Quarterly Essay 13

Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference

Robert Manne with David Corlett

Release Date:
December 2003
Our Price:
$15.95
ISBN:
9781863951418
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Description

In the first Quarterly Essay of 2004, Robert Manne tells the stories of individual asylum seekers and finds in their experience the seeds of a devastating critique. Balancing sorrow and pity with a controlled anger, Manne develops a sustained argument about what could, and should, be done for the nine thousand refugees who remain in limbo on temporary protection visas. Sending Them Home also contains a groundbreaking account of conditions in the offshore processing camps on Nauru, whose operations have until now been shrouded in secrecy, and a damning forensic investigation of the recent efforts to return - frequently against their will - many of those who sought our protection and whose countries remain in turmoil. Combining ethical reflection and acute political analysis, this essay initiates a new phase in the refugee debate.

"No one ought to pretend that the unanticipated arrival of the Iraqis, Afghans and Iranians did not pose real ... problems for Australia. However these problems arose not because these people were not genuine refugees. They arose, rather, precisely because the overwhelming majority of them were." —Robert Manne, Sending Them Home

Correspondence

This issue also contains correspondence relating to the previous issue QE12 Made in England by David Malouf. Correspondence relating to QE13 Sending Them Home will appear in the next issue.


About the Author

Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University, a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, and chairman of the Monthly. He has published and edited numerous books, including Whitewash: Keith Windschuttle and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History, The Howard Years, Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977–2005 and Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas for a Better Australia. He is the author of two Quarterly Essays, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right and Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference. His writing has won various awards, including the Washington National Intelligence Center prize, the Alfred Deakin prize and the Queensland premier’s prize for advancing public debate. In 2005 he was voted Australia’s leading public intellectual in a survey conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald. 

David Corlett has worked with refugees and asylum seekers both as a caseworker and a researcher. In 2003 he completed a doctoral thesis on Australia's response to asylum seekers. His writing has appeared in the UNSW Law Journal, Dissent, Australian Quarterly and the Canberra Times.