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Shipwreck with spectator: snapshots of

border security in Australia

Peter Chambersa

a Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, AustraliaPublished online: 19 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Peter Chambers (2014) Shipwreck with spectator: snapshots of border securityin Australia, Global Change, Peace & Security: formerly Pacifica Review: Peace, Security & GlobalChange, 26:1, 97-112, DOI: 10.1080/14781158.2014.868425

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COMMUNICATION ARTICLE

Shipwreck with spectator: snapshots of border security in Australia

Peter Chambers*

Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia

Introduction

On 15 December 2010, variations of the image shown in Figure 1 circulated through global massmedia, emanating from Australia.

The captions begin to tell the story of the image – ‘asylum seekers’, ‘boat crash’, ‘ChristmasIsland’; to many Australians this is already all too meaningful. And yet the captions leave out somuch else. What neither the image nor its captions capture can be gathered by responding to thefollowing question, which this communication seeks to do: what makes the situation captured bythis image possible? Border security is the answer. What follows offers a series of discursivesnapshots which seek to explicate this answer, in a way that provides a holistic understandingof border security as a transformation of power.

This is an image that can tell a story about what Australia has become in its expansive, expens-ive embrace of border security. Australia is a nation of ‘boat people’, totally dependent on revenuefrom shipping (through trade and exports), and yet, for the overwhelming majority of Australians,the materiality that supports them is almost totally invisible. As Michael Taussig comments, in an

Figure 1. Screenshot of news broadcast footage showing survivor of SIEV 221 shipwreck.Source: Google images.

*Email: pcch@unimelb.edu.au

Global Change, Peace & Security, 2014Vol. 26, No. 1, 97–112, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781158.2014.868425

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essay remembering the phantasmic Sydney of his childhood, ‘The conduct of life today is com-pletely and utterly dependent on the sea and the ships it bears, yet nothing is more invisible’.1

Contemporary Australia, the mongrel offspring of a nineteenth century thalassocratic empireand twentieth century multicultural capitalism, has become a coastal society that need thinknothing of that which totally supports its way of life.

And yet, politically speaking, successive Commonwealth governments have becomeobsessed by ‘boat arrivals’: groups of people escaping bad situations by being smuggledaboard re-purposed fishing boats from parts of the Indonesian archipelago, under the assumptionthat they will find a modicum of shelter, safety, and protection in Australia. For the Common-wealth and its border security apparatus, ‘boat arrivals’ are categorically recognized as securitythreats that must be neutralized by being interdicted, transferred, and processed in offshore deten-tion. Over the past 14 years Australia has emerged as one of the vanguard sites in the globalizingtransformation of power that is the embrace of border security; Australia’s story is not only anAustralian story. We see analogous processes taking shape and burrowing into the sociusacross the world: the USA, Europe, and Israel are three conspicuous cases.2 What followsoffers general lessons from discursive snapshots taken of a very specific case, one geographicallydistant, but that speaks to the political heart of our times.

1. The political geography of border security in Australia

The story of the rise of border security in Australia is one of extraordinary distances and wrench-ing dislocations. Consider the figures visible in Figure 1. The man on the left is an AustralianFederal Police (AFP) officer. The man in the middle, as far as I have been able to ascertain, isan officer from Australian Customs and Border Protection. The man on the right is an Iraqiasylum seeker, the only person aboard a boat – an Indonesian fishing boat – who managed tosave himself by scrambling on to the rocks. The boat in question, now fatefully known asSIEV 221,3 was one aboard which 50 people drowned in the course of trying to reach Australia.The rocks in question are those of Rocky Point, an unimaginatively named promontory on thenorth-east side of Christmas Island (CI), the tiny tip of an oceanic volcano in the middle of theIndian Ocean and a territory of the Commonwealth of Australia, approximately 320 km tothe south of Java and 2,630 km north-west of Perth. If the AFP officer were deployed fromCanberra, Australia’s capital, that directly governs CI as a territory of the Commonwealth, hewould be 5,182 km from headquarters, more than double the distance between London andMoscow and nearly 20% further than the ‘mere’ 3,940 km between New York City and LosAngeles. And the shipwrecked Iraqi, if he were from Baghdad, would be 8,106 km fromhome. Everyone here is a long way from home.

This picture also offers a way into a story of displacements. Why aren’t the Iraqis in Iraq?Why aren’t the Indonesian fishermen casting their nets in Indonesia? Why isn’t the AFPofficer in Canberra, Sydney, or Melbourne enforcing federal law ‘in’ Australia? And who, for

1 Michael Taussig, ‘The Beach: A Fantasy’, Critical Enquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 252.2 These three cases get framed within a commonality of ‘walling’ in Wendy Brown’s analysis, but the Australian case

shows us the ways in which an ocean calls into question the universal applicability of the wall. See Wendy Brown,Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). My strong preference would be to approacheach empirical case as expressing the shifting shapes of the conflictual political geography it involves society in, ageneral theoretical orientation better expressed in Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge, BeyondWalls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012) as well as EyalWeizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2012). See also Robert Lee Maril,The Fence: National Security, Public Safety and Illegal Immigration along the US–Mexico Border (Lubbock, TX:Texas Tech University Press, 2011).

3 SIEV stands for Suspect(ed) Illegal Entry Vehicle. The numbers of SIEVs are given in sequential order, as they areidentified by Border Protection Command (BPC).

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that matter, took this photograph? Why, in short, is everyone captured within this frame standingon a slippery rock on the tip of an oceanic volcano in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in the middleof a storm, just after dawn, little more than a week before Christmas? In order to explain how thesedisplacements all came to fit self-evidently within the frame of the image, I will now begin con-sidering, very schematically, the key moments from the historical emergence of border security inAustralia.

2. A schematic history of border security in Australia

In every country where it has taken hold, border security is extremely complicated, and thespecificities of each instantiation of border security can be read as the shifting shape of theconflictual process itself, one that draws upon an enormous regress of shaping factors.4 Inthe Australian case, a broader political history of border security can be traced from settle-ment,5 but for current purposes the first verifiable link in the chain was made on 10 April1999, when a boat travelling from the People’s Republic of China arrived in Scotts Head,6

a sleepy coastal town near Nambucca Heads in New South Wales that, if it is famous atall, is famous for its surf break. The Scotts Head landing made no lasting mark on the nationalimagination.7 But it did enable the secretary of the Prime Minister’s department, Max ‘theAxe’ Moore-Wilton, to begin laying groundwork for the Commonwealth’s implementationof border security. Two days after the Scotts Head incident, the Prime Minister, JohnHoward, established a Coastal Surveillance Task Force, chaired by Moore-Wilton. Barelysix weeks later, Howard announced that the Commonwealth would implement all of thetask force’s recommendations.

The Scotts Head incident initiated the institution of border security as a prioritized task forAustralian government. Among border security’s diffuse effects, after more than a decade ofits normal practice, has been its contribution to a transformation in thinking in relation to nationalsecurity. Here, a broadened conception of security has been tied to a large number of novel threatobjects. Previously disparate phenomena such as terrorism, disease, piracy, maritime pollution,quarantine, and some aspects of immigration, such as unauthorized boat arrivals, have all beenbrought under the ‘umbrella’ of security,8 and as this happened, national security has beenmade synonymous with border security.9 Once these elements have been aligned, ‘crossingthe border’ without authorization becomes visible as a threat to the security of the nation. Asthe Guide to Australia’s Maritime Security Arrangements (GAMSA) puts it, a security threat is‘an action that has potential to cause consequences adverse to Australia’s interests’ and theseinterests ‘are threatened by any irregular arrival of people’.10

We can regard this transformation of security more specifically as a process that has involvedtranslating a set of concepts into practices. Through the actualization of this translation, the

4 Conflict and inequality being the two fundamental, basic ones; we would have to consider so many others too (spatial,legal, political, etc.), although there is not room here. To name but two recent works looking at border security in theUS and EU respectively that address some of these factors, see note 2 as well as Jason Ackleson, ‘Constructing Secur-ity on the US–Mexico Border’, Political Geography 24, no. 2 (2005): 165–84; Henk van Houtum, ‘Human Blacklist-ing: The Global Apartheid of the EU’s External Border Regime’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(2010): 957–76.

5 Anthony Burke, Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).6 http://www.nambuccatourism.com.au/pages/scotts-head/7 This section draws upon and re-represents aspects from research already published: Peter Chambers, ‘The Rising Tide

of Border Security’, Inside Story, July 28, 2010, http://inside.org.au/the-rising-tide-of-border-security/.8 This is explained in detail in the Guide to Australian Maritime Security Arrangements (GAMSA), which is available

online from http://www.bpc.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/gamsa_2013_web.pdf (accessed November 18, 2013).9 This process was formalized in then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s inaugural National Security Statement, formerly

available at: http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/5424 (link dead as of November 18, 2013).10 GAMSA, 9, 83.

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nation’s borders are recast as the site of security, and the crossers of those borders were nowviewed as categorical threats: to the border, to national security, and therefore to political sover-eignty. Their repeated ‘arrival’ as crossers, in numbers represented as significant and increasing,meanwhile, generates urgency. In Australia this has been articulated in a way that has beenshamelessly exploited to enhance the electoral prospects of politicians on both sides of theparliamentary game. But in order for that to happen, a number of key steps had to be taken.

2.1 Decision, risk, complexity: rhetorical anchorings of Australian bordersecurity’s emergence

Border security is said in many ways. Discursively, border security has been anchored to Austra-lian political life by successive acts of political rhetoric. In November 2001 the then Prime Min-ister, John Howard, asserted the following: ‘We will decide who comes to this country and thecircumstances in which they come’. This phrase established what has remained the broad situa-tional definition framing border security tout court. It is one of those unusual occasions when awhole politics is expressed in a phrase,11 and though it refers in this case to parochial circum-stances, it has transcended its own context, survived a number of prime ministers and govern-ments, and is intelligible as a key governmental phrase of border security in Australia. It also,arguably, expresses the global, general wish which border security might be said to fulfil –though we need to tread warily when presuming to know what those invested in ‘’border security’might be said to ‘wish’.

What is clearly knowable is that Howard’s assertion is essentially decisionist in character. Butit is a decisionism that diverges in two important ways from the modality developed by CarlSchmitt in his account of political sovereignty.12 The first point of divergence concerns risk,the second complexity. Risk provides a general description of the conditions under whichdecision making takes place; complexity stands in as a synecdoche for the world environmentin which risky security threats emerge and must be decided upon – in such a way that politicalsovereignty is retained. Thus, risk (and decisive action) ‘in’ Canberra, threats (and environmentalcomplexity) ‘out in’ the Indian Ocean. To the extent that it resonates, Howard’s assertion main-tains the risk/threat split, and the stability of their location and meaning. But this itself raises ques-tions about knowledge.

In the contemporary nation-state the executive must decide, but it cannot know – even thoughit must say it does – and is giving it to be known that it is already acting accordingly, withouthesitation. It is utterly crucial to assert that this is mostly done by governmental spokespeople– mostly ministers, very often seeking re-election – through announcements intended to appearin mass media, and further that, in the absence of sufficient resources, most media outlets nowrely upon government announcements as an important source of information that can be reme-diated as ‘news’. When dealing with the securing of an ocean actual conditions escape calculabil-ity, but the mask of accountability must never drop, and the semblance of control must becontinually emphatically asserted for the cameras. In The Cosmopolitan Manifesto, UlrichBeck provides a short description of the connection between risk and decision that accuratelycaptures these aspects of the decisionism and knowledge in Australian border security. Beckwrites: ‘Risks presuppose decision. These decisions were previously undertaken with fixednorms of calculability, connecting means and ends or causes and effects. These norms areprecisely what “world risk society” has rendered invalid’.13

11 Clinton’s ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ also springs to mind here.12 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1985).13 Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 4.

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Border security, as it turns out, is a wish that the executive does fulfil – even though it does notknow precisely what that fulfilment does. One of the empirically observable effects that we canobserve, however, is that through positioning itself in relation to border security, the executiveends up pinned down. What we end up with is a kind of decisionism that, although it hasdictatorial pretensions before the cameras, operationally tends to express a resigned preferencefor more of the same. The executive may seek election or even try to govern with border security,but perhaps it is border security that is the decisive winner and controller.

This also means that decisionism is itself a risk, though one whose visible, intentionallyplayed stakes exist in relation to the game of the electoral cycle, whose probabilities areclearly calculated by the obsessively repetitive polling of Gallup, Morgan and Newspoll.14

Polling generates data which is then projected as unambiguous appearances of fact by massmedia: the popularity of the Prime Minister, the reception of specific actions, the risks offurther inaction, etc. This is a viciously circular, self-referential process of mediation that marshalsrhetoric and its remediation by polling and social media in real time in order to be reminted as ‘themessage’, thus minimizing risk – for the executive. The undiminished hazards of attempting toreach Australia in a rickety fishing boat are here translated into a calculable risk of electoral dis-advantage, a risk minimized by playing to the sentiments of sampled audiences of swing voters inmarginal electorates. Public rhetoric here moves into private homes as a set of questions, andthose who are asked produce a statistically significant preference for harsher treatment, strongerresponses, decisive action, above all. This reappears in the next day’s paper as a national ‘we’whoare still suffering from a ‘lack’ of border security, as well as ‘lame excuses’ from politicians whoare flip-flopping and muddling through. This is then broadcast as evidence of the need for evenharsher and ever more decisive measures, as a matter of urgency, to address the risk that boat arri-vals ‘are’ – and so on, ad infinitum.

Over time, and through repetition and condensation, decisive action on border security, or atleast its media-optimal semblance, has come to be understood as the electorally optimal way ofdealing with the risk that the ‘threat’ is held to represent, and as the ‘common sense’ response to a‘known problem’, based on the ‘evidence’. The inherently repetitive nature of this process is alsoimportantly agentic. Border security is said over and over in many ways, and this does things,many of which escape recognition and calculation of the ‘risks’ of border security – as follows.

Repeated ‘decisive actions’ within this media message cycle move quickly into policy docu-ments, institutional norms, and governmental practices. Once there, they prompt, enact, reinforce,and entrench the necessity of setting up elaborate, multi-billion dollar apparatuses to go out andrestore national security and political sovereignty by enforcing the decisionist prerogative. It isworth noting here that the recently elected Abbott government has actually dubbed its policyon this matter Operation Sovereign Borders. I will return to dwell on what this ‘policy’ actuallymeans, but, for the moment, what is crucial to note is how what began with the short onshorephrase ‘we will decide…’ ends with extensive offshore enforcement for the foreseeablefuture, and indefinite offshore detention for all would-be arrivals, including children. Thus, arisk in one onshore political environment is transformed into an enforcement archipelago inanother offshore environment, one placed quite deliberately beyond the shores of political con-tention. This insulates immigration detention from appearing as a risk, or as harmful, or ascruel. One of the ways in which this is stabilized is that the offshore environment is maintainedto be one of essential complexity.

14 Australia’s electoral cycles are short (three and a half years), and many of print and broadcast media’s key outletswork under conditions of scarce resources, intense time pressure, and capture by corporate interests with anakedly partisan character. Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation papers capture most of Australia’s printmedia audience, instructed his editors to take a politically partisan position against the incumbent Labor government(in power since 2008, defeated in September 2013’s election).

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Australian border security in its enforcement incarnation as the Border Protection Command(BPC) operates in the complex, hazardous conditions of the open ocean. But the BPC is also oper-ationalized by a kind of jargon of complexity, an expedient onshore description of ‘the world ofthreats’ that calls for border security ‘in the first place’. In 2008, then Prime Minister Kevin Ruddmade several moves to explicate, delineate, and formalize what under the previous Howard gov-ernment had been procedurally inchoate and informal arrangements around border security. Themost prominent of these moves was the inaugural National Security Statement, which, for the firsttime in Australian history, deliberately and carefully offered a precise definition of national secur-ity. Of interest here is the description of national security’s ‘facts of life’, its threat environment:

Increasing complexity and inter-connectedness is a fact of life in the modern, global environment.Classical distinctions between foreign and domestic, national and international, internal and externalhave become blurred… The security environment that we face today and into the future is thereforeincreasingly fluid and characterized by a complex and dynamic mix of continuing and emerging chal-lenges and opportunities. So while our national security interests remain constant, Australia needs anew concept of national security capable of embracing and responding to the more complex and inter-connected operating environment that we will face for the future.15

As we can see here, it is environmental complexity ‘out there’ – the blurring of the classical dis-tinctions that it engenders ‘in between’ – that calls for a new concept of national security ‘in here’.But complexity might ‘include’ anything – it’s that kind of concept. This is the important politicalpoint to take from the National Security Statement. What complexity does in this context is breakdown conceptual distinctions that have maintained entrenched institutional arrangements, and itdoes so in order to broaden the concept of security such that it can include the threat objects thatborder security now categorically recognizes as such – which keeps the risks, and the decisions,firmly ‘in Canberra’, and in the hands of the executive. The true complexity is in the artful hand-ling of context, venue, and audience. Before an audience of ‘national security stakeholders’, theexecutive speaks of nothing but complexity. Before the cameras and microphones of the pressgallery, the expressed ‘reality’ of border security is translated back into a world of unambiguouslyurgent conditions necessitating immediate, decisive action, with nothing less than the integrity ofthe nation at stake. Risks are a matter of calculation, but both decisionism and complexity aredaring, artful plays that transcend mere prudence. If we follow this interpretation, then the artof being a masterful politician is not just about risks and decisions, it is in the timing and deliveryof a performance that understands the nuance of the distinction between the two in a given situ-ation. The excision of Christmas Island offers one historical snapshot where border securityemerged, in part, as an effect of this art.

2.2 Translating the decisionist prerogative into the space of bordersecurity: Tampa, Relex, interdiction; the excision of Christmas Island

In late 2001, just before a federal election, a Norwegian freighter, MV Tampa, rescued the pas-sengers (mostly Iraqi and Afghani men) of a foundering fishing boat, the Palapa. ArneRinnan, Tampa’s captain, then communicated that he intended to transfer the rescued passengersto CI. The Australian executive ordered the Palapa not to approach CI, and eventually sent in theSpecial Air Services16 (SAS) to interdict the would-be asylum seekers. The Tampa incidentenabled the implementation of three key legislative changes that have buttressed and underpinnedAustralian border security. The first of these validated the government’s actions and generated

15 Australian Commonwealth Government, The First National Security Statement to the Australian Parliament(NSSAP), Address by the Prime Minister of Australia The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP 4 December 2008. Canberra, Aus-tralia: Commonwealth of Australia. Formerly available at: http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Speech/2008/speech_0659.cfm /(link dead when access attempted on 20 June, 2012), 5-6.

16 Australia’s special forces unit, roughly equivalent to the US Delta Force and Navy SEALs.

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new protection powers, including the power of interdiction; the second amended the MigrationAct 1958 to remove certain territories, including CI, from the migration zone, re-specifyingthem as ‘offshore excised places’. These amendments also added the new category of ‘offshoreentry person’. The third piece of legislation, the Consequential Provisions Act, enabled authoritiesto detain ‘offshore entry persons’ ‘in Australia’ or transfer them to a ‘declared country’. Theselegislative measures were then linked to an enforcement arm, initially called OperationRelex.17 Relex involved using all three branches of the Australian Defence Forces to ‘detect,deter and return’ ‘Suspected Unlawful Non Citizens’, or SUNCs, aboard ‘Suspected IllegalEntry Vehicles’, or SIEVs.18

Operation Relex was something profoundly new for the Australian Defence Forces, and it wasalso the first full-blown application of the border security paradigm in Australia. ‘Boat arrivals’were now categorically recognized and procedurally handled as ‘security threats’. By way of con-trast, the navy’s role in analogous historical cases19 had been to escort boats to Australian ports,where they would be received and processed by immigration authorities as an immigration matter.The transformed role initially consisted of personnel from the navy, army, air force, customs,federal police, and quarantine actively preventing boat arrivals from reaching Australian territory.

In 2004, the Howard government received a report from an inquiry it had requested into thestate of Australia’s coastal surveillance arrangements. The report recommended the formation ofthe Joint Offshore Protection Command (JOPC), which was renamed and permanently institutedas the Border Protection Command (BPC) in October 2006. The BPC effectively rolled OperationRelex’s spectacular enforcement methods into an ensemble of border surveillance and enforce-ment measures, all operating under the general rhetorical heading of ‘border security’ (or, inter-changeably, border protection). This date marks the point from which the key transformation toborder security came into full and (so far) permanent effect.

On the enforcement side, the BPC takes elements from all arms of the Commonwealth, whichit divides into two categories: ‘awareness generators’ and ‘response assets’. It is, as the BPC says,a ‘multi-agency command’. In Canberra, this command amalgamated and coordinated the for-merly disparate activities of customs, federal policing, the military, and intelligence under onecommand, which reports to one commander, who, in turn, reports to the Attorney-General andPrime Minister. Thus we can see again here how the decisionist prerogative ‘We will decide…’ was returned to the executive as a workable political technology.

This Canberra-based set of structures and processes coordinating enforcement is connected toits administrative counterpart, which the Commonwealth calls ‘National Maritime Security Gov-ernance’. Structurally, it is less a security-predicated megabureaucracy like the US Department ofHomeland Security, and more a set of committees with decisional power. Its existence is notsecret, but the majority of the public does not know of it, nor has it been the subject of much scru-tiny by journalists. Unlike the arrival of boats and the detention of asylum seekers, it is not poli-ticized. It is considered, when it is considered at all, as a technical matter. What, in my view, bearsemphasizing is how this is structured: both the ‘multi-agency command’ and ‘National MaritimeSecurity Governance’ tend to fade into the executive at all upper points of the chain of command.

In 2008, many of these structures were formalized, first of all in the wake of the NationalSecurity Statement, and second by ordering the explication of many of these relations, whichhad been formally inchoate though effectively operative under the previous Howard govern-ment.20 Kevin Rudd implemented measures that ensured border security was and is the avowable,

17 From late 2001, post-Tampa, until October 2006.18 What makes the suspected vehicles and their occupants ‘illegal’ is the fact that all non-citizens attempting to enter

Australia must have a valid visa, according to the Migration Act (1958). Any person attempting to enter Australiawithout a visa is an ‘unlawful non-citizen’.

19 The arrivals of so-called ‘boat people’ fleeing Indochina in the late 1970s.

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durable new paradigm for a key contemporary practice of national security, one replicable bycomparable nation-states as a model of security governance.

Upon assuming office on 18 September 2013, the Abbott Liberal-National (conservative)coalition government undertook a further, deeper institution of the decisionist prerogative.Operation Sovereign Borders, while not substantially unsettling the operational arrangementswithin the BPC, adds another Taskforce, the Operation Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Task-force, above the BPC.21 The novelty here is a formal one: for the first time, a military servicehas been made responsible to a minister, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, cur-rently Scott Morrison. This potentially places military assets at the disposal of an immigrationminister, thus militarizing immigration – and the executive responsible for it.

Border security is a key transformation of power, a way for the executive and its ‘allies’withinthe state, mass media, and the corporate sector (notably Serco Australia22) to manage mobility bysecuring circulation in its favour. But it is also legible as a pernicious and controlling process thatescapes control by the rhetorical, mass media-based and institutional levers described in thissection, because eventually all must govern in relation to it, and in its favour. At the time ofwriting, there is no way to say where this will lead or what its effects will be, who or whatmight resist or overcome it. However, the notable tendency throughout its institution is thatborder security has continued to expand and entrench itself, commanding more resources and cor-rupting the checks and balances which, in theory and in history, have worked to prevent the cor-ruption of liberal democracy in Australia. Is a government whose executive conducts OperationSovereign Borders – with the signalled support of a large electoral minority and Rupert Mur-doch’s media – still a liberal democracy? It is, perhaps, too early to say. With all this in mind,as I continue to explain the assembly of the picture that opened this essay, I now turn to considerChristmas Island.

3. How Christmas Island became what it is

As one Hazara boy detained on CI remarked: ‘When we studied geography, our teachers nevershowed us Christmas Island… [i]f we look at a world map, Christmas Island is hiding in themap. It’s so small’.23 After the implementation of excision and interdiction (2001–02) and theimplementation of the BPC (2005–06), CI became a component part in the broader border secur-ity apparatus.24 The excision of CI can be understood as the political translation of a geographicloophole into a legal grey area for reasons of unilaterally declared necessity. Jurisdictionally, CIremains Australia to almost all intents and purposes: Australia still exercises water column,seabed, and subsoil jurisdiction. Maritime search and rescue and the BPC take responsibilityfor the area surrounding it, as part of Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and

20 GAMSA is the ‘master document’ that gives these manifold systems, processes, offices, and officers their governmen-tal ‘unity’.

21 A full description of the institutional minutae is provided at http://www.customs.gov.au/site/operation-sovereign-borders.asp (accessed November 18, 2013).

22 Serco Australia is the Australian arm of Serco UK, a multi-billion-dollar FTSE 100 company that has been at theforefront of providing ‘support services’ (including running immigration detention) for the British government.Serco Australia also provides maintenance services for the University of Melbourne. See http://www.serco- ap.com.au/infrastructure_services/melbourne_parks_and_gardens.html.

23 In Peter Chambers, ‘Society Has Been Defended: Following the Shifting Shape of State through Australia’s Christ-mas Island’, International Political Sociology 5, no. 1 (March 2011): 19. This section closely follows substantivepoints made in ‘Society Has Been Defended’ and in some places – for example in describing the excision of CI –closely paraphrases this earlier work.

24 The Island’s population of 1500 or so, though Australian citizens, are mostly ethnically Chinese and Malay, the off-spring of the indentured workers brought to the Island by the British. See Chambers, ‘Society Has Been Defended’,18–34. This section re-presents elements from this study.

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conduct regular patrols there. For boat arrivals, however, CI is not quite Australia. This isdecisive.

‘Offshore entry persons’ who arrive on CI now with the status of ‘unauthorized non-citizens’have arrived in a ‘place’ that is outside Australia, insofar as their claims of asylum are concerned.Boat arrivals interdicted on the high seas and transferred to CI are effectively held under the law,while being beyond the full protection of the law; they are made subject to the law, without beingmade full subjects of the law. Australians meanwhile, such as the AFP officer in the photo, remain‘in’ Australia – very often to enforce border security in such a way that effectively defends ‘Aus-tralia’ from its others. These strange double standards, which are characteristic of offshore gen-erally, also typify the sites and spaces that border security apparatuses require to ‘mind the gap’that they open – legally, spatially, and imaginatively – when the executive begins to speak bordersecurity to life. Offshore jurisdictions and sites are technological zones25 that ensure portingbetween enclaves (for some), or preclude passage (for others).

In my view, the success of the Commonwealth’s excision of CI, in spite of legal counter-claims, is likely to ensure that analogous spaces continue to emerge globally; an archipelago of‘offshore excised places’ that can be filled, as required, by ‘offshore entry people’. We can seethis as strictly homologous to the ways in which offshore works for finance capital – $33 trillion,and nearly half of all world trade, passes through offshore.26 In both finance and immigration,offshore’s spread is ensured by collaborative cooperation and mutual learning processes, bothamong experts and, on a governmental level, through conferences and multinational governanceorganizations. If Australia’s policy becomes ‘best practice’ (as Finland and New Zealand’sprimary school pedagogy has, in another context), it will be applied worldwide. It also spreadsthrough regional domination based on colonial histories.27 In 2011, the Gillard Labor governmentre-established detention centres on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru, three yearsafter their closure by the Rudd Labor government. As of the time of writing, detention facilitiesat both these locations are being expanded.

What is also typical of offshore detention sites is that they tend to foster the construction ofdurable structures that – quite literally – concretize their paradigms. This began on CI with theconstruction of a purpose-built, state of the art Immigration Reception and Processing Centre(IRPC). The IRPC – built according to a re-specified design between 2004 and 2007 and opera-tionalized by Kevin Rudd upon his election as Prime Minister in 2008 – is really a medium-secur-ity, hi-tech prison.28 It was built on the west side of the island, in the middle of one of CI’secologically unique and fragile rainforests – exceptions from the usual standards of environmentalscrutiny were granted in the name of ‘national security’. The IRPC was extremely expensive tobuild in relation to its capacity, in no small part due to CI’s incredible isolation, which raises costsby a factor of approximately 10. It cost over AU$500 million29 to build, and more than $30million a year to run and staff. It has a microwave movement detection system, and full back-to-base surveillance systems, which can be monitored from Canberra. The materials used in itsconstruction were also designed to be noise dampening and fire retardant. But it also has wheel-chair access, as an equity measure. And special tunnels, ‘crab crossing facilities’, run under thecentre, to facilitate the migration of the red crab, that other migratory event for which CI isfamous.

25 Andrew Barry, Political Machines Governing a Technological Society (London: Continuum, 2001), 37–62.26 See the important work of Ronen Palan and Nicholas Shaxson, as well as the International Consortium of Investiga-

tive Journalists.27 Ronen Palan, ‘International Financial Centers: The British-Empire, City-States and Commercially Oriented Politics’,

Theoretical Enquiries in Law 11, no. 1 (2010): 149–176.28 I analyse the construction and governmental oversight of the IRPC in Peter Chambers, ‘The Passage of Authority:

Imagining the Political Transformation of Australia’s Christmas Island, from Sovereignty to Governance’, Shima(special edition on islands of incarceration, edited by Alison Mountz and Linda Briskman) 6, no. 2 (2012): 116–137.

29 US$450–500,000, and/or approximately €350–375,000.

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The IRPC is also too small, even for its intended purpose: it is only designed to house 420people, with contingency accommodation for a further 420. Its prison-based design means thatit has been subsequently judged inappropriate for women and children. If a few hundred menarrived each year, and no one else, it would be inappropriate, but adaptable. Given eitherlarger numbers arriving (including any number of women and children), or no people at all, itis a dysfunctional monster.

Since the IRPC’s construction, the numbers of arrivals has spiked, from 60 boats and 2,726passengers in 2009 to 278 boats and 17,202 passengers in 2012 (an historical peak as of the timeof writing).30 In global relative terms, these numbers are tiny: consider the more than 500,000illegal crossings of the US/Mexico border each year,31 or the millions of displaced in Egypt, Paki-stan, Iran, and Syria. The Australian case here is very telling on this point, which bears expandingupon. At this point, I break frame a little to offer one possible interpretation for what has beendiscussed so far, and how it relates to the way that alliances of agents within wealthy, powerfulnation-states are using border security to deal with inequality and human mobility.

Intermezzo: the Australian case, the numbers, and their significance forunderstanding mobility, the nation-state, and power in transformation

The gap between durable structures and fluctuating numbers in the Australian case tells us thatborder security has no necessary connection to the numbers. To be clear, I am not suggesting a‘non-relationality’ here (‘the boats’ exist, and they certainly do ‘arrive’), but what must be under-stood very clearly is that the border security paradigm in Australia was set up long before numbersspiked, while the size and design of the purpose-built immigration detention centre on CI –designed for 420 people, with contingency accommodation for a maximum of double thatfigure, 840 – tell us either that the Commonwealth never anticipated large fluctuations, or thatit was built to spill.32 Australian border security was a model solution before it was a responseto an immediate problem: and the model requires punitive structures and militarized enforcement,just as it requires that the BPC sees itself as ‘only responding’ to a threat that ‘naturally is’.

The Australian case can be read as indicating that we are fundamentally dealing with theimplemented effect of a transformed understanding of national security, one that – logically,necessarily – requires border security, just as the goal of full employment, political enfranchise-ment through representation and solidaristic care within thewelfare state were offered uncondition-ally as a way to retain governmental legitimacy in the societies of ‘Ford and Keynes’. Bordersecurity is one of the key techniques bywhich circulation is secured in favour of the state’s accumu-lation. This is why, at heart, Australian border security’s key document describes a security threatas ‘an action that has potential to cause consequences adverse to Australia’s interests’.33

In other words, border security certainly has deep associations with human mobility, but it isnot a technical solution to a natural problem (as it is presented by its own enactor-experts, boos-ters, and beneficiaries), it is an enacted politics that ‘makes sense’ globally after decades of neo-liberalization, the hegemony of finance capital, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan andIraq,34 postcolonial civil wars, high levels of global inequality, and the inability of the

30 http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/boatarrivals.htm (link dead as of November 18, 2013) – this is legible as atactic by the Immigration Minister. To wit: after being elected with a promise to ‘stop the boats’, the minister decidedthat the government would stop recording and publishing information about their arrival numbers).

31 http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06770.pdf (accessed November 18, 2013).32 See Peter Chambers, ‘The Rising Tide of Border Security’, Inside Story, July 28, 2010, http://inside.org.au/the-rising-

tide-of-border-security/, for a full discussion of this.33 GAMSA, 9.34 The top five ‘countries of citizenship’ of ‘irregular maritime arrivals’ come from the following countries, in order of

numbers: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka, stateless. See http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/statistics/asylum/_files/asylum-stats-march-quarter-2012.pdf.

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‘international community’ to deal unhypocritically and systemically with displacements caused,for the most part, by armed conflict, environmental degradation, and inequality (which I take to bethe side effects of systemic and structural issues).

Border security is the ready-to-hand paradigm by which those within the nation-states on the‘wealthy’ side of global inequality secure themselves against the externalities produced, in nosmall part, by the involvements of their investments elsewhere: whether military misadventure,resource extraction, currency destabilization, or food price spikes. The paradigm makes sense‘given’ the structural, subjective and spiritual transformations engendered by decades of neoliber-alization, and is ‘ready to hand’ because of who has the ear, mouth, and resonator of the executive:anxious, invested consumers of mass media; politicians seeking election; media owners such asRupert Murdoch. Onshore, the paradigm patterns the practice; offshore, the practice builds struc-tures that are the characteristic expression of its assumptions and obsessions. By 2013 we can alsosee from around the world – wherever displacement meets inequality, wherever agents of statepower confidently attempt to transform human mobility into secured circulation – that bordersecurity is an extremely pernicious and costly way of unilaterally reproducing political sovereigntyby translating decisionist rhetoric into durable institutional structures which are costly, expansive,unwieldy, and controlling. Border security is, moreover, a cruel way to deal with the inequalities ofthe century in which we actually live.35 It also enacts pathological learning processes that are gen-erative and path dependent. They are also deadly, as the following example of SIEV 221 shows.

4. SIEV 221: ‘unalerted and unattributed’

The Iraqi survivor in the picture was one of the lucky few aboard SIEV 221. Like all those atRocky Point, his was a boat that should not have been anywhere near CI that morning. Decemberto March is ‘swell season’ on CI; this makes the weather changeable, and prone to sudden,surging storms. The island has no good natural harbour, and only one small beach. There isnowhere to shelter, no sandbar or reef to run aground on; a vessel that lost power or rudder,regardless of its size, that struck the island would strike limestone rocks with full force – for asmall vessel this would most likely result in catastrophic shipwreck.36

Nobody in the BPC saw SIEV 221 coming. It was, in the government’s words, ‘un-alerted andun-attributed’.37 Like most border security apparatuses, the BPC is heavily reliant on hi-techequipment. Most of the time, in good conditions, the equipment works. In the Australian maritimeenvironment, it must work flawlessly across an unimaginably vast area: according to the statisticsin its own documents, the BPC patrols 11.5% of the earth’s oceans, or 8% of the earth’s surface,approximately 12 million square nautical miles. On the morning of 15 December, both of theBPC’s ‘surface assets’ were already fully committed, and because of the weather and thespeed at which the event unfolded, there was, arguably, nothing that could have preventedthe shipwreck. Or empirically, let’s say this: nothing did prevent what happened.

35 My assertion of the cruelty of border security follows that of Étienne Balibar. Balibar distinguishes between structuralviolence and cruelty. With structural violence, the indefinite detention of children in offshore processing centreswould merely be the unfortunate but systemically necessary condition of that system’s reproduction, like thedeath of cattle in huge abattoirs in the industrial production of beef burgers. Cruelty, for Balibar, is a form of violencethat takes place beyond the structural necessities of the system, ‘the totally non-functional elimination of disposablepeople’. This thesis, which I cannot explore at length here, brings us close to certain interpretations of ZygmuntBauman (Wasted Lives) and the figure of homo sacer in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. I prefer Balibar’smore open, gestural use of the term cruelty, as developed arguments around this topos tend to do violence – ofthe discursive kind – to the conjunctural specificity and political agency that always exists in these situations, inspite of everything. See Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), 25.

36 The important factor is that historically this is reflexively understood by the Indonesian fishermen whose boats are theusual vehicles here.

37 For a governmental narrative account of the SIEV 221 disaster (which includes detailed timelines and maps), seehttp://www.customs.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/110124CustomsInternalReview.pdf.

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SIEV 221 was first sighted at 5:40 am by a Customs and Border Protection Officer stayingat a hotel located in the Settlement area of the island. The officer reported the sighting to the on-duty officer on Christmas Island; at this time the officer estimated that the vessel was approxi-mately 500 m off the coast. Neither the officer who sighted the vessel nor the duty officerdialled 000.38 In Customs and Border Protection’s internal report, this is cited as indicatingthat the vessel was not in immediate danger, and was thus still to be approached on a securityfooting. Procedurally speaking, SIEV 221 was still a security threat. At 6:16 am, it was reportedthat not only had the vessel broken down, but that it was no more than 100 m offshore, in seastate five, with 70 to 100 persons onboard, and that a ‘major catastrophe was unfolding’.39

Six minutes after this, at 6:22 am, the vessel was reported by CI Customs and BorderProtection staff as being 50 m off Rocky Point, engines failed, drifting toward the rocks,with the storm swell pushing it on to the rocks. Seven minutes later, at 6:29 am, the boatstruck the island.

This moment brings into direct relation so many of the strange, contradictory elements ofborder security that I have been describing, including our probable photographer. The imageshown in Figure 2, taken from a point of relative safety, minutes before the impact, capturesthis moment.40

Onshore, a group of Australians, still ‘in Australia’, were now forced to watch, mostly help-less, as the ocean pounded the boat against the rocks and the swell filled its cabin. By 6:46 am,only an hour and six minutes after its initial sighting, there were numerous reports from respon-dents of a shipwreck: ‘women and children were in the water and could be heard screaming.Attempts were being made to throw life jackets over the cliff to approximately 60 people inthe water’.41 From this point onward, the response moved into a rescue phase, on a Safety of

Figure 2. Snapshot of SIEV 221 and spectators, shortly before impact with Rocky Point.Source: Google images.

38 Australia’s equivalent of the US 911, the UK 999, or Germany’s 112.39 SIEV 221: Internal Review, 20.40 The age and ethnicity of the spectators suggests to me that they are junior AFP officers or BPC employees. For further

photographic images, enter ‘SIEV 221’ into Google images.41 SIEV 221: Internal Review, 21.

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Life at Sea footing. Border security had, finally, been overcome by an event of its own partialconstruction.

Conclusion: shipwreck with spectator

Australia’s embrace of border security can teach us a lesson. But what that lesson is dependsupon what we are willing to know and learn. In ‘Rescue by Sinking’, Hans Blumenberg considersthe fundamental relations disclosed by the shipwreck:

Simple images turn us into spectators. They remind us of the proem to the second book of Lucretius’On the Nature of Things, in which he has a spectator standing safely on shore observing a ship caughtin a raging sea go down with all hands – he watches with neither scorn nor Schadenfreude, and yet forthe first time he pleasurably experiences the solid ground beneath him… There is no connectionbetween the sinking ship out there and the safety here, other than the heartfelt weighing of formsof life [Lebensformen]. This spectator will not make a sacrifice to the sea god.42

For Blumenberg, shipwreck constitutes an absolute metaphor that, historically, disclosed ourontological precariousness. As he reminded us, with Pascal: ‘we are embarked’. Or were. Buthave forgotten. What we have forgotten is the inherently hazardous nature of our commonjourney, and the care it requires. Border security has no conception of hazards, or fortuna, or‘the Gods’: its world is one of ‘threat objects’, to which it must ‘respond’, as matter of urgency.

In the wake of SIEV 221, the BPC reflected on its actions. It found that its officers had actedbravely, even heroically. And aside from deciding to erect a memorial for the victims, it asked forthe following: better radar. And perhaps jet skis.43 And rocket-propelled lifejackets. The prudenceof this measure was echoed by the Coroner.44 These reflections, and their inability to movebeyond border security’s self evidence’, have contributed to a hardening of border security inits dealings with subsequent shipwrecks. Rather than produce critical reflection, they reinforcedthe necessity of enforcement. The election of the Abbott government, and the institution of Oper-ation Sovereign Borders, can only be interpreted as a reinforcement of enforcement.

Afterward, June 2013: cutting out cruelty

On 9 April 2013, a vessel carrying 66 Sri Lankans – attempting to reach New Zealand – unex-pectedly arrived in the port of Geraldton, Western Australia. Geraldton, a major grain port andan unremarkable town, sits 373 km north of Perth, 3,319 km from Canberra, and is 5,447 kmfrom Colombo, Sri Lanka.45 The arrival was remarkable on a number of levels: the audacity ofthe voyage from Sri Lanka, the either thoughtless, mad, or desperate intention of the voyagersto travel by fishing boat from Sri Lanka to New Zealand46 (given the terrifying power of theSouthern Ocean and the Roaring Forties), and the fact that this was actually the first time that avessel had ‘arrived’ at this section of mainland Australian coast. In many ways it bookends theScotts Head incident that inaugurated Australian border security, and counterpoints the mira-culousness of the Iraqi’s arrival depicted in the image that opened this paper. The luck, stu-pidity, and possible heroism of the epic journey were rendered mostly invisible by onshoreAustralian media, however. The following statement, made by the Western AustralianPremier, was repeated without significant analysis or scrutiny by print and broadcast media:

42 Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 31–2.43 See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/adequacy-of-rescue-mission-under-scrutiny/story-fn59niix-

1226094166076.44 See http://www.coronerscourt.wa.gov.au/_files/Christmas_Island_Findings.pdf.45 In a weird detail that stages the irony of the global mobility of capital, people, and images, the vessel they were tra-

velling on had the name and logo of Deutsche Bank printed in large black lettering on the hull.46 The direct distance between Colombo and Auckland is 10,897.79 km.

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This is a serious, unprecedented and unacceptable breach of Australia’s border security… That a boat,laden with people, can sail into a busy regional port in broad daylight is shocking. Geraldton Port isone of Australia’s busiest regional ports and Australia’s second-largest for grain export.

Barnett also said this was a ‘game changer…We should not be just concerned about asylumseekers but crime gangs and drugs… There is a wider issue here’.47 Barnett’s statement offersa clear expression of the by-now-normal combination of demonization, stereotyping and confla-tion that characterizes most press releases by politicians on maritime arrivals. The Geraldton Inci-dent was also a political opportunity: two weeks later, the then leader of the Liberal oppositionTony Abbott, spontaneously appeared in Geraldton with Mr Barnett, campaigning once againfor the federal election – September 2013 – on the phrase ‘stop the boats’, which he used to devas-tating effect against the incumbent Labor government in the 2013 election campaign.48 The Ger-aldton Incident caused a few days’ worth of ripples in the national media. It certainly raised morescrutiny than the following.On 16 May 2013, the entirety of the Australian mainland was excised from the Migration Zone.All of Australia is now effectively CI, for the purposes of migration. Even more striking than theaudacity of the excision was the absence of any opposition from the major parties or media scru-tiny. It sailed through both houses of parliament, and into law, like a veritable ship in the night.

Around a month later, I received the image shown in Figure 3, sent to my webmail account bya concerned friend.

Figure 3. Snapshot of vox pops’ from Wagga Daily Advertisor containing comments responding to BorderProtection Command’s decision to discontinue search for victims of shipwreck.Source: Webmail.

47 See http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/asylum-boat-carrying-72-sri-lankan-passengers-sails-into-geraldton/story-e6frfkp9-1226617279185#ixzz2SULmzigV and http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/16671500/border-protection-review-after-geraldton-asylum-fiasco/.

48 In Australia the Liberal Party is a broadly right-wing liberal party, encompassing everything from ‘small l liberals ’(classic rights liberals) to neoliberals, authoritarian utilitarians, and white aspirationals appealing to the rights ofbusiness and traditional ‘family values’. The Labor Party was, historically, the party of the labour movement andtakes its power bases from the trade unions and the industrial proletariat, but in recent decades, as in so many

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The image was sent to me as a jpeg, a digital ‘cutting’ of a ‘vox pop’ published in The DailyAdvertiser,49 that was responding to an incident involving a boat spotted by a navy aircraft patrol-ling for the BPC onWednesday, 5 June 2013, eight nautical miles north-west of Christmas Island.A BPC ship, HMASWarramunga, was despatched to the location, but when it arrived at 1.30 amon Thursday only wreckage and floating lifejackets were discovered. A full-scale search did notbegin until Friday. On Saturday, 13 bodies were seen in the water. On Sunday evening the searchwas called off, on advice that it was ‘medically impossible for anyone to be alive’. On Mondaymorning, BPC officials announced that there would be no further search for the bodies of thedrowned. Border security’s spatial arrangement of risk, decision, and complexity has been main-tained.

Like SIEV 221, this event was distressing for many people I spoke to. But it was also mostlyre-presented in mainstream broadcast media – especially TV news – with a flat, hard, cursorytone, more prominent than in the case of previous shipwrecks. Yet the distress is alsoevident in the fact that the above artefact reached me as a cut-out that had been circulatedbecause of the sense expressed by my friend when he asked, ‘is this what we’ve become?’That there is shame and anger here tells us that, in spite of everything, border security hasnot yet fully immunized the mainland from care for the cruelty its government inflicts in thecourse of ‘securing society’. And yet, the flatness of the image, the deadness of the responsesfrom the respondents. After all that’s happened. Anecdotal though it certainly is, this image rep-resents an aspect of an Australian becoming that many people – and not only Australians –

should reflect upon. I break frame to say the following: I do not want to live in a world inwhich this is unconcerning.

The relation between executive power and corporate media is not causal as it plays on andre-presents this tragic event by flattening it down to a series of smiling faces and ugly little com-ments. It’s important to emphasize, as well, that the faces chosen to appear were probablycherry picked from others who may have expressed more ambiguous or critical comments.As an artefact in circulation, and as it attaches back to the broader context described throughoutthis paper, it offers a final snapshot of border security in Australia that sits alongside the pre-vious two disclosed here: shipwreck with spectator. It’s a snapshot of a series of Australia’sfaces, faces whose visibility, expression, and relation to responsibility beyond the nation-state show us the de-facing in which border security has involved contemporary Australian pol-itical life.

On 19 July 2013, the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced a set of ‘hardline’ policiesin relation to border security, immigration detention, and asylum. After making arrangementswith his counterparts in Papua New Guinea, Rudd announced what he conceded was ‘a very hard-line decision’: people interdicted by the BPC would be detained on Manus Island in Papua NewGuinea ‘for processing’. Should their asylum claims be successful, they would be resettled inPapua New Guinea as refugees, with no prospect of resettlement in Australia. This ‘solution’had been engineered to be both ‘budget neutral’ and to meet ‘our legal and compassionate obli-gations under the refugees convention’, while also fulfilling ‘our responsibility as a government isto ensure that we have a robust system of border security and orderly migration’.50 Since its elec-tion in September 2013, the Abbott government has continued this commitment to a very hardlineapproach to border security. It’s an unconditional commitment – which, as we have seen, is

places, it has abandoned its egalitarian values and nationalist socialism (certainly not of the German kind!) in favourof a pragmatic consequentialism. The Labor Party has spent the past three and more years tearing itself apart overissues of meaning and purpose. The Liberal Party, unfortunately, seems to know very well what and whom itstands for, and, as mentioned above, was returned to power in September 2013.

49 A regional newspaper published in Wagga, New South Wales, and owned by Fairfax.50 http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/kevin-rudd-to-send-asylum-seekers-who-arrive-by-

boat-to-papua-new-guinea-20130719-2q9fa.html.

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necessarily a commitment to a unilateralist, decisionist expression intended to secure the bordersin the name of the political sovereignty of a nation – and will also most likely mean that thelanguage of international law and rights, as well as Australia’s obligations to the Refugee Con-vention, will be entirely negated.51

At the heart of Australian border security as it is currently enacted is a dialectic of visibilityand invisibility: in making some things so clear that they go without saying (such as Australia’snon-responsibility for the bodies of the drowned), border security also, simultaneously, rendersinvisible the cruelty that border security actually involves. Border security, an entirely politicaland contingent solution to a complex problem, has now become an infrastructural condition‘necessary’ for the maintenance of a secured onshore life, and the violence the border securityand immigration detention apparatus inflicts only appears as a necessity, perhaps unfortunate,of maintaining this face of Australia for itself. Border security is a form of structural violencethat invisibilizes its cruelty by excising it, precisely in order to enable its onshore addressees tosee themselves as good. As detailed above, this has now meant going as far as cutting out theentirety of the mainland from itself (but only for others), and of using the ‘political sovereignty’of a still-colonized Papua New Guinea in order to preclude ever having to share Australia’s extra-ordinary material prosperity and comfort with those who come across the seas. Border security isa fixation on threat objects that is transfixed by the image of its sovereignty, an image that, for it tokeep sending back to itself, must also exclude visibility of and responsibility for the bodies of thedrowned. After the election, the formerly concerned speak of ‘compassion fatigue’.52 This hasbecome a cruelty that keeps taking place securely outside the frame of the good nation – and,but for political courage, it is likely to continue its transformation.

Notes on contributorPeter Chambers, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Culture & Communication, The University ofMelbourne, Research Unit in Public Cultures.Peter Chambers works on borders, security and technology as a way of developing a social theory of powerin transformation. His recent published work addresses the emergence of border security and governance inthe transformation of human mobility into secured circulation, and also examines the interface of control andsurveillant attention framed by our favoured devices, such as the smartphone.

51 Although this ‘resolve’ on the part of the executive will also surely be tested. While it is not the place or intention ofthis correspondence to explore these facets here, the judiciary in Australia still appears to be operable within andaccording to its own logic: it is not yet governed by expediency, decisionism, and the regulative norms of contem-porary governance.

52 Julie-Anne Davies, ‘Abbott’s new world order’, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 15, 2013. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/abbotts-new-world-order-20131114-2xji4.html (accessed November 18,2013).

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