In Sending Them Home, 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
This issue also contains correspondence discussing Quarterly Essay 10, Made in England, from Phillip Knightley, Morag Fraser, Larissa Behrendt, Alan Atkinson, James Curran, Sara Wills, and Gerard Windsor
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Dr David Corlett has worked with refugees and asylum seekers for about two decades as a case worker, researcher and advisor. He currently works as a researcher with the International Detention Coalition.
In 2003, he completed a doctoral thesis on Australia’s response to asylum seekers. He is the co-author of Quarterly Essay 13: Sending Them Home – Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference (with Robert Manne), and author of Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers, which was highly commended by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission – and Stormy Weather: The challenge of climate change and displacement.
His writing has also appeared in the UNSW Law Journal, the Monthly, the Age and the Canberra Times.