Compassionate deterrence: a Howard government legacy

Recent decades have seen issues of asylum seeking and border security feature heavily in Australian federal elections, with significant campaign time and money dedicated to the promotion of border security policies that seek to limit the number of boats carrying asylum seekers. In this article, we investigate the language of threat and the construction of asylum seekers as a “threat to national security,” we suggest that this language can be traced to the 2001 “Tampa crisis,” and that while there have been brief phases where a “humane” approach to the arrival of asylum seekers was present, the asylum seeker “issue” overall has been exploited by major political parties to generate positive election outcomes at the expense of Australia's humanitarian obligations. We argue that the current perception of Australia's border protection laws are a form of “compassionate deterrence,” where inhumane treatment of asylum seekers is justified on the basis of “saving lives.”