“A sentence of nine years’ imprisonment is reserved for crimes such as rape, aggravated robbery and manslaughter, but the hundreds of asylum seekers we’ve imprisoned for that same length of time have committed no crime,” writes columnist JON STANHOPE.

I CLEARLY remember where I was and what I was doing eight years ago this past week.

I was living and working on Christmas Island. I was, in fact, the administrator of Christmas Island and of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. In that role I had no responsibility for or formal interaction with asylum seekers or asylum-seeker policy. 

In fact, as administrator, I had very little responsibility for anything, but that is another story for another day.

However, I did have strong, albeit mainly negative, views about Australia’s asylum-seeker policies and the manner of their implementation. Views I was wont, to the chagrin of my masters and others, to express if ever invited to do so. Views that I retain to this day.

The reason, of course, that I have memories of this week from eight years ago is because that was when Australia’s policy of offshore and indefinite mandatory detention was formally announced and put into immediate effect by the Rudd/Albanese Labor government. 

The policy was, of course, kept in place by the Liberals following Labor’s defeat at the hands of Tony Abbott and has been retained by us, ie Australia, for the last, long eight years.

In the two years that my wife Robyn and I lived on Christmas Island more than 600 asylum boats and more than 20,000 asylum seekers arrived on Christmas and the Cocos Islands. Both my office and our home were adjacent to Flying Fish Cove, which was where asylum-seeker boats arriving at Christmas Island were moored and their human cargoes landed before being transported to the detention centre and the boats taken out to sea and scuttled.

I made a habit of attending at the wharf whenever asylum seekers were landed. I always sought to make eye contact with those coming ashore, but could do little more than smile, as a sign of welcome, as I did so. 

I clearly remember the expressions on the faces of those coming ashore. More often than not the men are striving to put on a brave face, the women anxious and nervous, holding their babies tightly to their chest and their children by hand, and the children themselves excited and smiling.

Incidentally, I have photographs of hundreds, if not thousands, of asylum seekers entering Australia at Flying Fish Cove that constitute, I think, an important record of this black chapter in Australia’s history that needs a good and secure home and I would welcome suggestions on where that might be. 

They are photographs that I am sure our grandchildren and great grandchildren will use when, sometime down the track, there will be demands for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to seek to ensure that Australia confronts and atones for this awful chapter in our history.

My point in this long meandering introduction is that as I strive to understand the seeming disinterest in and lack of apparent concern about or widespread acceptance of our individual responsibility for the way in which we have, for eight years, treated the thousands of people that risked their lives in coming to Australia to seek protection and a better and safe life, I am reduced to thinking that it is in the main because we do not see them as real people.

Collectively, we seem to be unable to empathise with them as fellow humans worthy of not just our empathy but our care and protection.

How else can we explain the lack of any broad sense of outrage that there are still hundreds of people in detention, ie locked up, in our names, some of whom are entering their ninth year as prisoners.

It is sobering to reflect that a sentence of nine years’ imprisonment in courts across Australia is reserved for crimes such as rape, aggravated (armed) robbery and manslaughter but of course the hundreds of asylum seekers that we have imprisoned for that same length of time have committed no crime. They are the innocent victims of an ugly political war. We need to end the war and release all asylum seekers who remain in detention into the community.

I would like to think that as a first step the Labor Party (my party), which introduced the policy, could acknowledge that it was wrong. That it admits that, in the heat of a political campaign and behind in the polls, it made a dreadful mistake. I feel sure that not only would the people of Australia reward them for doing so, but it would force the Liberal Party alone to own this heinous policy and hopefully bring it to an end.

Jon Stanhope was chief minister from 2001 to 2011 and represented Ginninderra for the Labor Party from 1998. He is the only chief minister to have governed with a majority in the Assembly.