Culture

From Chris Brown To Troy Newman: Why Do Australian Progressives Suddenly Love Border Force?

Cheering on the same agency that runs our offshore detention camps is a very strange look.

by Chad Parkhill  8 October 2015

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Just over one month ago – back in the dim, distant past when Tony Abbott was still our nation’s prime minister – the newly-minted Australian Border Force announced that they would join a number of other agencies in a joint operation in Melbourne’s CBD. A press release announcing Operation Fortitude laid on the menace with a trowel: Border Force promised it would speak with “any individual we cross paths with”. “If you commit visa fraud you should know it’s only a matter of time before you’re caught out,” it thundered.

The threat of racial profiling and harassment of those who don’t look ‘Australian’ was implicit (and, according to Border Force after the fact, an unintentional effect of a poorly-worded media release). Melbourne, to its eternal credit, swiftly rallied – a lighting-fast protest action prevented the planned media conference about the operation from occurring, and shortly enough Victoria Police cancelled it altogether.

Given the strength of the response to Australian Border Force’s bungled Operation Fortitude, it’s surprising to see that Australian progressives have entered into a much cosier relationship with the agency in the past few weeks.

First, the self-professed progressive organisation GetUp! mounted a campaign to pressure the agency into denying a visa to U.S. R&B artist Chris Brown, who viciously assaulted his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, days prior to her scheduled appearance at the 2009 Grammy Awards. Soon after the Chris Brown controversy, progressives – including members of the Australian Labor Party – applied pressure to the agency (and the minister in control of it, Peter Dutton) to cancel the visa of  U.S. anti-abortion activist Troy Newman.

GetUp! copped to the more problematic aspects of their campaign against Chris Brown and have subsequently withdrawn it — but in essence, both these movements were successful: Brown’s visa has been cancelled (although he plans to contest the decision), and Troy Newman was apprehended and incarcerated after attempting to enter Australia without a valid visa. (He has since been deported and returned to the U.S. after his bid to challenge this decision in the High Court failed.)

Of course, not every Australian progressive is breezily cheering on Border Force’s decisions to exclude odious people from our country. But the fact that many on the left are enlisting the support of an agency that just one month ago was being pilloried as ‘Border Farce’ – also the same agency that is responsible for overseeing the horrendous conditions in Australia’s offshore processing centres – ought to give us pause.

Why Should Chris Brown And Troy Newman Be Let In?

Nobody should feel particularly sad for the targets of these campaigns. Brown talks a mean game about being a changed man since he assaulted Rihanna, but his statements about it are shot through with enough self-pity that it’s hard to believe he really understands that Rihanna, not he himself, was the victim of his crime.

Newman, for his part, has publicly advocated for doctors who provide abortions to be executed for (entirely made up) crimes against foetuses. He moved the base of operations for his anti-abortion organisation to Wichita, Kansas in order to harass the physician George Tiller; Tiller was later assassinated by an associate of Newman’s, Scott Roeder, who had the assistance of one of Newman’s senior policy advisors.

Neither Brown nor Newman is the kind of person you or I would want to have over for dinner – but does that mean that they deserve to be subjected to the full exclusionary force of the state? As Jeff Sparrow notes, Australia has a history of excluding African-American musicians from touring the country, one fuelled by racist hysteria about black men’s supposed criminality and deeply dubious notions of white women’s ‘purity’. And as Clem Bastow argues, the campaign against Brown ultimately distracts us from both the number of high profile Australians who have histories of violence against women, and from the hard conversations we need to have about the transgressions that our culture is happy to gloss over.

Similarly, as Jane Gilmore argues, keeping Troy Newman out of the country won’t stop anti-abortion lobby groups, and it may have robbed feminist activists of an opportunity to ramp up a debate about the fact that not all Australian women have access to safe and legal abortions.

There’s a grim paradox in the fact that Border Force and the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection have received their popularity boost in progressive circles just as more details surface about the full extent of the abusive conditions for asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru. As Jenny Noyes at Daily Life notes, Border Force’s decision to prevent Newman from entering Australia came not long after the ABC’s 7.30 aired video footage of a Somali refugee woman found by Nauruan police, hours after being allegedly dragged into bushes and raped by Nauruan locals.

We already know that the offshore processing camps are a horrorshow – the Australian government (both Labor and Liberal) has in the past proudly trumpeted this fact in cartoon form in order to dissuade asylum seekers from attempting to reach our shores. And while the Nauruan government’s recently announced shift to detention-free processing is a promising change, whether the Nauruan government can ensure asylum-seekers’ safety remains to be seen.

Whatever the true extent of the problem – and remember, both the Nauruan and Australian governments are doing all they can to prevent independent investigators, including journalists and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, from finding out how bad things are through anti-whistleblower laws and excessive visa fees – it’s clear that Australia’s offshore processing centres have a huge problem with sexual violence, one that Border Force and Minister Dutton are unwilling to tackle.

Troy Newman To Aylan Kurdi: How Visa Laws Create The Market For Human Smuggling

Adding to the paradox, the legal mechanisms through which high-profile entertainers and speakers are prevented from entering Australia are the very same mechanisms that have created the unprecedented demand for people-smuggling in both the Timor Sea and the Mediterranean.

When Troy Newman’s visa to Australia was initially revoked, he was aboard a domestic flight in the U.S. en route to Australia, but was forced to disembark at Denver when United Airlines found out he did not have a valid visa. Airlines don’t police visas out of the goodness of their hearts – they do so because governments worldwide (including Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union) levy large fines on airlines if they let people without valid visas aboard. (One of the few mysteries that remains about Troy Newman’s Australian adventure is just how he convinced United Airlines staff that he should be allowed on the flight.)

This not only ends up outsourcing aspects of border control to private companies; it also means that legitimate asylum seekers are prevented from travelling to their destinations by air, as they may not have the appropriate documentation, or may be unable to acquire a tourist or business visa in order to fly to Australia and then seek asylum. (Those who arrive by plane, unlike those who arrive by boat, are not detained while their application for refugee status is processed.) This in turn creates the market for people smugglers and their boats. If you were distressed or moved to compassion by the image of Aylan Kurdi drowned on a Turkish beach, consider that Kurdi’s family would not have attempted the dangerous sea voyage from Bodrum to Kos – one of a mere twenty kilometres – if the much safer option of flying to be reunited with extended family in Canada had been open to them.

The fact that progressives can joke about Troy Newman being sent to a camp that we know is an epicentre of sexual violence and cruelty shows the full extent of the damage that Australia’s refugee policy has done to our national psyche. That progressive organisations such as GetUp! and Collective Shout are willing to utilise the full force of the state to achieve their policy goals – and in so doing tacitly approve of that force, and its perverse outcomes – shows that we have a long and difficult conversation ahead of us about the legitimate uses of state force, and when that force should be resisted.

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Chad Parkhill is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. He has written for The Australian, The Lifted Brow, Killings (the blog of Kill Your Darlings), Meanjin and The Quietus.

Feature image by Anadolu Agency, via Getty.