by Jack Garton
The Australian government undertakes deliberate steps to dehumanise asylum seekers who come to Australia through a network of illegal concentration camps. The Australian federal government has consistently and knowingly disregarded legal norms and violated international law. Despite claims to the contrary, Australia wields profound and undue influence over Papua New Guinea and the Republic of Nauru, where these camps are located. Finally, the efforts of the Australian government in the years 2013-6 at ‘othering’ asylum seekers is an insidious form of dehumanisation. These policies, I shall argue, are not an aberration in European-Australian history, but rather a culmination of a profound and latent racism upon which the modern Australian state was founded upon.