Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Asylum Seekers: the Silencing of Accounting and Accountability in Offshore Detention Centres

This paper examines how accounting can both entrench and challenge an inhumane and costly neoliberal policy—namely, the Australian government’s offshore detention of asylum seekers. Drawing on Bruff, Rethinking Marxism 26:113–129 (2014) and Smith, Competition & Change 23:192–217 (2019), we acknowledge that the neoliberalism underpinning immigration policies and the practices related to asylum seekers takes an authoritarian tone. Through the securitisation and militarisation of the border, the Australian state politicises and silences marginalised social groups such as asylum-seekers. Studies have exposed accounting as a technology that upholds neoliberalism by representing policy as objective and factual. Curiously, there has been a wilful intention by successive Australian governments to silence the accounting for offshore detention. We seek to demystify this unaccounting and unaccountability by exploring counter-accounts produced by meso-level organisations that support asylum seekers. We apply a close-reading method in analysing limited governmental accounts and various counter-accounts to demonstrate how counter-accounts give visibility to practices that an authoritarian neoliberal regime has obfuscated. We also reflect on the potential for counter-accounting to foster broader social change by holding the Australian government accountable to moral and ethical standards of care for human life. This paper considers the intersections between accounting and authoritarian neoliberalism and presents counter-accounts as mechanisms that can challenge these neoliberal norms.