Social work co-option and colonial borders

This chapter discusses social work collusion in government- sponsored cruelty with asylum seekers. The reference point is offshore detention that is part of the armoury of Australia’s deterrence of people endeavouring to arrive directly on Australian shores to seek asylum. Although there have been a number of frameworks for examining offshore policies and practices, including legal- , health- , and human rights- focused, the question of neocolonialism is largely unexplored. To set the context for a neocolonial paradigm, the chapter first provides an overview of Australia’s asylum seeker detention regime and critiques that have followed. Then two offshore detention sites are examined – Nauru and Manus Island (Papua New Guinea), arguing that through inducement of nations rendered impoverished by colonial processes, a new form of colonialism has been enacted. Despite the dismantling of many formal arrangements of ‘empire’, I argue in this chapter that the principles that sustained empire- thinking continue through new means of domination and racism that are underpinned by notions of Western superiority. This plays out in two ways for asylum seekers: first, through measures imposed on people from non- Western backgrounds that would not be accepted if applied to those from the ‘civilised’ west, and second and more specifically on the topic of this chapter, the establishment of structures in nations deemed to be ‘developing’, underpinned by an obsession with British and enlighten¬ment ‘values’, propped up by a clash of values approach (Huntingdon, 1996). This is exacerbated by the audacity of Australia in endeavouring to export its mode of ongoing colonialism. The colonial inheritance of a belief in white superiority remains entrenched in the Australian psyche and within its institutions (Briskman and Fiske, 2009). The unwitting and uncritical collusion in ongoing colonial structures and processes through contractual employment relationships, should be an area of concern to social workers globally.