“Between a Rock and a Hard Place”: Australia’s Mandatory Detention of Asylum Seekers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For fourteen years Australia has detained asylum seekers arriving unlawfully in its territory. It also intercepts asylum seekers arriving in the territorial waters, detaining them in third countries and preventing them from seeking refugee status in Australia (the “Pacific Solution”). This paper traces the development of the policy, its current implementation, the justification employed by the government for maintaining it, and its legality under international law. On examination of these issues, it is evident that the justification for the mandatory policy is flawed; that the costs of the policy – in terms of the physical and mental well-being of asylum seekers themselves, and the social and financial impact on the Australian community – are too great, and it puts Australia in breach of its obligations under international law. However, the government has not canvassed alternatives to the mandatory detention policy and has no intention of changing it. This leaves asylum seekers who enter Australian territory unlawfully literally and figuratively between a “rock and hard place.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".