Abstract  In 2001, the Australian government implemented the Pacific Solution, which is known today as Operation Sovereign Borders. This policy is designed to hold asylum-seekers arriving by boat to Australia on Pacific islands that are geographically and politically external to Australia, keeping them in what is commonly known as offshore processing and detention centers. This thesis examines the way in which these offshore processing detention centers are portrayed in the media and provides a comparative study between Australian and international publications through qualitative text analysis of the consistently occurring themes in news coverage of the issue. The importance of the thesis originates from the previous lack of international media coverage and criticism revolving around the offshore processing detention centers.

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In October 2016 the newspaper the Guardian published an interactive database online with classified incident reports from an Australian overseas asylum seeker processing centre on the island republic of Nauru. The incident reports describe events that occurred within the Nauru Regional Processing Centre and this collection of over 2000 documents were given the name of “Nauru Files”. By using Nick Haslam's dehumanisation theory this thesis aimed to analyse the Nauru Files to find if the documents present evidence of animalistic and/or mechanistic dehumanisation. Upon reviewing the Nauru Files the author found four overacting themes; (1) deteriorating mental health for asylum seekers; (2) sexual assault, abusive behaviour and misbehaviour by staff, (3) incidents involving children and (4) misrepresentation of information. Furthermore, the evidence connected with these themes within the incident reports indicates dehumanisation, mainly mechanistic - meaning asylum seekers were deprived of aspects of humanness and were repeatedly treated as objects. Related to the Nauru Files a closer review of Australian immigration policies was conducted. The results show that the dehumanisation that is evident in the Nauru Files can be considered to be a product of Australia's long history of systematic dehumanisation of asylum seekers from non-European countries.