Drowning at sea

The justification given for imprisoning refugees trying to reach Australia in horrible detention centres in Papua New Guinea is that it stops those same refugees from drowning at sea.  The supporters of this policy insist it's got nothing to do with racism or bigotry, it's about a deep and abiding concern for the suffering of refugees who arrive by boat into Australia's waters.

The cartoonist First Dog on the Moon produced a telling cartoon about this, which you can see here.

In the comments, commenter AndiGuar eviscerated the arguments put forward by the Government (and the Opposition) in favour of this horrible policy:

The drowning at sea argument is patently ridiculous, and has never been anything but a peg to hang a xenophobic / bigoted / racist hat on, while maintaining the pretence of claiming the moral high ground.

There are many ways of pointing out the hypocrisy & illogicality of it, for example:

* 1600 Australians drowned within our own territory in the same period that 1200 foreigners drowned mostly in international waters. Why do we throw $5,000,000,000 at the foreign drownings while our surf lifesaving clubs struggle to stay afloat?

* The annual cost of the supposed anti-drowning campaign could instead provide annual antimalarials for five hundred million people. If saving lives is our goal, then why ignore half a billion people to save an average of 200 a year? (the 1200 figure was over six years)

* In the same time that 1200 drowned, around 200,000 Aussies died from alcohol or tobacco. Once again, we have to ask why the 1200 are so precious that we need to lock people up to save others, when we don't lock up people who drink or smoke? (or drive cars, or hangglide, or scuba dive, or snow ski, or surf, or any number of other legal activities that carry an associated risk. There is absolutely no precedent in our system that makes it OK to lock survivors up as a deterrent for others against doing something risky but legal.

There is no sense whatsoever in the supposed "won't somebody please think of the drownings?" rationale for our detention centre regime.

And this can be easily proven: considering that it has already cost about $2,500,000 per person on Manus or Nauru, if you ask people why we couldn't have just bought them a plane ticket in the first place, the answer is always:

"BUT THEN MORE WILL COME!!!"

Which is what they are really worried about. Not the drownings.

Just so.