This Australian government billboard in northern Sri Lanka, written in Tamil, is designed to dissuade asylum seekers arriving by boat.
It states that people who the Australian government designates as ‘illegal boat arrivals’ will not be granted visas, and will be returned home.
Australian government statistics show that the overwhelming majority of people who seek asylum on arrival in Australia do so after flying in.
Adoption of the term ‘illegal boat arrivals’ prompted a mini-crisis in the Australian Department of Home Affairs in 2014 when a senior officer noticed that one media outlet had referred to the larger group as ‘legal plane arrivals’.
A series of Departmental workshops was held over several months in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Jakarta and Darwin to devise a new name for the larger group.
The winning phrase, now used by the Department to describe asylum-seekers who arrive by plane, is: ‘illegal non-maritime arrivals’.
“It’s a masterstroke in dehumanisation,” stated one bureaucrat involved in the process, insisting on anonymity.
“If you didn’t know better, you’d hardly know we’re talking about people.”
“An ‘illegal non-maritime arrival’ could be a bag of horse shit!”
“It even makes it sound as though they came by boat, even though they flew in! It’s brilliant!
The official confided that one group of colleagues considered celebrating the new terminology by hiring a party boat and throwing symbolic child mannequins overboard into Sydney Harbour.
“It sounded like fun to me, but a couple of the others were a bit squeamish about it,” the official said. “They were worried someone might film it on their phone and leak it to the media.”