12).

21 Makau Mutua, ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights’ (2001) 42 Harvard International Law Journal 201.

22 Silverstein, ‘Refugee children’ (n 13); Silverstein, ‘Cruel Care’ (n 13).

23 Loughnan and Murray (n 12).

24 Mutua (n 21) 203.

25 Ibid 227.

26 Ibid.

27 See an example here in this account of resistance at Manus Island, Behrouz Boochani, ‘Incarceration, Autonomy and Resistance on Manus Island’ (2018) 152 Arena 28.

28 Sajad Kabgani, ‘Time and Borders, Policy and Lived Experience A Posthumanist Critique’ in Behrouz Boochani, Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani (Moones Mansoubi and Omid Tofighian eds, Bloomsbury Publishing 2023) 59.

29 Mutua (n 21) 230.

30 Ibid 229.

31 Megan Stack, ‘Behrouz Boochani Just Wants to be Free’ The New York Times Magazine (New York, 4 August 2020) <www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/magazine/behrouz-boochani-australia.html> accessed 12 April 2023.

32 Wendy Brown, ‘Suffering Rights as Paradoxes’ (2000) 7(2) Constellations 230.

33 Ibid, 239.

34 Ibid.

35 Matua (n 21) 206.

36 Boochani (n 27).

37 Afshar and Tofighian (tr) (n 5).

38 Ibid.

39 Mutua (n 21) 219. See also Anna Szorenyi’s analysis of images of suffering and victimhood, and the distinction that is created between ‘authentic’ and ‘in-authentic’ victimhood in ‘The Face of Suffering in Afghanistan: Identity, Authenticity and Technology in the Search for the Representative Refugee’ (2004) 21(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 1.

40 Boochani (n 12).

41 Ibid.

42 Mutua (n 21) 208.

43 Boochani (n 12).