Medevac repeal gives Morrison a political win, but prompts intense moral discomfort

Extract from The Guardian

Australian politics

It is Australia’s shame that we can’t have proper medical evacuation procedures and, also, the prospect of ending indefinite detention

Katharine Murphy Political editor

@murpharoo

Wed 4 Dec 2019 16.28 AEDT Last modified on Wed 4 Dec 2019 17.33 AEDT

‘While I am hopeful, genuinely hopeful, that Lambie has helped focus Morrison’s mind on dismantling the amoral mess of offshore detention, whether she has remains moot.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

As the debate over the future of medevac dragged on unresolved, Jacqui Lambie told colleagues she was looking past that particular issue to the fate of the people in long-term offshore detention. In simple terms, the Tasmanian independent was pursuing a bigger objective than repeal or no repeal: she wanted people off Manus Island and Nauru.
Lambie told the Senate on Wednesday she put a “proposal” to the government. She did not call it a deal.
In her telling, this proposal (details absent, sorry guys, national security) meant things would not go back to the way they had been before the medevac regime was legislated. After her conversations with Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, Lambie told the chamber she was now “more than satisfied” that the conditions were in place to allow for repeal of the medevac procedures.

The talk around parliament on Wednesday is Lambie emerged from the tortuous medevac tussle with a letter from Morrison indicating the government will pursue resettlement with New Zealand after the current deal with the United States is exhausted – but I haven’t seen the letter.
I am entirely confident Lambie has been pursuing the New Zealand resettlement option in her protracted talks with the government about medevac repeal, but the rest is speculative, and the government claims no deals have been made.
Still, there is an obvious way to square this “I’ve got a deal, sort of”/“no deal” circle.
Despite appearing reluctant to pursue New Zealand’s kind offer to resettle the asylum seekers Australia sent to moulder in offshore detention, the home affairs minister hasn’t really ruled out doing that. The line has been that now is not the time.
Assuming that New Zealand remains willing, perhaps a more convenient time to pursue resettlement will materialise soon. Perhaps the government signalled this to Lambie, or some other viable resettlement plan involving another country – a plan to slowly dismantle the life-force sapping apparatus of offshore detention. Not a deal so much, as a sharing of (as yet unannounced) government policy (if you will).

Morrison gave a broad hint that this may well have been what happened on Wednesday. Asked would the government consider the New Zealand deal once the United States arrangement had been exhausted, Morrison said: “The government’s policy is that we seek to resettle people who are on Nauru.”
Only time will tell if this is a genuine, good faith commitment from the government, or a convenient and transitory bauble dangled before Lambie in order to shepherd her into doing exactly what the government wanted.
Because we need to emphasise that Morrison’s immediate wants were great on Wednesday. He wanted an end to a medical evacuations regime that was imposed on his disintegrating government pre-election; and he wanted a political win. Just in case it’s not obvious, securing a win was important after the abject debacle of the previous sitting week, where the prime minister was fending off a police investigation into one of his ministers, and Pauline Hanson had the last laugh on his union-busting bill.
While I am hopeful, genuinely hopeful, that Lambie has helped focus Morrison’s mind on the urgent imperative of dismantling the amoral mess of Australia’s creation – the banishment of our fellow humans offshore in conditions that have generated an unconscionable crisis in the mental and physical health of asylum seekers – whether she has remains moot.
The repeal of medevac is also more than a setback. It is a shocker.
Medevac wasn’t imposed on the government because of a cheap bit of chamber theatrics. It was imposed on the government because the government was failing the people it put on Nauru and Manus; because there was a humanitarian disaster playing out on our watch.
That’s why matters were taken out of the government’s hands. That’s why the new system was enacted: because people were ailing, and suffering, and dying, and there was no credible evidence the medevac system was creating significant problems.

Unless Lambie has secured a water-tight commitment that all medical transfers now occur expeditiously and without fuss as the pre-condition of repealing the regime, the terrible suffering offshore will only intensify.
That thought is unbearable if you think of this cohort as fellow human beings to whom Australia owes a duty of care.
Repealing medevac to speed up third-country resettlement is the working definition of a Faustian pact.
Thinking about it prompts intense moral discomfort. Witnessing it in the chamber was discomfiting in the extreme.
It seems to me entirely possible to have proper medical evacuation procedures for seriously ill people and, also, the prospect of ending the arbitrary indefinite detention of people exercising their rights under an international convention.

The fact these propositions are apparently in competition with one another is Australia’s shame.