Trashing a Tradition of Compassion

The Age - 22 November 2006
Peter Craven

For the past two years Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone has been attempting to deport to Sweden a man who has spent all but the first 27 days of his life in this country. As a consequence of a recent decision by the High Court, she will be able to do so.

The case is complex and exhibits plenty of alarming and pitiable features. The man in question, Stefan Nystrom, who first fell foul of the law at the age of 10, now faces further charges (including assault with a knife and wrongful imprisonment) and says he wants to be deported to Sweden even though he cannot speak the language and does not know his relatives there.

When he was remanded (to appear today) the Victorian Deputy Chief Magistrate, Jelena Popovic, said Nystrom would require special care, given his mental health.

Vanstone's victory in her High Court appeal in the Nystrom case came after a rebuff by the Federal Court last year, where Justices Michael Moore and Roger Gyles found that Nystrom, as someone who had lived in this country for more than 10 years, had an "absorbed visa" and could not therefore be deported because of a criminal conviction.

They also said Nystrom had behaved no more badly than many other Australians and that his not being formally "Australian" was fortuitous: "The difference is the barest of technicalities. It is the chance result of an accident of birth."

In other words Nystrom is Australian in culture, character and in everything other than the formality of his citizenship. His siblings were born here and are Australian citizens. One can only speculate at the grief Vanstone's decision would cause his family. Not to mention the eyebrows it would raise in Sweden.

Indeed, a Swedish news service reported baldly that "a serial criminal who was born in Sweden but spent all his life in Australia" could be heading back to Sweden's shores. It was precisely the irregularity of this that the federal judges underlined when they said, "Apart from the dire punishment of the individual involved, it assumes that Australia can export its problems elsewhere."

Well, the unanimous decision of the High Court now allows Vanstone to mete out the "dire punishment" of exile to people who have received prison sentences of 12 months or more even though they have spent their entire lives in this country.

Nystrom is at least in the position of being deported to a society similar to our own. In recent years Attorney-General Philip Ruddock deported Robert Jakovic to Serbia even though the Serbs refused to accept responsibility for him and he declared that he would starve to death on the steps of the Australian embassy. He is back in Australia, stateless and on a visa that runs out on January 7. The Immigration Department asked him to apply for Serb nationality. Then there was the case of Ali Tastan, a paranoid schizophrenic whom Ruddock was happy to dispatch to the streets of Ankara, screaming in his affliction. His permanent residence has been reinstated (because of his mental health), but not without Ruddock doing everything to keep him out.

One does not have to be a bleeding heart to find the Howard Government's attitude in deporting offenders both sickening and inhumane.

We may be inured to the detention camps and the incarceration of David Hicks, and we may even accept these things as more or less bipartisan responses to a complex situation - though we are, I think, a lesser society for doing so.

But it is difficult to imagine that most people in our society could tolerate the bloody-mindedness of what Vanstone wants to do with people convicted of crimes but who happen not to be protected by the figleaf of citizenship.

This country was, we should never forget, founded by people who suffered the torment of enforced exile. One would have thought an awareness of this fact went with a knowledge of Australian history and that the Howard Government, with its sensitivity to our historical heritage, would show greater care in not repudiating our own traditions.

Think of what the people closest to us culturally - the New Zealanders and British and European immigrants, many of whom have never taken out citizenship - would think of us saying that someone had no right to live among us because they had had the misfortune to go to jail.

And think, too, of the message it sends to the immigrants among us that we can throw back our rejects on a world elsewhere, as if they were so much garbage.

You would think that Vanstone might also remember that it was under her watch that Cornelia Rau, an "Australian" in all but citizenship, direly affected by mental illness, was illegally and inhumanely detained, to the shame of her ministry.

The Howard Government should also beware of this kind of issue. Geoffrey Robertson said once that only an inch divides conservative government from Labor government but that this is the inch in which we live.

Labor established the detention centres, Labor (in the person of Kim Beazley) failed to stand up to Howard at the time of the Tampa.

But when Beazley said of Robert Jovicic, the Belgrade deportee a year ago, "He's been in the country since the age of two, for God's sake. All his criminal activities and everything else have been things that are a product of our system and his decisions within it. You don't just go and dump him on the Serbs," he spoke for what is best in the people of Australia. He spoke on behalf of one of the only traditions we have worth spitting at, the tradition of mercy and the defence of the underdog.

Peter Craven is a Melbourne critic.