Abstract
Watching the news just before Christmas 2010, of 48 or more asylum seekers drowning off Australia’s Christmas Island, I felt doubly guilty. I was ashamed as an Australian that my country was continuing to flout international law in ways that led ineluctably to the otherwise avoidable deaths of yet more asylum seekers. I also felt guilty that I had not yet reviewed Mike Grewcock’s careful, analytical and (since it is commendably morally engaged) inevitably condemnatory study, Border Crimes: Australia’s War on Illicit Migrants. Grewcock shows us that such deaths are not just tragedies, they are the result of state crimes. The perpetrators of these ‘border crimes’ are not the conveniently blamed ‘people smugglers’, still less the victims travestied as ‘illegal immigrants’, they are policy-makers and agents of the Australian state. These are state crimes.
Border Crimes begins, appropriately, with the story of the Iraqi refugee, the late Amal Basry, who with her son Rami survived in October 2001 the shipwreck of the unseaworthy fishing boat denoted by Australian authorities as the Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel X (SIEV X). Some 353 people perished, nearly half of them children (p. 2). Amal’s account, and the use of her own words, gives ‘a human face to a group of people who had been condemned by the Australian state as “queue jumpers”’ (p. 1), and to whom Australian officials had been strategically determined to deny humanity, identity and a life history.
Grewcock has fruitfully adopted, following Green and Ward (2004), something of a Gramscian approach (see p. 23); this is often implicit in the use of the term ‘hegemony’ throughout the book. This has entailed analysing social and political processes in their concrete historical development, with judicious application of the comparative method. Such a ‘big picture’ method approaches the questions of human rights abuses against unauthorized migrants (and those taken to be such) by the Australian state in the historical context of the exclusions of the ‘white Australia’ policy, and traces the ideological antecedents of contemporary xenophobic ‘othering’ to such deeply embedded cultural and political roots (Chapter 2). I find this powerfully revealing. I also concur with the analysis that identifies elements of assimilationist ideology of ‘integration’ persisting within the policy and rhetoric of multiculturalism from the 1970s onwards, and supporting the attacks on multiculturalism, especially from the mid- to late 1990s.
This approach demonstrates that the definition of ‘deviance’ underpinning the concept of state crime in Ward and Green (cited on p. 17)—
an act is deviant where there is a social audience that (1) accepts a certain rule as a standard of behaviour; (2) interprets the act (or similar acts of which it is aware) as violating the rule, and (3) is disposed to apply significant sanctions—that is significant from the point of view of the actor—to such violation
—is historically contingent, and is at any conjuncture the outcome of ongoing political struggle. (This principle is consistent with what has been called the ‘absolute historicism’ in Gramsci.) While it may be argued that the abusively exclusionary practices of the Australian state, from White Australia to the ‘Tampa crisis’ (Australian military interdiction and boarding in August 2001 of a Norwegian freighter that had rescued foundering asylum seekers, see Chapter 5) may not always have fulfilled these ‘social audience’ definitional criteria in Australia, humanity has its objective, transhistorical nature and its negation is real. In any case, while these definitional conditions may not have applied widely in Australia in 2001, they certainly did by the time the Howard government was decisively rejected in late 2007.
The adoption of a sociological-criminological rather than a narrowly legal notion of ‘state crime’ allows the explanation of the deviance to be offered in its institutional and indeed structural context. It critically interrupts the recasting of ‘systematic and violent human rights abuses’ in terms of maintaining sovereignty and policing borders as ‘matters of national interest and popular concern, which the government is addressing in the exercise of its democratic mandate’ (pp. 243–247). It avoids being bogged down in technical arguments of the lawfulness or otherwise of specific policies, regulations, orders, practices and actions. In the cases of acts conceded by the State to be unlawful, it offers a powerful corrective to ‘the conceptual vacuum in which unlawful state acts become the responsibility of errant individuals or unnecessary systems failures’ (p. 214). It questions and rejects the language of ‘tragedies’, ‘mistakes’ or unintended consequences or indeed blaming the victim.
The book moves logically from establishing the theoretical groundwork in the literature of state crime (Chapter 1), to the global context of contemporary policies of exclusion of unauthorized migrants (Chapter 2), to the historical and political context in Australia (Chapter 3), to the social construction criminalizing refugees as ‘illegitimate (Chapter 4), to accounts of Australia’s so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ through incarceration on islands of client states (Chapter 5) and the detention complex of ‘the Australian gulag’ (Chapter 6), to the concluding section on contemporary juridical and ideological justification (Chapter 7), to an Epilogue offering a realistic and indeed prescient assessment of the promise for human rights of asylum seekers of the post-2007 Labor government.
The argument is built up with great care, scrupulously careful with the reliability of sources and the weight of empirical evidence. The book is measured in its tone as well as its claims. It is admirably well written, with an eminently readable narrative style.
I have recommended this book to dissertation and final-year undergraduate students, and they have all been moved intellectually and emotionally by its account. Border Crimes shows, carefully and systematically building a ‘big’ picture and an overwhelming case without the detraction of any ‘moral crusade’ (Stan Cohen, cited on p. 16), how the humanity of Amal Basry, and all those who suffered in the ‘SIEV X’ tragedy, in the regime of mandatory detention and temporary protection visas which led to it, and inthe ‘Pacific Solution’ which accompanied it, was systematically denied and degraded by these policies. Tragically, or rather reprehensibly, it is still happening.