It’s Time to Demand the Dissolution of Australia’s Border Force
Since its launch in 2015, Australia’s Border Force has been mired in controversy and corruption scandals. Its dissolution is imperative to ending the punitive and pernicious approach at the heart of Australian immigration policy.
An Australian Border Force agent looks toward the Western Province of Papua New Guinea from the shore on Boigu Island, Australia, on March 25, 2021. (Brook Mitchell / Getty Images)
Former foreign minister Scott Morrison announced the creation of the Australian Border Force (ABF) eight years ago. His proposal was couched in terms both practical and political. On the “pragmatic” side, Border Force’s creation would consolidate twelve supposedly unwieldly government departments into one superagency. On the ideological front, it would be a nationalist vehicle for safeguarding Australian sovereignty and twenty-first century destiny.
For the first five years of its existence, Border Force’s activities were largely directed at refugees, foreigners, and the occasional Australian citizen unlucky enough to catch the agency’s attention. But the COVID-19 era has given many more Australians a brush with the beast that has been created in the name of their protection. And more people are seeing Border Force for what it is: an opaque paramilitary organization riddled with corruption and largely above the law.
“Stop the Boats”
The Australian border has been a site of intense politicking for three decades. It was Paul Keating’s Labor government that introduced mandatory detention — the automatic and indefinite imprisonment of all refugees — in 1992. Since then, successive governments have tried to outdo each other on border security. Australia’s Pacific neighbors Papua New Guinea and Nauru have been cajoled into hosting brutal for-profit internment camps for asylum seekers, and the imprisonment of refugees has been largely moved offshore.
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