‘I Am Responsible’: Histories of the Intersection of the Guardianship of Unaccompanied Child Refugees and the Australian Border

In Australia in 1946, the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act was passed. This Act was intended to support the postwar migration to Australia of British children, unaccompanied by their parents, and to provide them with a guardian in Australia—the Immigration Minister. Despite subsequent amendments, this key provision continues. Children who attempt to migrate to Australia unaccompanied by adult family members are subject to the minister’s guardianship. In 1948 Arthur Calwell, the then Minister for Immigration, described himself in parliament as the ‘father’ of such children. This article focuses on the period from the 1970s to explore what this notion of fatherhood entails. What can it tell us about how children, families and the role of the minister in child refugee policies have been imagined? I examine how the Act functions as a form of biopolitics, to discipline and regulate intimate relations for child refugees. The article asks how the Act produces a set of historically specific interdependent relationships and highlights the ways successive governments have subordinated concerns for the ‘best interests of the child’ to concerns of the policing of the Australian border.

made the Minister for Immigration the guardian of all unaccompanied child migrants.Haylen noted that Arthur Calwell, the then Minister for Immigration, 'has been called all kinds of names in his time, but now [as a result of this legislation] he is to be the beneficent and legal godfather of the thousands of children who will pour into this country.'At that, Calwell interjected, proclaiming that no, he would not be their godfather, but rather he would be 'the legal father' of these children. 1 Close to thirty years later, on 22 September 1976, at the Midway Hostel, a migrant hostel in Maribyrnong, Victoria-now the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre-two residents, [N.P.] and [C.P.] signed a note, written on unheaded lined paper: We the undersigned, declare that there is no familial relationship between ourselves.(58) and their friendship in Timor. 2 A further thirty-seven years on, in September 2013, a 16-year-old unaccompanied Somali boy was flown to Perth from the immigration detention centre on Christmas Island-a distant island territory of Australia, located in the Indian Ocean close to Indonesia-after he attempted suicide.The Somali community in Perth tried to reach out to him, with Hassan Egal, the president of the Somali Community Association in Western Australia, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

As a community we are, traditionally we help each other, and we want to look after him after his situation gets better and give him accommodation and shelter and food, and whatever available until his case of refugee claim is under process.
'His family's not here,' Egal went on to say, 'and he's young, he's underage.We will encourage him, and we'll talk to him in the language, the food, the sense of belonging.'3Tony Burke, the then Minister for Immigration, Multicultural Affairs and Citizenship, refused to allow anyone from the community to visit the boy, with the Immigration Department spokeswoman saying, 'as the boy's guardian, he's maintaining a personal interest in his medical care'.She was further reported as asserting that 'the focus needed to be on the boy's health and wellbeing' and that it was 'far too early to respond to requests from the community or questions about the boy's asylum claims'. 4begin with these moments as a way of drawing out some of the discourses and implications of the history of the Act and its historical production of categories of child refugees and guardians, as well as notions of family, community, intimacy and responsibility.The implementation of this Act has always engaged with these categories of connection and kinship, with references to family management spread throughout the archival records of the departments that have managed it. 5The Act has, since its inception, attempted to regulate familial relations.That is, the guardianship produced by the Act has existed as a form of biopolitics, normalising a particular set of intimate relations for the populations it seeks to control and in doing so exerting control over the politics of the country's borders.In this article I argue that the Act has produced a relationship of intimacy between guardians and unaccompanied child refugees (particularly since the 1970s, from when the Act was more broadly applied to refugee children, as I will explain further below) such that these refugee children were 'produced' as lacking family and hence in need of a type of care not required by adult refugees.In this way, the Act has functioned as what Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese have termed 'law as an apparatus of biopolitical governmentality'. 6This Act, and its history, is uniquely Australian: no other country has an Act like it, or controls their borders in relation to asylum seekers and refugees with the same peculiarly punitive measures of incarceration.Australia's regimes are, however, also under scrutiny from other countries, with some decrying the nation's treatment of asylum seekers and others expressing admiration for it. 7is article sketches a history of the Act as examined through the lens of family-like relations.While there has been some legal analysis undertaken of the role of the minister as guardian of unaccompanied child refugees it has not yet been explored in depth by historians.Moreover, while various historians have examined the history of government policy towards refugees and asylum seekers, none has looked at the history of this specific Act.Indeed, Klaus Neumann, Sandra M. Gifford, Annika Lems and Stefanie Scherr have recently noted that 'scholarship about refugee settlement in Australia is marked by its blind spots as much as by its research strengths'. 8In this article I aim to fill this gap by exploring the history of the guardianship role and focusing on what the role does.Moreover, I look at how the role sits alongside the other functions of the minister, primarily that of controlling Australia's borders and determining who should be allowed into Australia.How does the Act create a category of 'unaccompanied minor', what work does the category do and what does it come to mean?What relations of intimacy are articulated through this work?I wish to open up fundamental questions regarding the role of the development of policy, its evolutions and enduring impacts, and the ways policy language has shaped discourses and understandings of child refugees in Australia, as well as how it has sought to control the contours of the population in general.I focus on the ways the Act produces an idea of who unaccompanied refugee children are in relation to the Minister for Immigration.Here I am not referring to the production of embodied people, but rather to a set of imagined figures, interrelationships and discourses.These figures and discourses have had real and deeply damaging impacts on many of the children who are subject to the Act under regimes of the so-called 'protection' provided by the  , vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, p. 89.7 For instance, Danish MPs have visited the Australian detention centre on Nauru as part of a fact-finding mission.Paul Farrell, 'Danish MP Confirms Visit to Nauru Camp at Heart of Offshore Detention Outcry', The Guardian, 23 August 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/23/danish-politicians-seek-to-visit-nauru-site-at-heart-of-offshore-detention-outcry?CMP=share_btn_tw.See also Antony Loewenstein, 'Australia's Refugee Policies: A Global Inspiration for All the Wrong Reasons', The Guardian, 18 January 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/18/australias-refugee-policies-aglobal-inspiration-for-all-the-wrong-reasons.8 Klaus Neumann, Sandra M. Gifford, Annika Lems and Stefanie Scherr, 'Refugee Settlement in Australia: Policy, Scholarship and the Production of Knowledge, 1952-2013', Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol.35,  no. 1, 2014, pp.1-17.Federal Minister for Immigration.9This article is concerned with both these facets of the Act-the way it has produced knowledge and the material effects of this knowledge.
The Act produces a kinship relationship between child and guardian that is also performative, drawing on histories of Australian governmental ideas of the state as fit parents and producing those ideas into the future.That is, the Act produces the figure of the child refugee as someone who is dependent, and the Minister for Immigration as the figure of responsibility in relation to that dependent.This ensures the children, as figured, fit within a particular register of intelligibility in relation to migration, border maintenance and control.In this article I begin by examining the existing scholarship on the Act and presenting a history of the changes to the Act.I then explore the ways the Act has functioned during its existence, with a particular focus on the period since the 1970s.Moving through the following aspects in turn, I demonstrate how, as part of the productive, imaginative governmentality of the Act, it produces the figure of the child; produces the figure of the guardian; produces a relation between the two, which involves the guardian, or state, being designated as best able to make decisions for the child, or know what is best for the child; and produces a conception of the limits of concern held by the government towards the populations it controls.In subordinating kinship relations to ideas of border control, national security and population management, the Act demonstrates how guardianship responsibilities are secondary to other governmental considerations, thus offering up a conception of the place of kinship within social, cultural and political understandings of the building blocks of the nation-state.It will become evident throughout the article how ideas and discourses of kinship, responsibility, guardianship and national borders intertwine.

A history of the scholarship on the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act
There is very little academic writing on the workings of the Act, but there are some small pockets of scholarship, particularly from lawyers and doctors.Historians of child protection schemes in Australia, such as Shurlee Swain, have noted the existence of the Act and its guardianship provisions, particularly with regard to child migrants, but have not yet explored its implications for notions of familial relations among child refugees in Australian history. 10In her work on child protection in Australia, Swain-together with Dorothy Scott-does, however, provide a model for viewing children who are subjected to government care and protection legislation, writing that we must recognise that such children are seen 'as both victim and threat, savage and waif '. 11 Alongside this historical focus on child protection, organisations such as the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Refugee Taskforce of the National Council of Churches in Australia have produced inquiries and reports exploring the minister's guardianship role. 12Karen Zwi and Sarah Mares, part of the Australian Human Rights Commission's 2014 Inquiry into Children in Detention, note that today the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) provides unaccompanied children on Christmas Island guardianship from a local 'Delegated Guardian'. 13From their interviews, however, it was evident that children were unaware who their guardian was, or who could help them if they required any form of assistance. 14Further, Zwi and Mares were told in interviews with children in the detention centre on Christmas Island that 'DIBP do not routinely contact families of unaccompanied children to inform them of their children's whereabouts and processing of asylum claims'. 15This is notable, highlighting ways that familial bonds are imagined, and differentially respected and broken, by Immigration Departments, a point to which I will return below.Through snippets of testimonies, Zwi and Mares provide both a medicalised exploration of the experiences of asylum seeker children and an overview of the ways the testimonies of unaccompanied children can be used to narrate their own histories.
Diane M. Zulfacar has investigated the policy provisions for unaccompanied refugee minors from a social work perspective, focusing on guardianship mechanisms, care arrangements and income support.Zulfacar's exploration of the unsuitability of the Act provides a useful basis from which to understand why the problems and contradictions explored below came to exist.Zulfacar notes that the Act was created to deal with British child evacuees, rather than refugees, and in doing so draws attention to the ways policy around the Act, and around the care of child refugees generally, has, since the 1970s, been created on an expedient basis.As such, the history of the Act, according to Zulfacar, is also a history of slow and ad hoc change. 16number of lawyers have explored the guardianship provisions of the Act, many placing the emphasis of their argument on the inherent conflict of interest in the minister being the guardian of these asylum-seeker children as well as, as representative of the state, being in ultimate control of both determining their refugee status and of what happens to them while their claims are being determined.Mary Crock notes: The Immigration Minister's protective role under the IGOC Act stands in stark contrast with the obligations and powers conferred by the Migration Act and Regulations … The simple and devastating problem for the young asylum seekers is that the Minister is both legal guardian, by virtue of s 6 of the IGOC Act, and their prosecutor, judge and gaoler within the complicated matrix of the Migration Act. 17ross a number of publications, Crock lays out the legal importance of creating an independent guardian. 18Julie Taylor has pointed to an obligation for this conflict of interest to be remedied.She explores the legal and procedural inadequacies created by the lack of a un-conflicted legal guardian and concludes, '[m]ost importantly, throughout the process of applying for a visa, unaccompanied children are likely to need assistance from their legal guardian or some other appointed person; and the Immigration (GOC) Act makes them legally entitled to it'. 19Maria O'Sullivan has also examined the conflict of interest in the Act, highlighting that 'the best interests principle is regarded internationally as the linchpin of children's welfare', and that because of this legislative reforms are imperative. 20Mark Evenhuis similarly focuses on the human rights-based legal requirements, and the notion that the child is vulnerable and primarily requires protection, arguing that this cannot be achieved through the guardianship provisions of the Act. 21 can be seen, then, that the existing scholarship frames the discussion around questions of vulnerability, care, the particular human rights that children should be subject to, and the problems of 'conflict of interest' and 'best interest of the child'.In this article, I take a different point of departure and ask the following question: how can the Act, and its notions of guardianship, be understood as responsible for the production of a set of historically specific figures and interdependent relationships?

A history of the Act and its production of guardianship
The Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act was first passed in 1946, ensuring the Minister of Immigration would act as the guardian for those British boys being brought to Australia in the aftermath of World War II, as well as the British children who had arrived in Australia during the war. 22From the beginning, the Act was designed to provide guardianship care from the minister to migrant children who fit the age-based description (in 1946 it was children under twenty-one years of age), who were not Australian citizens, and who were not accompanied by a parent or a relative over the age of twenty-one who was to act in the role of a parent or guardian.Refugee children who had arrived during this same wartime and pre-war period were looked after by community groups, such as the Australian Jewish Guardian Society. 23The Act followed on from the previous National Security (Overseas Children) Regulations, which had concluded at the end of the war.It was created as a result of consultation with state and territory migration authorities on 20 August 1946, from which the governing Australian Labor Party concluded legislation was needed to continue to regulate, govern and control the presence of these children in Australia.This new legislation-which had broad support among the sector and in parliament24 -was framed as providing a means to 'prevent exploitation' of the children and their labour, and it was noted both in parliament and in the press that the powers of guardianship would be 'delegated to officers of welfare departments in each state, but could be terminated at any moment in respect of any child'. 25These facets of the legislation would then become the Act, creating a situation wherein the Minister of Immigration was the guardian for those child migrants who were unaccompanied by any parent or immediate relative who could act as a guardian, until such time as they reached the age of twenty-one, left Australia or became citizens.The responsibilities of this guardianship could be delegated, and provision was in place for the minister to exclude, by regulation, a class of migrant children from the Act, if he so desired.This Act has been amended numerous times, but the key provision that the Immigration Minister is the guardian of all children who are governed by the Act has remained. 26ter being passed in 1946, the Act was first amended in 1948, with provision then being made for private individuals, as well as institutions, to act as delegated carers for unaccompanied migrant and refugee children.Other amendments made at this time provided for the minister to be the guardian of the child's estate as well as their person, and legislated that any child covered by the Act would need to receive permission from the Minister to leave Australia. 27These amendments, Calwell explained, were based on the experiences of those working with the Act and were made on the advice of 'officers expert in child welfare administration'-not, it should be noted, on the advice of the children governed by the Act. 28e Act was not widely applied to all refugee and asylum-seeker children until the 1970s.This was in part because, as Klaus Neumann has noted, 'Australia's DP program included surprisingly few unaccompanied minors, and discriminated against large families.Australia's resettlement of DPs favoured workers.'As a result, non-British unaccompanied minors did not come to Australia in substantial numbers until 1949. 29From this point onwards the Act was applied to refugee children who came from Europe, including Jewish children in the 1940s and Hungarian children in the 1950s.But, crucially, it was not until 1974, in accordance with the requirements of the White Australia policy-one of Australia's first pieces of legislation passed upon Federation in 1901, which dictated that only white people (with limited exceptions) were allowed to migrate to Australia-that non-European children would be covered by the Act.In 1983 amendments to the legislation replaced 'immigrant' with 'non-citizen' in specifying who was covered by the Act. 30her amendments have altered the group of children governed by the Act, as well as who could be considered to be guardian.These changes have included the age-based definition of a child, which changed in 1983 from those under twenty-one to those under eighteen.Since 1985, a non-citizen child who is governed by the Act has also been considered to be a person who 'intends, or is intended, to become a permanent resident of Australia', and these 1985 amendments enabled the minister to 'direct that a person under 18 years of age shall be a ward of the Minister notwithstanding that that person entered Australia' with a guardian.The amendments required that the 'relative who is charged with caring for the person consents to the Minister assuming guardianship'. 31Amendments in 1994 altered the legislation so that the minister was no longer responsible for children entering Australia for the purposes of adoption, while the 2008 amendments-which came as part of the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws -General Law Reform) Act 2008-provided new gender-neutral definitions of 'parent' and 'relative'. 32These changes expanded the definition of who could be eligible for providing legal guardianship to children, who would then not be considered as covered by the Act. 33Amendments passed as part of the Migration Legislation Amendment (Offshore Processing and other Measures) Act 2012-which amended both the Migration Act and the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act-allowed the government to assert the primacy of the former over the latter.This meant the government could make and implement 'any decision to remove, deport or take a non-citizen child from Australia', enabling the offshore detention and processing of child asylum-seekers. 34This measure was further strengthened in amendments passed in 2014 to the powers held by the government under the Maritime Powers Act. 35Interestingly, the introduction of the foundational legislation, the Migration Act, in 1958, produced no amendments to the Act.
Since the creation of the Act, the Minister's guardianship obligations are considered to have ended when the child reaches adulthood, becomes a citizen or leaves Australia permanently.Since 2012, 'leaving Australia permanently' has been considered to have occurred if, among other things, the child has been 'taken from Australia to a regional processing country'. 36That is, if they were taken to offshore detention, a measure that has been in operation in Australia intermittently since 2001, under both Coalition and ALP governments, where asylum seekers who have attempted to reach Australia by boat are taken instead to detention centres in Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. 37hese regimes of detention-which are currently indefinite-have faced significant protests from refugees and supporters both within and outside the centres, and are uniquely Australian.Nowhere else in the world has a program of indefinite offshore detention for all asylum seekers, including children, who come by boat.The Australian Immigration Minister has also always been able to delegate some of the responsibilities of guardianship and has regularly done so, to Departments of Social Service or Community Service, or similar bodies, and to private companies running immigration detention centres, in each of the states or territories. 38The Act is, it appears, the only one of its type in the world.
This brief history demonstrates a broad consensus among successive governments that unaccompanied child migrants in general, and, for our purposes, child refugees in particular, are defined as requiring specific forms of support from the government.The Convention on the Rights of the Child, introduced in 1989 internationally and in 1990 in Australia, emphasises the 'best interests of the child' and proposes that children be primarily regarded through the lens of considerations of rights, but the Act demonstrates a different register of analysis for decision-making. 39Indeed, the Explanatory Memorandum for the 2014 amendments to the Act, when weighed against the Convention, explicitly states: in developing the policies reflected in this Bill, the government has treated the best interests of the child as a primary consideration.However, it is Government policy to discourage unauthorised arrivals from taking potentially life threatening avenues to achieve resettlement for their families in Australia and this, as well as the integrity of the onshore protection programme, are also primary considerations which may outweigh the best interests of the child in relation to a particular measure. 40n the rest of this article I explore the specifics of the register apparent in the Act, to highlight the ways the Act has produced distinct understandings of the figure of the child refugee and the figure of the Immigration Minister, and the intertwined relationship between these figures.

Producing the category of the child
To understand the ways guardianship of unaccompanied children has been imagined, we must first understand what the Act is designed to do.To do this, we must note that the Act-and its accompanying discourses-help construct the category of 'the child'.It is thus important that we understand 'childhood as discursive rather than an empirical fact'. 41That is, the category of the child is historically produced, rather than a natural creation. 42Collective notions of what a child is-of who is signified by this word-are produced through such social and political creations as this Act.For instance, a report produced for the Australian Centre for Indo-Chinese Research in 1981 explained:

The use of the word 'children' contributes to the confusion of the situation. In the West, the general comprehension of this term is those who are reliant on adults and who need traditional western family type care to survive. The legal definition of children is those under 18 years of age. 43
The report argued that this confusion led to a situation wherein children were understood as requiring a specific formulation of help.As just one other example among many, we can reflect on the title of the 2014 report and recommendations for the care of unaccompanied asylum seeker and refugee children, produced by the National Council of Churches in Australia, Protecting the Lonely Children. 44Through foregrounding 'protection' and 'loneliness', this report highlights refugee childhood as primarily shaped by vulnerability and a lack of attachment or kinship.These are but two historical understandings of what the concepts of childhood, and refugeehood, can contain, which both recur throughout discussions of guardianship. 45e guardianship produced by the Act has also allowed children to be categorised into a number of different groups.From the 1970s, all children governed by this legislation were known as 'isolated'. 46Under this umbrella term, they fell into one of two groups: 'unattached', which meant they had no relative in Australia to look after them, or 'detached', meaning they had a relative who was over twenty-one but was not a parent.These categories translated into different funding schemes, housing arrangements and modes of care from the government and social services; creating a problem that was continually debated by those responsible for the day-to-day care and management of these children. 47From the 1990s all such children began to be referred to as 'unaccompanied', a name and a signifier that is still used today.Regardless of the precise term being used, these descriptors all position the child in relation to family.That is, these refugee children are produced and comprehended as a group through the description of their relation to a missing caregiver and their relative perceived vulnerability.
The support for refugee children provided by and under the Act has been consistently attenuated.In 1978 the Department of Community Welfare Services, Victoria, produced a confidential report on 'Services to Isolated Refugee Children' which made clear they felt the federal government was not providing enough financial support for the delegated Victorian government agency to properly look after the children. 48This problem echoed through the 1970s and 1980s.Diane Zulfacar's 1984 report, Surviving Without Parents: Indo-Chinese Refugee Minors in NSW, for instance, was just one of a series of reports or notes in meeting minutes that explained that no one knew with any certainty how many isolated, detached and unattached children were in Australia. 49The bureaucratic invisibility of, and lack of proper support for, unaccompanied child refugees can be seen throughout the archives.In paperwork sent backwards and forwards within the responsible agencies, and in reports produced by social welfare administrators and Indochinese community groups, it is evident that decisions were made on an ad hoc basis, with little Federal Government direction or planning. 50In October 2011, in a hearing of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Australia's Immigration Detention Network, Greg Kelly, the First Assistant Secretary in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, testified that the Department was unaware of the existence of any formal protocols for the delegation of guardianship to any departments in the states or territories, or to the Serco officers who then ran the detention centres. 51In testimony in September 2011, Alan Noel Thornton, the deputy principal of the Christmas Island District School, stated that many of the children would not have known who to approach if they had a problem; they were unaware of which adult they could go to for direct help. 52Such writings and testimony provide another window into the ways refugee children who are subject to the Act have been defined: they are produced as a group who are not required to understand their place within the social fabric.They are, we could say, infantilised and made an indeterminate mass rather than perceived as individuals.

Producing the category of the minister as guardian
Just as the figure of the child refugee who requires guardianship and care is produced by the Act, so too is the correlating idea of the Immigration Minister as provider.For Tony Burke, the Minister for Immigration, Multicultural Affairs and Citizenship from 4 February to 1 July 2013, even those children for whom he was not (yet) guardian evidently played an emotive role in determining his approach to refugee policy.At the ALP National Conference in July 2015, Burke described his experience of learning that a ten-week-old child had been among those who died when attempting to make the journey by boat to Australia. 53He told the conference:

[the child] was 10 weeks old, he died on my watch, I just want[ed] to know his name … I was given his name on a post-it note, and I kept that note on my desk until we lost office. I kept it there for one very simple reason: we have to show compassion to not only who is in our line of sight, but to everybody who is affected by our policies. 54
This reflection on the loss of a child-a child for whom Burke expressed a feeling of responsibility-provided the backdrop to a declaration by Burke that the ALP should support making the navy and coastguard responsible for turning back boats carrying asylum seekers towards Australia, in order to dissuade such asylum seekers from using people smugglers in their attempts to reach Australia. 55This measure can constitute refoulement, which is illegal under international law.Burke's apparent sense of responsibility for child asylum seekers, then, provided the emotional language through which he would understand and express his desire that particular controls be placed on the arrival of asylum seekers in general.That is, his role as guardian of the borders appeared to be thoroughly informed by his understanding of his role as guardian of children.Somewhat similarly, in the story that opened this article of the way Burke related to the Somali child, we can see that his imagining of his role as guardian provided the lens through which he would produce the child's relationship to his community.This role as guardian can therefore be profound in producing imaginaries of intimacy.
The Act, and the ideas of guardianship it embodies, can be understood to intertwine notions of control of borders and control of children.The challenges of the Minister for Immigration also being guardian of unaccompanied children have long been recognised in parliamentary discourse.In December 2002 Julia Gillard, then an ALP MP, told parliament: 52 Mr Alan Noel Thornton, Joint Select Committee on Australia's Immigration Detention Network hearing, 6 September 2011.53 Burke's tears were much commented on online.See, for instance, the tweets available at 'Burke #alpconf2015'.54 'Tony Burke: Asylum Seekers & Boat Turnbacks', Labor Herald, Youtube, 25 July 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvwc4Q7myUk.See also Tony Burke, 'Tony Burke on Deaths at Sea: "I've Never Seen a Photo of Him, but I Have of his Coffin"', Labor Herald, 25 July 2015, https://www.laborherald.com.au/economy/tony-burke-on-deaths-at-sea-ive-never-seen-a-photo-of-him-but-i-have-of-his-coffin/.
55 Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, 'Factsheet: Turning Back Boats', 26 February 2015, http://www.kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/publication/%E2%80%98turning-back-boat-s%E2%80%99. 56ch a move in responsibility for children-from being part of the Immigration portfolio to being the duty of a children's commissioner-would have shifted the policy and discursive understanding of the address: unaccompanied children would be considered within the realm of the child, rather than the realm of migration and border control.This would, as a 1984 report from a working party on refugee children convened by the Standing Committee of Social Welfare Administrators made clear, serve to make these guardianship arrangements accord with those of citizen children. 57Yet, in a discussion later that month of a bill to amend migration legislation in a way that would encourage the government to release unaccompanied children from detention, Gillard reiterated that 'nothing in [the legislation] requires the taking of any action which would cause a health or security risk to Australia'. 58Vague notions of 'security' thus continue to circulate as the preeminent concern, highlighting the importance placed on the minister's role in ensuring the biopolitical control of the nation.

Formally, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs is the guardian of unaccompanied children. There clearly is a conflict of interest or, at the very least, a perception of a conflict of interest, and we believe that ought to be addressed by moving the guardianship to an appropriate other entity. Under Labor's suggestion, that entity would be the children's commissioner which Labor policy would introduce to deal with children's issues broadly from the perspective of the federal government.
Concerns about the dual role of the Minister-which Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young in 2012 termed being 'both the jailer and the legal guardian' 59 -were articulated by Senator Chris Evans when he was Immigration Minister.In October 2008 he told the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs: 60 From at least November 2012, the ALP made clear that it no longer sees a need for an independent guardian, but the sentiments of change have been widely shared. 61n 2013 and 2014, Hanson-Young introduced bills to create a specific 'Guardian of Unaccompanied Children', explaining in 2014: 'This Bill sets up a Guardian who will be responsible for ensuring that the best interests of the child are always the paramount consideration.' 62 This notion of the 'best interests of the child' is one which comes to the Australian polity from international law and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which demands that states prioritise this 'best interest' when making decisions about children. 63A question we must address then, is where has this notion of 'best interests'-and the guardian as responsible for fostering those interests-historically sat alongside the other responsibilities of the minister?And how have apparent concerns for children, for the maintenance of borders and for national security sat alongside each other?

I am responsible, for instance, under the act for unaccompanied minors and the guardianship of children, but I am also making decisions about them. I just think there are some really unsatisfactory arrangements in the way the legislation deals with children, and that is something we have got on the agenda.
The rhetorical production of relations of intimacy While this history is not simple, linear or based in only one interpretation, we can note that successive governments have made clear that the responsibility of the Immigration Minister to act as guardian for unaccompanied children is secondary to his responsibility to the nation to guard its borders.Prioritising the maintenance of borders over caring for the people who are crossing those borders is clearly not unique to this one aspect of the Immigration portfolio, but it is useful to examine this particular example individually.Doing so, firstly, allows us to foreground an aspect of Australia's refugee history that has not been previously examined or well understood and, secondly, enables a more nuanced understanding of the broad effects of a focus on 'border protection' over ideas of settlement.Primarily, it enables us to understand in more depth the textures of the ideas of 'guardianship' as held by the Immigration Minister, and the notions of family and intimacy, produced by the Act.
In 2011 a series of amendments were proposed that would allow the government to institute offshore processing of unaccompanied child asylum seekers-created in response to the High Court of Australia overturning the so-called Malaysia Solution (which would have seen refugees who wanted to settle in Australia sent to Malaysia instead) on the basis of the responsibilities enshrined in the Act. 64In a second reading speech for these amendments, Chris Bowen, the ALP Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, proclaimed they were necessary 'to assert the primacy of the Migration Act over the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act'.There was, he claimed, 'national importance' to these amendments; they represented a moment 'when we, as a parliament, must collectively do our job' to 'act in the national interest'.This was necessary because 'a blanket inability of the government of the day to transfer unaccompanied minors to a designated country provides an invitation to people smugglers to send boatloads of children to Australia'. 65Such sentiments heightened Senator Chris Evans's comments to the Senate the week before, when he stated:

[the] Government believes that its overriding obligation is to stop unaccompanied minors risking their lives by taking the dangerous boat journey to Australia. We believe our overriding obligation is to say to parents, 'do not risk the lives of your children on the prospect of being granted an Australian visa'. 66
Through these words, government actors worked to regulate not only the borders and the lives of refugee children who are subject to the Act, but also the Australian population at large.They contributed to discourses that worked to condition a set of specific interactions.
Such rhetoric is fundamental to the ways the Act has functioned to produce certain notions of child refugees and refugee families.Indeed, part of the work of this Act is to regulate ideas of family, and in the letter referred to at the beginning of this article, which the two Ps wrote in 1976, we catch a glimpse of the quiet violence underpinning the governing of these relationships.Two people are compelled to clarify their relationship for a bureaucracy that makes little attempt to know or understand possible differences in family ties or formations.These two people are required to use the language of the state to explain, and condition, their relationship.Similarly, in Tony Burke's determination to act as a 'father' to the Somali child, he prioritises state-based relationships over communal ones.Where the community values markers of ethnic and national belonging-food, language, similarity-Burke deploys the rhetoric that emphasises the supreme importance and value of the personal, individual interest of the guardian.There is a prioritising of a particular notion of a surrogate nuclear family over a different, communal, conception of connection and familial intimacy.These then are two distinct examples of the diverse ways the Act has served as a regulatory and productive force for ideas of kinship.
If we are to think about the work of the Minister as Guardian in terms of how it regulates and produces relations of intimacy and kinship, always aimed at maintaining a specific vision of the border and the nation, then we need to think about how it sits alongside other such regulatory instances.One key moment in this history is the so-called 'Children Overboard Affair'.In October 2001, after a boat carrying asylum seekers towards Australia broke and capsized and many of its voyagers fell into the water, the Howard government, led by Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs Philip Ruddock, Minister for Defence Peter Reith and Prime Minister John Howard, accused the adult asylum seekers of throwing their children from the boat into the sea to gain the sympathy and support of Australia. 67This charge was proved to be false-no children were thrown overboard-but before the facts could be unravelled, the government used the moment to fuel a story of refugees as bad parents. 68John Howard, in a radio interview, remarked that he felt that there was something 'incompatible' about a refugee throwing their children into the sea. 69'It offends the natural instinct of protection, and delivering security and safety to your children', he said. 70uch sentiments led to the now notorious declaration by Howard: 'We will decide who comes 67 There has been much written about the 'Children Overboard' affair.view, vol.8, no.2, November 2002, pp.11-26.We should also note the parallel rhetoric around Indigenous parents as well as gay marriage, particularly the construction of Indigenous and gay parents as inherently bad parents, which regularly emanates from governments in Australia.Further exploration of these parallels are, however, outside the scope of the current article.
68 See The Australian Senate, Select Committee on A Certain Maritime Incident: Report.
69 Suvendrini Perera has made clear that determining the meaning of the waters around Australia, and the ways that asylum seekers engage with those waters, is a fundamental way Australian claims for sovereignty are produced.Suvendrini Perera, Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats,  and Bodies, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009, particularly pp.1-14.70 John Howard, radio interview, 8 October 2001, 'John Howard Children Overboard … Remember This?',  Youtube, 23 November 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3WJ10xGkas.Ruddock also said, in interviews in the same clip, 'I regard these as some of the most disturbing practices that I have come across in the time that I have been involved in public life' and 'I imagine the sorts of children who would be thrown would be those who could be readily lifted and tossed, without any objections from them.' to this country and the circumstances in which they come.'These Bad Parents, it was clear, would be unwelcome; their presence would unacceptably breach the nation's borders.Similarly, in response to a 2001 inquiry into the detention of asylum seeker children, Ruddock's spokesman was reported as saying, 'we are not happy with children in detention, but we are not the ones that have brought them here to Australia'.It was further reported that this spokesman 'hoped the inquiry would look at the motivation of people who sent children unaccompanied on boats' and that he 'believed some of the 53 unaccompanied children in detention centres had been deliberately sent by their parents to establish refugee claims'. 71 these speech acts, Howard and his ministers produced the children as innocent and vulnerable, at the mercy of parents who were constructed as not knowing how to parent.These refugee families were depicted as inherently dysfunctional, the government in contrast a salvation for the children.This notion of children as innately vulnerable and lacking in agency is shared at times across the political spectrum.In much discourse about asylum seekers, regardless of the motivation behind these speech acts and regardless of the outcome that is desired, asylum seeker and refugee children are thought of, and talked about, as fundamentally and essentially requiring protection.72This is why guardianship-or the regulation of who acts as guardian, carer or parent-becomes such contested terrain.Vulnerability is assured; what it means to act in the child's best interest, and what place that 'best interest' has in the hierarchy of interests, is contested. 73Throughout all these discussions, the discourse of the innocent asylum seeker child, and attempts to regulate relations of intimacy, holds firm.This battle over ideas of appropriate intimacy is a fundamental aspect of the movement by the government towards border control.It is part of the same project.
Thus specific familial relations are produced while simultaneously notions of caring are tightly defined.Alongside the production of the Minister for Immigration as guardian sits the disavowal of certain relationships among groups of refugees and asylum seekers, as seen in the examples used to open this article.These two aspects are produced in concert.The Act produces both relations of intimacy and an understanding of the refugee child as in need of protection from the government.The governing of who is considered the caregiver is produced in two ways: by creating specific relations between refugees or asylum seekers, and by installing the minister as the proper caregiver for refugee children.Such an understanding of the minister's role sits within a vast Australian history.A focus in Australia on white lives-and the successful procreation of white Australia-Erica Millar explains, routinely takes place through the disavowal of non-white Australia, both Aboriginal and migrant.The white family, and the white father, has played a crucial role in this. 74In the context of unaccompanied refugee children, a highly racialised group, this then means that their family-ness is perceived as a lack rather than a presence.The kinship relations within refugee families-or within the families which individual refugees attach to-are understood by successive governments as inadequate or absent. 75en refugees are produced discursively as not knowing how to properly parent, the government is produced discursively not only as the ones who do know how to parent but also as those responsible for teaching the populace what proper parenting, or proper caring, entails.At the same time, they are performatively prioritising the regulation of the border and the nation over a parenting role.We can see connections here to the policies that have produced the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children, wherein successive generations of Aboriginal children were removed from their families under government regimes of assimilation and false discourses of protection and care. 76The government in these different historical cases is enacting a position as the demonstrator of the 'good white father', as articulated by Fiona Probyn in relation to the history of the Stolen Generations, a paternalistic government formulation that operates control over the child's life in response to the idea that they lacked their own 'good father'. 77The government, it would seem, enjoys at times the various discursive and policy possibilities opened up by presenting their credentials as 'proper parents', while simultaneously constructing matters such that guardianship is legislatively and discursively deemed less important than border control.This relationship, however, demonstrates the ways these two facets of governmentality are intertwined.That is, these are both mechanisms for asserting sovereignty over racialised others.In this move, the government is making a claim for its own ability to determine both 'the best interests of the child' and 'the best interests of the nation'.The intimate relationships of parent and child are overridden by the intimate relationships of government and populace.The broader Australian population, and unaccompanied children, are to be produced and regulated by this overriding, both groups always reminded that the control of the state is the first priority of the government.The differentiated biopolitical management of populations within, astride and outside the border thus leaps to our attention.There is an attempt by governments, we could say, to evade the interpersonal relations which this guardianship demands, in order to keep the political and historical question of how to relate to refugee children in the realm of the biopolitical management of people, community and society.

The limits of concern and the creation of categories
The figure of the unaccompanied asylum seeker child, then, often serves as a signifier of policies that control the parameters of the Australian population, rather than as a subject of humanitarian concern.Indeed, this figure perhaps works instead to map the acceptable limits of that concern.Calwell's proclamations of a fatherhood gained through the Act thus represent a very specific idea of what fatherhood entails, one that is focused on its implications for the nation, rather than on the relationship between parent and child. 78The guardianship relation also, it could be argued, creates a situation wherein these refugee children are not really 'regarded as children at all'. 79ese limits of concern-and how the Act functions to produce them-are also evident through the associated bureaucratic deployment of obscurity.The Act is routinely referred to by governments, NGOs, policy makers and refugee advocates as IGOC.The language of obscure acronyms is fundamental to modern political bureaucracy, but this acronym does particular work in removing the 'substance' of the children who are subject to the Act.Thus, in international refugee policy children are referred to as 'minors', a move which, refugee scholar Miriam Ticktin suggests, shifts understandings of them away from that of being children. 80In the world of Australian refugee policy, the children who are governed by the Act are today known as Unaccompanied Minors, or UAMs.At times they are referred to as 'IGOC Act children'. 81In the 1970s they were known as detached, unattached and isolated minors.The children whose lives are controlled by this legislation are obscured through a series of acronyms and misnomers. 82This, I would suggest, is the work such language does, helping create a history of category confusion.This state of the Act's history is, I should be clear, not accidental.By analysing it this way, we can understand the Act's purpose was always to make human life obscure, always to regulate the population in such a way that children become controlled and erased.Migration, in Australian history, has always been shaped by governmental desires to control and regulate the border, nation and population. 83The Act has played an important role in maintaining this control, producing various figures that entwine to form a certain version of kinship relation.

Conclusion
The history of the Act is, then, also the history of the bluntness and clumsiness of categories.That is, it is the history of a series of governments trying to bring together policies, politics and ideologies around immigration, childhood, family and community in ways that attempt to control those being created as its subjects.The Act's history, then, is also a history of the subordination of children to border control.The Minister for Immigration has made this plain with the codification-first discursive, then legal-of the order in which matters relating to children and migration must be considered.Alongside this, through the policies and languages that have surrounded the Act, there is an explicit negotiation and regulation of familial relationships and concepts of intimacy.
Such a history seems to undo the discourses of child vulnerability, to lay bare the provisionality of these discourses, the ways they are never stable or evenly applied, and the ways they are always produced through systems of racialisation and control.The Act is in large part concerned with producing and regulating ideas of intimate relations, through establishing refugee children as a group needing various forms of ministerial control and care.But this care has been shaped by its relations to both the production of normative families and the production of the Australian border.If we return to the moments used to open this article we can now understand the letter written by the two Timorese refugees as having been produced by a specific history of how kinship relations have been determined by government policy.A family must be defined in a certain way, this letter seems to suggest, to be legible to the government, and thus to Australian society at large. 84oreover, a child must be defined clearly through a system of relationality produced by the Act.Families of all who enter the borders must be made comprehensible to Immigration Departments, through the set of terms, figures and discourses the Department has invented.The guardianship offered by the minister, then, functions to remind these children that so long as they remain within the category of 'unaccompanied minor', they are always subject to the border. 85Kristin Phillips has discussed this with reference to the control of the lives of refugee women and children by Australia, arguing that 'the modern biopolitical fantasy of saving women and children is able to coexist with the fantasy of absolute control over the life of the nation'. 86The same coheres in the Act.
Guardianship, in this bureaucratic formulation of government policy, is, we could say, very much not about an intimate relation of parental love.Rather, it embraces ideas of guardianship and surrogate parenthood that focus on providing certain forms of care and control, always

41
Katy Gardner, 'Transnational Migration and the Study of Children: An Introduction', Journal of Ethnic  and Migration Studies, vol.38, no.6, 2012, p. 895.42 While numerous scholars have explored this approach to understanding the figure of the child, I am most influenced by the work of Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004.43 Robert Bennoun and Paula Kelly, Indo-Chinese Youth: An Assessment of the Situation of Unaccompanied and Isolated Indo-Chinese Refugee Minors, Indo-China Refugee Association of Victoria, Melbourne, 1981, p. 3. See also Evenhuis, p. 537.44 Basham and the Australian Churches Refugee Taskforce.45 For a history of childhood see Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Knopf, New York, 1962.See also the definition of childhood held by the UNHCR, which is based on that proposed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, pp.20-8.46 During the 1970s and 1980s, these children were predominantly Timorese and Indo-Chinese.

5
See, for instance, examples in NAA: A446, 84/79152: Settlement Branch-Background papers-Unattached refugee children-General policy 1978-1981.6 Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, 'White Law of the Biopolitical', Journal of the European Associate of Studies on Australia See, for instance, David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003; The Australian Senate, Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident: Report, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 2002; Robert Dixon, 'Citizens and Asylum Seekers: Emotional Literacy, Rhetorical Leadership and Human Rights', Cultural Studies Re-