There continues to be plenty of sloppy thinking on asylum seekers from all parties to the debate, if that’s the word, over the government’s efforts to restart offshore processing. It reached a new peak over the weekend when Labor’s proposed amendments to route around the High Court’s judgment were attacked for failing to pay sufficient heed to Australia’s international humanitarian obligations, or to requirements closer to home, like natural justice.
The first policy priority for a rational, civilised government must be to minimise the risk of people dying trying to reach here. I suggested some measures to that end, involving big rises in our humanitarian intake and a lot more assistance to the UNHCR, last week. That priority should override everything else, including sterile debates about onshore versus offshore processing, whether Australia is meeting its humanitarian obligations or whether lawyers and judges like the government’s amendments to the Migration Act. But that priority is not necessarily inconsistent with some of those goals. It should be possible for Australia to fulfil its humanitarian obligations while minimising the risk to life. Merely “stopping the boats” is not a coherent policy.
If you think onshore processing has no impact on the decision of desperate asylum seekers, whom the UNHCR has been unable to place, to risk a journey to Australia, then you can advocate for a return to onshore processing in good conscience. If you accept there’s a chance it will increase the risk people will try to get here by boat, you have to propose an alternative policy. Otherwise, you’re not offering any sort of moral argument.
There’s plenty of the latter at the moment.
We know what doesn’t work to reduce the risk of people getting in boats. Temporary Protection Visas don’t work. In fact, they actually encourage people to get in boats. TPVs aren’t just an amoral policy, they’re an outright evil, because we know what they lead to. Make your own conclusions about anyone who offers TPVs as a serious policy.
And we know that mandatory detention doesn’t work, if it ever did. We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep asylum seekers in detention in the belief that detention provides some form of deterrent value. Maybe that worked in the mid-1990s. If it did, it didn’t for very long, as the massive surge in maritime arrivals in 1999 and 2000 demonstrated. Why do we retain mandatory detention beyond the period necessary to screen asylum seekers? And how can the government criticise Nauru as expensive and ineffective when exactly the same criticism can be made of mandatory detention? Labor can’t have it both ways. Either mandatory detention is a dud on the same basis that Nauru is, or it works and justifies the huge amount of money taxpayers spend on it. There’s no evidence for the latter.
And we know that Nauru doesn’t work, for the same reason that mandatory detention doesn’t work: if you face years in limbo awaiting the uncertain prospect of UNHCR resettlement, the idea of spending a year or longer on Nauru before certain resettlement in Australia or another developed country is, like the idea of spending a year on Christmas Island, unlikely to deter you taking the risk.
And we know that turning boats around doesn’t work, because the Howard government abandoned that policy in the face of bloodymindedness from people smugglers and asylum seekers themselves in scuppering boats.
We do know that a heavy investment in policing and intelligence resources in Indonesia has some disruptive effect on people smuggling networks, although how much remains unclear to the public.
All parties have individual elements of workable policies. The Greens want to increase our humanitarian intake to 20,000. Labor has been moving families out of mandatory detention and believes transfer offshore will deter boat arrivals. All sides appear to support continuing to invest resources in disrupting people smuggling networks. The Coalition, however, insists on policies in other areas that have been demonstrated not to work. It even continues to insist turning boats around is a viable policy.
But the basic question for anyone wanting to participate in this debate is, how will you try to minimise the chances that desperate asylum seekers, facing years of limbo while awaiting resettlement, will risk their lives to get here? If you don’t have a rigorous answer to that question, you can criticise the government’s amendments all you like, but you’re not serious about the morality of our asylum seeker policy.
The alternative to discouraging people using boats to get here, to my mind, would be making it safer to use a boat to come here. To me it seems the largest contributing factor to making these journeys safe is the criminalisation of people smuggling. Restricting the trade to people who are willing to break the law, and disrupting their networks such that they have to be more secretive are not going to be conducive to the smugglers providing and maintaining safe vessels for the journey.
Solutions could involve just decriminalising people smuggling and hoping the lowered barriers to entry saw competition on safety, through to a licencing and sea-worthiness registration system. Incentive could also be provided by service payments for people delivered who are found to have legitimate refugee claims.
People have been moving and trading between SE Asia and Aust for millennia.
Alas, one of the sadder (unintended?) consequences of the current practice,
mandatory confiscation and destruction of boats, is the fact that they’ll only set off in the leakiest and most unseaworthy vessels.
Bernard – most refugees who get on boats do so in Indonesia. If a refugee is intent on getting to Australia they make their way to Indonesia. When they get there they must register with the UNHCR who tell them that resettlement in Australia may take up to 12 years. If you are a refugee with young children that is all their schooling years in Indonesia. That’s why they get on boats. What say we make an agreement with the Indonesians and the UNHCR to process their applications fairly IN Indonesia and then when they are recognised as refugees, they fly to Australia to start their new life. No risky boat journey. No mandatory detention. Current figures show that there are 811 registered refugees in Indonesia with 2071 waiting in the pipeline for processing. The figure of around 2000 refugees awaiting processing in Indonesia has been stable for some number of years. Friends who are refugee advocates formulated this plan after discussion with refugees who came to Australia by boat. When asked if this plan was in place when they were in Indonesia they said they would not have paid to get on a boat.
Maybe we could have a DIAC ferry service from Indonesia to Christmas Island. All asylum seekers would need to do is turn up at the boat, no identification necessary and be whisked safely to their new life in Australia by navy personnel.
A meme which has popped up with renewed vigour in the last few days is that, ‘people smugglers enrich themselves on the basis of other people’s misery’.
I fail to see how this makes people smugglers any different from Australian doctors and, in some instances, lawyers. They also charge a fee whilst offering a service intended to alleviate suffering. Why is the one reprehensible and the other saintly?
Can anyone make a case that there is a moral difference between a private sector surgeon and a people smuggler?