Compassionate Bastard, by Peter Mitchell

Poet and songwriter turned immigration officer Peter Mitchell has pulled back the veil on Australia’s immigration and detention apparatus. Mitchell’s job called on him to be tough, but also display compassion and understanding for those trying to stay illegally in Australia. Compassionate Bastard is the former immigration compliance officer’s attempt to open up a more realistic and open debate on Australia’s immigration laws. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in the subject.

In his idealistic youth, Peter Mitchell saw himself as a poet and songwriter, but by the time he had hit 30 his more pragmatic wife insisted that he take the public service exam and get a stable job. Left with a choice of working in Taxation, Defence or Immigration, he chose the latter, as it sounded like it would be more people based, and hence a better fit for his prior training in the humanities. (Mitchell holds a Bachelor of Arts degree.) Having not entirely given up his dreams of writing poetry, short stories and songs, Mitchell presumed that work in the public service would be pretty laid back, allowing him to dash off a poem or two on the job.

It didn’t turn out this way. A career in immigration (or the human misery industry, as Mitchell wryly describes it) took the poet and songwriter on a roller coaster ride that started as a compliance officer and later as manager of Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. Compassionate Bastard is not the type of dry memoir you’d expect from an immigration officer.

How lucky the reading public is to have had a poet in their public service, observing and writing about life at the front line of immigration compliance and detention. Mitchell writes in a cheerful manner and keeps a lively pace. His prose is rich in descriptive imagery and smart wordplay, but without being brassy. He tries to show how his job called for striking the right balance between upholding Australia’s immigration laws, and showing genuine compassion and understanding for those wanting to stay in Australia, but without the legal authority to do so.

The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with his first job as a compliance officer, and is full of exciting detective work finding people who have overstayed their visas or are in the country illegally. These tales of individuals telling all sorts of stories to desperately try and stay in the country are illuminating, describing a wild variety of characters with tall tales about their identity and papers. The second part deals with Villawood, and goes into detail about how the place was run and some of the human stories. The third part discusses Mitchell’s work managing ‘Operation Safe Haven’ at East Hills, which accommodated refugee Kosovars and East Timorese.

Overall, I found Compassionate Bastard to be a fascinating eye opener, shining a light on how so many key factors of our immigration system work. Mitchell is refreshingly candid, taking us behind all the public rage and anger to show Australia’s immigration laws in action. Implementing the law means breaking up families and causing misery for those caught out. Mitchell shows mixed feelings about doing his job: on the one hand, finding an ‘illegal’ would be exhilarating, as it showed he had been doing his job, but nonetheless he couldn’t help feeling deep sympathy for those he managed to send back to either detention or their native countries.

Interestingly, Mitchell says he could never really tell people what type of work he did, as it really put them off. Even those who supported the more hardline of the Howard government’s immigration policies weren’t comfortable in Mitchell’s presence, finding his work irksome.

Compassionate Bastard was written in the hope of opening up the debate on immigration, as so much of the dirty work happens out of sight. We need to confront the difficult and unpalatable aspects of immigration policy, and have an open conversation on how we really want to run immigration. At the moment, in the political sphere at least, the discussion on immigration is a shouting match over entrenched positions, with little or no relation to the reality on the ground.

Compassionate Bastard is both a rollicking and intelligent read from a skilled writer and compassionate observer. This should be essential reading for anyone interested in Australian immigration policy.

Compassionate Bastard, by Peter Mitchell. Published by Penguin. ISBN: 978-0-14-356622-9