The new prison at Inverbrackie

The more I hear and read about asylum seekers the more I come to believe that this government doesn’t have a clue. They don’t have a clue about being humane and they don’t have a clue about politics.

South Australian premier Mike Rann was on PM last night talking about the new prison that is being built in Inverbrackie in the Adelaide Hills. The locals seem to be pretty angry about having several hundred asylum seekers imprisoned in their community. The way the government and the Greens are responding to this is instructive. It is the locals protesting against the new prison who have got it wrong, the line goes. The people imprisoned there are not bad people, the locals are told. Their children won’t overcrowd the local schools. The locals should make them welcome, not protest at their coming.

But why not side with the locals? Why shouldn’t they be upset? It is the government who have gotten it so wrong, who have made this into a problem when it doesn’t have to be one and who have thrust this problem onto the people of Inverbrackie.

I can’t be the only one who can see that this mess is entirely of the government’s own making. If they didn’t imprison asylum-seekers they wouldn’t have to build new prisons to put them in. Then they wouldn’t have a problem with a local community who feel, rightly, that the government’s problem is being landed in their backyard.

And it’s no use telling the locals “the asylum seekers are not a threat to you.” If that’s the case then why are they locked up? Is the government actually admitting then that it spending millions of taxpayer dollars locking up innocent people? Why is it doing that then?

And it might be unfair to the Greens but I heard Senator Hanson-Young speaking on this recently and she seemed to have bought into the logic of the government and was expressing concern that some of the locals were so vociferous in their opposition to the new prison. Some of them even expressed racist sentiments. Gosh golly. But who in their right mind would be in favour of a new prison being built next door to house hundreds of asylum seekers? I wouldn’t be. Would Hanson-Young be thrilled at the idea?

You don’t have to be a racist to oppose an asylum-seeker prison being established in your community. You just have to be a normal human being.

So here’s how the government could make the headache go away. Don’t lock up innocent people in the first place! Then you don’t have to spend hundreds of millions building new prisons. Then you don’t have headlines screaming about overcrowded prisons and hundreds more boat people on the way. People arrive, you lock them up for a few days while they have health and security checks. Then you let them go and they get on with their lives.

There are no longer overcrowded prisons full of people going mad. There are no longer angry local communities wondering why an incompetent government is dumping its problems on them. There is suddenly a hundred million dollars available for the causes of good instead of evil.

But first of all stop calling these prisons “detention centres.” They are prisons, so call them prisons. The people in them are not “detainees” they are prisoners. So you should call them prisoners. You’ll be amazed at how little sense mandatory detention imprisonment makes when you start discussing it in Plain English.