Punting on a person’s life is another form of torture

Date: 29/06/2014

Publication: The Sunday Age

Sending asylum seekers ‘home’ is a cruel gamble, writes Warwick McFadyen.

Australians like a bet. We’re one of the bettingest countries on Earth. Horses, greyhounds, footy matches, they’re all fair game for a bet. Two flies on the wall? You bet. In fact, we gamble billions of dollars a year trying to beat the odds.

What’s the odds then of this coincidence? In the space of 24 hours, a bill is introduced into Federal Parliament, part of which increases the risk threshold from 10 per cent to 50 per cent that an asylum seeker sent back to their homeland will be tortured, and the world marks UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

Australia is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture. The convention bans countries from shipping people to where they believe there is a strong possibility they will be tortured. This is non-refoulement. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, however, believes that a 50-50 bet keeps us within the boundaries of doing the right thing by the convention and Australia’s obligations.

Morrison told Parliament that “the government remains committed to ensuring it abides by the non-refoulement obligations” under the convention. At present, a “real chance” of the risk of torture stands at 10 per cent, but “it is the government’s position that the risk threshold applicable to the non-refoulement obligations … is ‘more likely than not’.”

More likely than not means “a greater than 50 per cent chance that a person would suffer significant harm in the country they are returned to”. Perfectly logical. One phrase jumps out from Morrison’s opening remarks to the House on the reading of the bill. It is that the legislation constitutes “increased processing efficiency consistent with our election commitments”.

If one is to increase processing efficiency then it makes perfect sense to loosen the parameters by which that processing is conducted. You say you’re going to be tortured if we return you home? Hmmm, we reckon that’s a 50-50 bet. You can live with that eh? We can. “This is an acceptable position which is open to Australia under international law,” Morrison said last week, “and reflects the government’s interpretation of Australia’s obligations.”

Morrison and the government will argue that they are only delivering what the public wants. They have a mandate to act as they are doing. The Australian public gave it to them. “These changes will enable the Australian public to have confidence in the Australian government’s capacity to assess all asylum seekers.”

Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t recall hearing or reading during the election campaign about a torture commitment. There was the “turn back the boats” promise, the “reclaim Australia’s borders” vow, but a torture assurance? Doesn’t ring a bell.

To mark the International Day in Support of Torture Victims, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked the world that in honouring the victims of torture, nations “pledge to strengthen our efforts to eradicate this heinous practice”. Critics would say that the UN chief is living in cloud cuckoo land. Eradicate torture? Who is he kidding?

Sure everyone agrees with the UN that torture “cannot be justified under any circumstances”, and that it is “one of the vilest acts perpetrated by human beings on their fellow human beings”. Who could place anyone in a situation where there would be the remotest possibility of that “vile act” being carried out on someone? Who indeed?

As any punter will tell you, assessing the odds of an outcome will narrow the possibilities of a predicted outcome in the majority of cases. But it will not eliminate all possibilities. The dead cert is really a myth. If it is “more likely than not” a result will go one way rather than another in the torture stakes, then we may as well start waterboarding asylum seekers now.

As Daniel Webb, of the Human Rights Law Centre, said: “These amendments would allow the government to send people back to their country of origin even if there’s a 49 per cent chance they’ll be killed or tortured as soon as they get off the plane.”

What sort of national ideology is this? Taken with the change of terminology, disclosed by this newspaper last October, that those who came by boat were to be referred to as “illegal maritime arrivals” rather than asylum seekers, the excising of parts of the nation so as to thwart such people arriving on our far-flung shores and the depositing of said people in neighbouring countries with no chance whatsoever of ever being resettled here speaks to a coldness in the heart. The depressing thing is that this deep freeze has spread into the veins of both major parties.

But then, I’m sure they may see it as a useful virtue in hedging their bets for best poll position.