Helping professionals and Border Force secrecy: effective asylum-seeker healthcare requires independence from callous policies

Objective: To examine the Australian Border Force Act (BFA) and its context, its implications for asylum-seeker healthcare and professionals, and contemporary and historical parallels. Conclusions: Prolonged immigration detention and policies aiming to deter irregular migration cause maritime asylum-seekers undeniable, well-publicised harms and (notwithstanding claims about preventing drownings) show reckless indifference and calculated cruelty. Service personnel may be harmed. Such policies misuse helping professionals to underwrite state abuses and promote public numbing and indifference, resembling other state abuses in the war on terror' and (with qualification) historical counterparts, e.g. Nazi Germany. Human service practitioners and organisations recently denounced the BFA that forbids disclosure about these matters. Continuing asylum-seeker healthcare balances the likelihood of effective care and monitoring with lending credibility to abuses. Boycotting it might sacrifice scrutiny and care, fail to compel professionals and affect temporary overseas workers. Entirely transferring healthcare from immigration to Federal and/or State health departments, with resources augmented to adequate standard, would strengthen clinical independence and quality, minimise healthcare's being securitised and politicised, and uphold ethical codes. Such measures will not resolve detention's problems, but coupled with independent auditing, would expose and moderate detention's worst effects, promoting changes in national conversation and policy-making.