Australian Immigration Detention: How Should Clinicians Respond?

Abstract

Australian immigration detention violates human rights and international law. Clinicians and professional healthcare bodies have been central to its operation, both providing healthcare within detention centres and protesting its consequences. Since its introduction over 25 years ago and despite ongoing protest the government has continued to implement increasingly opaque and punitive policy. How should clinicians respond? This thesis sets out to challenge over 20 years of thinking on this topic, calling for a shift in how clinicians and professional bodies engage with Australian immigration detention. I argue that current responses to the health and healthcare needs of those detained are inadequate. I reject a boycott but call for such action to be seen within a broader strategy aimed at bringing about social and political change. I propose a theoretical base to inform such a stance, by appealing to social movement theory and other theories of social change. I demonstrate how such theory can be applied to inform systemic, social and political change, and I argue that clinicians and professional bodies should embrace this approach which includes employing forms of political action such as protest, disruption and civil disobedience.