Fleeing from tolerance
Every
nation heralds its self-selected qualities like free speech, faith and honesty
– though not all are grounded on facts.
Australia’s honor roll once included ‘Fair Go’.
This supposedly meant that newcomers who toiled
tenaciously and hugged Aussie values would not be held back, for the Lucky
Country has long been welcoming migrants – currently 190,000 annually.
Last year’s census shows almost half its 24 million
population was either born overseas or Mom or Dad came from abroad. Traditionally that was Europe; now it’s Asia.
They’ve arrived by air with wanted skills and valid
visas. A handful chose a different route. In the past they were accommodated. In 1975 when North Vietnam defeated the
United States and its allies – including Australia - thousands fled the South
by boat.
Some made it to the promised land. One mixed group handed Customs officers a
letter: ‘Help us live in Australia …we shall keep Australian law, will be
goodman. (sic)’
Others went to camps like Indonesia’s Pulau
Galang. During the next two decades 150,000
Vietnamese resettled in Australia.
That compassion was further enhanced following the 1989
Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy activists in Beijing. Policy
was made on the spot when then Prime Minister Bob Hawke tearfully offered
asylum to 42,000 Chinese students who feared return.
Australia was clearly a haven for the persecuted. This encouraged others fleeing conflict in
Iraq, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and elsewhere to head for the Great South Land.
Now the harbors are barred. Hopefuls paying people smugglers to ferry
them from the archipelago to Australia’s north are turned back or sent to
detention camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
This shift from acceptance to rejection has been
examined by historian Dr Claire Higgins in Asylum
by Boat, just published by the University of New South Wales Press.
It comes with the former Australian Human Rights
Commissioner Gillian Triggs commenting that the policy has moved from ‘humanity
to inhumanity’. Maybe, but it’s widely
popular with an electorate fearing Asia’s mega millions will flood the island
continent and destroy the occupants’ First World lifestyles.
The hard liners are more diplomatic, reminding
voters concerned at the damage to Australia’s image that being tough saves
lives; more than a thousand have drowned after rickety fishing boats sank.
The other argument runs that ‘queue jumpers’ should
not take places reserved for proven refugees patiently waiting in camps
elsewhere. Last year Australia took 17,500 under its ‘humanitarian program’.
Governments claim policy making is
deliberative. Not with Australian responses
to asylum seekers. By 2001 so many were sailing south that a crisis was looming
in an election year.
Suddenly political salvation: The
Norwegian freighter Tampa rescued 438
asylum seekers from a sinking hulk and tried to land them in Australia. Instead
they were sent to Nauru.
The then Prime Minister John
Howard accelerated new laws to ‘determine
who will enter and reside in Australia’. Although tagged the ‘Pacific Solution’ it clearly wasn’t as the boats kept coming. The number peaked in 2013
with 300.
So the chauvinistically titled ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ was launched
with ‘zero tolerance’ to the dismay of human rights activists. Since then 30 boats have been turned
back, the last in March this year. In August six Chinese men who landed on an Australian
island near PNG were flown home.
Through her research into the background of these
shifts and shunts Higgins has found nine options proposed by ministerial
advisers which clearly show that policy making was adrift.
These included a bizarre revenge-motivated plan to tell the ‘governments of Thailand,
Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia that we will put the entry of their
nationals, including students, on to a quota and for every refugee that comes,
one is dropped off the quota’,
A second madcap idea was to tie up the boats under
quarantine till the passengers got fed up and sailed away to who knows where. Did anyone consider that the desperate might scuttle
the boats?
Another notion
suggested treating the new arrivals ‘almost as lepers, segregating them
in special camps and giving them minimal standards of support’. Centres like
those in Thailand and Malaysia (where conditions are said to be primitive) were
mooted
Eventually deals were done with Nauru and PNG to
warehouse the asylum seekers till they either go home or get resettled
elsewhere. There are currently about 1,300; most are men and some have been
held for more than three years. A similar number, including children are in
camps on Australian soil, mainly Christmas Island. The US has just agreed to
take 50 under a deal pre-dating Donald Trump’s election.
Malaysia has more than 150,000 refugees and asylum
seekers registered with the UN High Commission for Refugees, Indonesia a tenth
of that number.
Refugee advocates remind that Germany has taken
more than a million and Chancellor Angela Merkel has survived the political
backlash. They believe Australian detainees are so few that just being
compassionate could solve the problem, The Government says going soft would
revive people smuggling.
Higgins interviewed former Liberal Party leader
Malcolm Fraser for her book. In a
response revealing the paucity of policy the late PM asked the academic: ‘What
else could you do?’
‘It is as relevant as ever,’ she writes. ‘The other
answers to that question have been implemented, but not in a way that addresses
the needs of vulnerable people and Australia’s international responsibilities.’
For Australian politicians the ‘Pacific Solution’
is messy, possibly illegal but a crowd pleaser.
It’s also costly: AUD 5 billion so far plus AUD 70 million compensation to Manus detainees for allegedly holding
them in dangerous and damaging conditions.
Absent is any coordinated international approach despite an
available forum - the Bali Process on
People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime.
(See Strategic Review 24 March 2017).
So each
country handles the issue their way according to the whims of local politics. The
‘Fair Go’ tag has passed its use-by date.
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