Out of the shadows

First published by Claire Morgan in Uniken Winter 2016.

Madeline Gleeson has read more pages of Hansard than any person should reasonably  be expected to.

But not for pleasure. The lawyer and research associate at the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law pored over the thousand or so pages for her book Offshore: Behind the wire on Manus and Nauru.

Gleeson had already trawled myriad government and Department of Immigration interviews and media releases, media reports and official inquiries, and interviewed sources to build a picture of what had been happening inside the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru.

The Hansard search was a bid to understand the logic behind the policy. She found none.

“I kept going back further and further to find this policy’s purpose,” Gleeson says. “There is yet to be one government that has thought through this policy to the end. There’s never been an answer to where these people are supposed to go when they are found to be refugees.”

The book is a comprehensive – and at times confronting – account of what life has been like inside the centres on Manus Island and Nauru since offshore processing was resurrected by the Gillard government in 2012.

Gleeson wanted to move beyond the rhetoric to present a factual account of what has happened on Manus and Nauru.

“I want this book to help Australians recognise how spin is being used, to recognise that you can’t assume a policy has been properly thought through,” she says.

Read the full article here.