Liberal Minister for Home Affairs and real-life movie villain Peter Dutton has come out to support open borders–at least when it comes to Queensland’s borders with other Australian states. 
"When you hear about families separated from sick kids or [people who] can't get medication, can't get to work, their business is on one side of the border and they live on the other, these are the practical implications of this closed Queensland border scenario," Dutton said on the Today show.
It’s a remarkable admission from a man who has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/07/peter-dutton-defends-nauru-policy-after-refugees-told-to-separate-from-family">overseen the separation of refugee families on Nauru</a>, and fought relentlessly to prevent asylum seekers even receiving adequate medical care.
Dutton has spent his time in government perfecting a border regime that imprisons thousands of refugees in concentration camps for years on end. Australia’s camps inflict extensive physical and mental damage on detainees–a natural consequence of prolonged indefinite confinement, cut off from the world with no hope of release, as well as abuse by the guards hired to run the facilities.
Since 2018, he has made it his personal mission to ensure the Tamil refugees Priya and Nades, along with their two young children, are deported back to Sri Lanka. He has no concern for the persecution and violence they, or any of the other thousands of Tamils deported from Australia, will likely face at the hands of the Sri Lankan regime, a close ally of the Australian government.
It might seem ironic, then, that Dutton is now calling for open borders. But his campaign against the refugees who cross Australia’s borders and his demand for state borders to be opened in the middle of a global pandemic are both driven by the needs of Australian capitalism.
Demonising refugees has often been a key election strategy for Australian politicians. Refugees are presented as a political “problem”, to be solved by means of state violence and persecution. Dutton has played a key role in pushing the debate far to the right, though not without the eager participation of his colleagues in the Liberal and Labor parties. Today, the debate is largely limited to the question of who is most capable of managing that persecution, with no voices in mainstream politics asking whether refugees should be locked up in the first place.
This serves as more than just a convenient talking point for right-wing politicians. Attacks on refugees are bound up with the racism, nationalism and authoritarianism of the capitalist state. The expansion of refugee detention, and the accompanying narrative of “national security”, plays a role in preserving the whole system. It helps to legitimise the expansion of draconian state powers, while promoting racist divisions among workers and the oppressed, inhibiting our capacity to fight back.
Dutton’s call to open state borders reflects his priorities as a representative of the ruling class. The argument that borders should immediately be opened is being prosecuted by some of Australia’s most prominent capitalists, such as Wesfarmers CEO Rob Scott and Alan Joyce of Qantas, and for good reason. It echoes the demands of capitalists around the world to end lockdowns and get workers back to work. In the middle of a pandemic, this is a demand to risk the lives of workers and their families in order to get profits flowing again.
In the eyes of politicians like Dutton, the national border must be closed to refugees to serve the interests of the capitalist state; state borders must be open to serve the economic needs of the capitalist class. To win a world where the lives of refugees and workers alike aren’t treated as expendable, we need to fight the system that gives psychopaths like Peter Dutton the power to decide who is worth saving.

Oscar Sterner

Mitch Both

Peter Dutton’s border wake-up call

Refugee rights campaigners, Tamil activists and trade unionists rallied on 21 February outside the federal court in Melbourne in support of Priya, Nades, Tharunicaa and Kopica, the Tamil refugee family currently held in Australia’s detention centre on Christmas Island. The action was part of a long running campaign to bring the family back to their home in the rural Queensland town of Biloela. They are the only refugees currently being held in the Christmas Island detention centre, at a cost so far of more than $27 million for the government. 
Spokesperson for the “Home to Biloela” campaign and friend of the family, Brad Coath, told Red Flag that “[5-year-old] Kopica goes to and from school accompanied by SERCO officers. [2-year-old] Tharunicaa is practically isolated from contact with other children, apart from attending playgroup one day per week.” 
Such are the lengths the government is prepared to go to maintain its brutal border regime, and to deliver Tamils back into the hands of the Sri Lankan regime. In 2009, tens of thousands of Tamil civilians in the last days of the Sri Lankan civil war. There is an ongoing military occupation of Tamil areas, and the rape and torture of imprisoned Tamil activists is widespread according to human rights groups. 
“The family is very worried about the deportation to Sri Lanka” said Aran Mylvaganam, Tamil Refugee Council founder based in Melbourne, “Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was in charge of the war in 2009, is now the president of Sri Lanka. He has already declared war on Tamils, declaring 20,000 missing Tamils dead without explanation, and by encouraging military harassment. This new development should be enough for the Australian government to let Priya and Nades stay here.” 
The Australian navy operates in tandem with Sri Lankan security forces to prevent Tamil refugees from fleeing this violence and persecution. “The Australian government under the Labor and Liberal parties have maintained a good relationship with the Sri Lankan Government”, says Mylvaganam, “To appease the Sri Lankan Government, they have built a system that is designed to fail Tamil asylum seekers.”
Tamil refugees deserve protection from the atrocities that generations of Tamils have suffered. But for successive governments, maintaining friendly diplomatic relations and trade with the Sri Lankan regime is more important than Tamil lives. 
The campaign to save the family has succeeded in delaying their deportation. In August last year supporters protested outside the airport as the family was transported to Christmas Island, and a court injunction was granted to stay the deportation attempt. The family and their lawyers have since been embroiled in a legal battle, during which time the family have been detained on Christmas Island. 
The Government has removed any legal hurdles to the deportations of Priya, Nades and Kopica. But Tharunicaa, the family’s youngest child, has not been assessed for a protection visa. This is the legal basis for the current appeal. 
Whatever the outcome in the courts, supporters must be ready to take all necessary action to prevent the family’s deportation. An ongoing struggle to break the back of the brutal border regime and Australia’s support for the Sri Lankan government is also needed so no other family has to suffer like Priya, Nades and their children do every day they are imprisoned.

Peter Dutton’s border wake-up call

Bring this family home to Biloela

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