The Gillies Institute for Public Policy is proud to announce the Dili Solution.
The Asylum seeker crisis has gone on long enough. Ten years after Tamper the politicians must be dragged from the punchbowl. Asylum seekers are a political resource Australia’s democracy can no longer afford. For ten years now nothing else has been able to get a decent grip on the agenda. Ten years lost wringing our hands over a few fucking boatpeople.
In order to get Australia back on track and give on the path to the ultimate end of a clean hermetic nationhood, we need an Endlosung to this problem. Baudrillard pointed out long ago that third world catastrophes and their refugee byproducts are simply a resource for western societies to exploit just as the west exploits the third world’s natural resources. To us, in raw form, this resource is useless, nay threatening. It must be processed, refined, rendered palatable and useful. We would never accept some shipment of goods holus bolus, without papers or authentication. We cannot start now. The modes and forms of consumer society demands clean, verified goods. As the Apple phenomenon demonstrates clearly, we want shit that arrives in an immaculate box and functions perfectly, immediately. Clearly all this shows asylum seekers themselves are not the problem in this issue, it is only processing that matters now. However, self evidently in the globalised, post-industrialised era Australia is no place to undertake such semi-skilled, low-end rendering.
Clearly this is an issue of exchange which inverts the imaginary construct of flows to and from Australia. The boatpeoples turning up on our shore deliver an incredibly rich primary resource to Australia’s public and politicians, yet this importation flies in the face of common sense. All aspects of Australia’s economy society and mentality are geared precisely for the opposite. We export dirt and import cleanliness. We send filthy ores, woodchips, wool and beef. We receive white-goods, cars, knitwear and suits. How dirty boat people cannot understand this simple trade dynamic is beyond my comprehension, but it seems they will not hear reason. To accept this human refuse and process it here, in Australia would be a regression to the infancy of white Australia. It would be a return to the beginning when clearly we want the end. It would reinstate the convict stain that Australia has spent its entire history as a western nation trying to wash away. We will not return to our beginning as a processing plant for human waste.
Today the Gillies Institute for Public Policy unveils the Dili solution which will address the Australian public’s boat people question. East Timor is declared a special cultural-industrial zone; its purpose is now the refining of peoples. Asylum seekers, malcontents, misfits and undesirables who are a blot on the Asia-Pacific landscape will be herded, registered, marked and shipped forth. Once in Dili, they will be encamped and subject to processes which will refine and clean them. They will be subject to the most stringent quality control processes, approved by no less than Steve Jobs himself. Finally adjudication will take place as to the necessary and productive spaces which may or may not be open to the finished product. The only question left hanging is what to do with the surplus?

The Colonial