I have shown how references to German concentration camps were used to object to the policy and practice of immigration detention in Australia. This discursive shortcut reflected the high emotion surrounding the issue in the first years of the twenty-first century. By connecting the two forms of incarceration, members of the public were able to articulate, in shorthand, their objections to the Howard Government’s immigration policies. The comparison also made detention centres seem exceptional to the normal workings of the Australian nation-state when, in fact, many forms of administrative detention in Australian history have performed similar social and political functions.

In his social history of incarceration in the United States, David Rothman stresses the importance of positioning it in a historical context.^[40] To do so, he explains, reveals a continuity between carceral practices that might be forgotten when examining specific instances. Since the ‘invention’ of the penitentiary, the insane asylum and the almshouse in the early nineteenth century, incarceration has been an ‘enduring’ feature of the modern nation-state. Rothman explains how incarceration, as a political solution to a social problem, is reinvented to fit each social circumstance.

Concentration camps in Germany, like immigration detention centres in Australia, were a government solution to the ‘problem’ of certain categories of people. As in the case of the other forms of administrative detention explored in this chapter, people were incarcerated not because of what they had done, but because of who they were. By controlling who had membership to the community, all these forms of administrative detention were intimately connected with the nation-state.

Ultimately, though, the study of administrative detention in the Australian context can facilitate a far more comprehensive understanding of the contemporary policy and practice of immigration detention than can be achieved by making the comparison with German concentration camps. Throughout Australia’s history, administrative detention has been used to manage social and geographical boundaries. This has involved the classification of people into social groups, the identification of some of these groups as outsiders to Australian society and the attempt to regulate these groups.

Immigration detention is not a new solution invented to solve a particular social problem. Neither is the social problem unique to our times. Rather, immigration detention is best understood as a reinvention, a recycling, of an old solution to a perennial issue. Recognition of this continuity, however, does not mean that incarceration is an inevitable part of our social and political landscape. For Rothman, the knowledge that carceral systems have been recycled and reused to respond to particular social situations encourages us to experiment with new solutions: ‘We need not remain trapped in inherited answers.’^[41]