In Australia, 2025, Progressive Patriotism is now, apparently, our political modus operandi and, as Anthony Albanese ambitiously explained, it can be “a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward”.

How can Australia hope to model a future direction, without an honest, if confronting, assessment of its past and present failures towards humanity?

When it comes to Australia’s First Nations’ history, colonial Australia has certainly been utterly incapable of such honesty. This is evident in the entrenched denial of dispossession and harm, historical and ongoing, so shamefully exposed in the defeat of the Voice Referendum. Indeed, recognition and acknowledgement of this ongoing injustice has historically been dismissed and denigrated as the “black armband view of history”.

This failure to confront the damaging impact of our policies is again evident as we mark 12 years since Kevin Rudd’s 2013 avowal that asylum-seekers who arrived by boat would never settle in Australia. We urgently need an honest assessment of the devastating impact that Rudd’s policy has had. Far from the kindness and compassion that Albanese spoke of on election night 2023, for those who risked all to come by boat seeking safety in Australia the reality is vastly different.

For almost 25 years, Australia has led the world in carrying out cruel, punitive policies towards refugees and people seeking asylum. These policies have revolved around three key areas of cruelty: mandatory indefinite detention of women, children and men as the first resort; outsourcing the “processing” of people seeking asylum to poor countries together with brutal conditions of detention; and keeping people in fear and uncertainty for years on temporary visas with the threat of deportation a constant shadow.

The immense harm has been well documented by Australian and international bodies, including the Human Rights Commission, the UNHCR and Human Rights Watch. Extraordinarily, the company tasked with running the show has also documented these abuses as in the case of the Nauru Files. The numbers tell a horrifying story: at least 14 deaths in offshore detention, including murder, medical neglect and suicide, self-harm, abuse, sexual abuse, assault and mental health crises.

Onshore detention facilities in remote parts of the country, refugees dehumanised, demonised, scapegoated. Offshore detention camps, refugees assigned identity numbers, stripped of agency and stripped of hope. Those Australians who dared to expose the harm were threatened with jail.

The UN has found that Australia’s treatment of refugees and people seeking asylum has amounted to torture, and is in breach of our obligations under the UN Refugee Convention, the UN Rights of the Child and the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In regards to the treatment of refugees, Australia is known as a serial human rights abuser. The “Australian Solution” is now shorthand for the intentional cruelty towards people who have come by boat seeking protection, and utter indifference to their plight.

As then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull said in 2016, “we cannot be misty-eyed about this” of the men held in Australia’s brutal detention prison on Manus Island. After 12 long years of trauma and deprivation, 37 of these men continue to be trapped in PNG. And so it has been with successive governments of both hues, knowing full well the harm being suffered in offshore and onshore detention facilities. Politicians have simply chosen to look away, while also claiming to care about saving people from drowning on risky boat journeys at sea.

While the ALP continues to pride itself as the socially responsible and progressive party, it refuses to genuinely consider the notion of creating safe pathways to prevent people from taking dangerous journeys to Australia, as was done under the Fraser Government in response to people fleeing Vietnam, or creating complementary pathways to protection for refugees and people seeking asylum in the Asia Pacific region, as has repeatedly been urged, including by peak bodies such as the Refugee Council of Australia.

The foundations of this cruelty were laid in 1992, with the introduction of mandatory detention by the Hawke Labor Government. But the politicisation of refugees ramped up to fever pitch in the lead-up to the 2001 election when John Howard refused entry to the MV Tampa in August 2001; it was carrying 438 asylum seekers en route to Australia to seek protection.

Just two short months later, in October 2001, the Howard Government knowingly lied, as found in the 2002 Senate Inquiry into the “incident”, claiming that refugees had “thrown their children into the water” to force their way into Australia. The so-called “Pacific Solution” was established and Australia became the first country to outsource its obligations under the Refugee Convention, through the forcible removal of people who arrived in Australia to seek protection, to poor third countries, Nauru and Manus Island in PNG.

Apart from a few short years, from 2008 to early 2012*, Australia’s cruel and harsh refugee and asylum policies have had bipartisan support from the ALP and the Coalition. To the extent that they may have differed, this was more in a bid to “outcruel” each other. Unsurprisingly this “outcruelling” approach has often been associated with election periods, a case in point being the obscene race to the absolute bottom between Rudd and Tony Abbott in 2013, as each sought to promise ever more brutal policies towards people seeking asylum.

Make no mistake. Australia’s refugee and asylum policies inflict deliberate cruelty, intended to break a person such that they would “choose” to return to their homeland, to the dangers that they have fled. But those who have been subjected to this brutality have met this with resistance and defiance at every turn. Refugees and people seeking asylum have refused to be invisible, and continue to demand their freedom, their agency and their voice. Resistance has come in many forms, from daily protests by women, children and men imprisoned on Nauru and Manus Island, to marathon journeys on foot or bike to Parliament House in Canberra, to 24/7 encampments that were in place for months on end.

Despite the bipartisan support for these cruel policies and the billions of dollars spent in their pursuit, refugees and people seeking asylum continue to resist and demand justice. Alongside them are thousands of Australians who have throughout rejected the politics of punishment and who choose instead to walk alongside, hand-in-hand and in solidarity with those who came to Australia seeking safety and a place to rebuild their lives and a place to call home.

Twelve years on, on 19 July this Labor Government with its sizeable majority in the House needs to seize the moment, to rewrite and re-right not only the wrongs of cruel policy, but also its own legacy as a perpetrator. That is a model that can point the way forward for Australia and the globe.

*This was the period of Kevin Rudd’s first prime ministership, during which he closed down the offshore detention facilities on Nauru and PNG and ended temporary protection visas, instituting permanent protection for those found to be refugees.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.