“Stay where you are, don't move”, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard warned the asylum seekers in Indonesia and Malaysia waiting to board boats to come to Australia as she introduced a new legislation to deter asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boats.
The legislation, Migration Legislation Amendment Bill passed from the upper house of the parliament on 17 August and has the backing of the ruling Australian Labor Party and the opposition Liberal-National Coalition. Asylum seekers arriving by boat will now be deported to the remote Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for offshore detention.
The new policy, dubbed Pacific Solution 2.0, will come into effect less than five years after the Labor Party led by the then incumbent Kevin Rudd, dismantled an infamously similar immigration regime. The current Prime Minister had described the previous plan as inhumane and ineffective but has now taken a U-turn on her previous stance. The backflip has come about after a panel of government appointed so-called experts, specifically tasked to come up with a plan to deter asylum seekers, recommended that the processing centres on Nauru and PNG’s Manus Island be reopened.
The new measures, described by the former Australia Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser as racist and even harsher than the previous plan, also includes recommendations to increase Australia’s annual humanitarian refugee intake from 13750 to 20000, and a so-called no-advantage-test where those processed in the centres would be detained for the same period of time as they would have been processed through a proper United Nations channel. Retired Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, the head of the so-called expert panel termed the recommendations as "hard-headed but not hard-hearted”.
The Prime Minister and the Immigration Minister echoed Houston’s comments. The opposition termed the new approach a vindication of their long argued view that only a return to the punitive terms of the original Pacific Solution could destroy the so-called business model of the people smugglers and deter the asylum seekers from boarding the boats.
The Greens, the only major party to have consistently opposed offshore processing of asylum seekers, said the policy would dump asylum seekers out of sight, out of mind: "This is about a policy that strips out legal protections in Australian law”. The new policy drew the immediate ire of eminent Australian human rights experts and refugee advocacy groups. Refugee advocate Pamela Curr rejected government’s claims that the new legislation was about saving people’s lives: "They don't give a damn about people's rights or people's health".
Former Australian diplomat and refugee advocate Bruce Haigh says that the new legislation has everything to do with the political desperation of the government and the opposition, and nothing to do about the asylum seekers or the people smugglers: “If they were serious about preventing asylum seekers from boarding unseaworthy boats, they would open processing centres in Indonesia, in Peshawar and in Quetta in Pakistan.”
The passage of the bill through the House of Representatives ends years of political deadlock over the issue of asylum seekers. As small as the percentage of people arriving by boat may be, the major parties have always maintained a position of exaggerating and exploiting the issue for political gains. With the next elections just around the corner, the incumbent Prime Minister and the Australian Labor Party have historically low approval ratings and all projections show that they will lose the next elections due to be held in 2013.
The scale of ALP’s backflip on the issue of asylum seekers and the speed with which legislation has been drafted and pushed through the parliament, shows that the government is desperate to regain lost ground by one upping the opposition on a deeply controversial issue.
Intensive misinformation campaigns and xenophobia have led some in the community to believe that the country is being swarmed by boat people, although air travel has for long been the preferred mode of travel for a overwhelming majority of the asylum seekers.
The negative tone of the public debate is dotted with slogans like “fuck off, we are full”, “no to asylum shoppers”, “sink them or send them back” and so on. Politicians and pundits often refer to asylum seekers as illegals or queue jumpers, words that have entered everyday lexicon in Australia.
These politicians and pundits are well aware that under Article 14(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is not illegal to claim asylum even if arriving by boat, and that there are no queues for people wanting to seek asylum in Australia. In addition to that, the detachment of the public narrative from ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Middle East has resulted in a lack of information about the people coming to Australia by boat.
Although Australia is an active party to the conflict in Afghanistan, the adverse political narrative at home has prevented the public opinion from being sympathetic to the plight of the people fleeing the Taliban and other extremist groups. Government and the opposition have swiftly exploited this apathy for electoral gains.
The government’s new bill is anything but new. It is a repeat of Prime Minister John Howard’s infamous offshore immigration regime that remained in place from 2001 to 2007. The opposition has been vocal about their claims that their regime stopped the flow of boats in the years after 2001.
This is simply not true. At the very same time, many European countries also experience similar falls in the number of asylum seekers, despite having no similar regime in place. The primary reason behind the end of boats was fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, following which millions of Afghan refugees returned home.
The previous Pacific Solution left asylum seekers stranded on remote Pacific Islands for many years. The immigration regime led by the Prime Minister John Howard and the immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock, made the offshore detention centres out of bound for journalists, lawyers, refugee advocates and anyone deemed undesirable to the intentions of the government.
Of the 1,153 asylum seekers locked up for up to 4 years on Nauru under the first Pacific Solution, a majority were found to be refugees. 705 were eventually resettled in Australia, 401 in New Zealand and many more in Canada and Northern Europe. A large number of detainees developed depression and mental health issues as a result of long-term detention.
One asylum seeker died while in detention on the island. Of those who returned, Edmund Rice Centre for Human Rights reports that at least 9 men may have been killed in Afghanistan, 39 were in perilous conditions, and three children of the returnees are confirmed to have been killed.
Contrary to the claims of the government, the new legislation will neither save lives at sea, nor destroy the business model of the people smugglers. Under the new measures, asylum seekers will still be making the boat journey to Australia but will then be escorted to the offshore centres.
They fail to take into account that the majority of asylum seekers have no idea about the dangers of the sea and the conditions of their mode of transport, until they are aboard the boats and in the middle of the sea. The dire situation faced by the asylum seekers in Malaysia and Indonesia rarely makes it to the news in Australia.
The policy and the so-called experts, fail to take into proper consideration the circumstances that force asylum seekers to board rickety boats in search of asylum. For instance, the possibility of indefinite detention will still be safer and more desirable than the possibilities of death for Hazara asylum seekers from Pakistan, Tamils from Sri Lanka and Rohingya asylum seekers from Burma. Facing inhumane immigration regimes is still more desirable than facing the Taliban.
The entire reason why the so-called boat-people exist is the lack of accessibility to alternative means. Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran have lived in limbo for decades and there are no queues for them to apply for asylum in Australia. Australia visa remains out of bounds for the ordinary refugee, who has lived all his life as a refugee and has no identification documents. It is simply not possible for them to gain a tourist or student visa and upon reaching Australia, apply for asylum, like most asylum seekers do.
Waiting for years and years in a refugee camp in Indonesia offers no hope either. At the end of June this year, there were 4,766 asylum seekers and 1,219 refugees registered with the UNHCR in Indonesia. Of these, only 60 have so far been resettled in Australian so far in 2012. This inherent problem with the immigration regimes of recipient nations has itself created the niche market for people smuggling. As such, the no-advantage tests and claims of getting people to use regular means are rendered meaningless.
Finally, it is difficult to see why such a small number of asylum seekers, a vast majority of whom have been proven to be of refugees, are such a dominant feature of the public debate. Arrivals by boat represent only about 2 per cent of the total annual migration to Australia, and the number of arrivals in Australia is nowhere near the levels in other industrialized nations.
Graham Thom of Amnesty International is on the mark in stating that the new policy penalizes people solely based on their mode of arrival: "We are only talking about people who come by boat, we're not talking about the thousands of people who come by plane and seek asylum in this country.
What we are doing is penalizing one particular group and actually taking them to a very remote place where we know they've been damaged in the past and holding them hostage to stop other people from coming." Coming to Australia on unseaworthy boats is not a lifestyle choice; in fact it is a manifestation of lack of choices. The people who risk their lives out of despair and lack of alternatives – many asylum seekers have been refugees for decades before boarding a boat to Australia.
The Australian government and their so-called experts need to understand this fact. This is a multi-dimensional and complex issue and it should not be reduced to a cluster of political sound-bites for the sake of electoral gain, otherwise, the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world will be put into jeopardy.