Given the bizarre circumstances that gave birth to this minority government of ours, we should’ve anticipated some surprising policy outcomes. But this is up there with the weirdest.
After over a decade of watching our two main parties politicise the issue of asylum seekers who arrive by boat, we are actually waking up to a new era of onshore processing — against the wishes of both mainstream parties — and not only that, horror of horrors, letting more people into the community, providing bridging visas and granting them limited work rights.
The government has been quietly shifting asylum seekers into community detention for months now. But now they have to own that fact. It’s a strange and sad state of affairs when a government feels compelled to keep hush hush on a compassionate and highly effective policy — they’d say it was to ensure that a signal wasn’t sent to people smugglers, but there’s also politics at play.
We don’t doubt Bowen’s conviction on proposing a policy that he genuinely believes, and has been advised, will deter people smugglers and therefore save lives being risked at sea. But there is a great degree of self-justification after the fact at play here — more on the part of his prime minister. The moment Julia Gillard stood on board a coastal watch boat with David Bradbury for a photo op she put politics first when it comes to dealing with this diabolical policy problem.
Politics is at the heart of quietly slipping people into the community, politics is at the heart of treating people who arrive by boat differently to people who arrive by plane — and now, somehow, despite the best efforts of both major parties, politics has been taken out of the picture.
Both parties have their binoculars trained on the distant horizon — for essentially the same reason. They both want to blame each other for the next influx of boats.
To rest your political fate over an arbitrary number of boats that rises on the whims of domestic policy but, more importantly, the whims of global conflict, famine and natural disaster, is folly for both parties.
But they’re not just pinning their political fate on the cycles of global conflict and disaster — equally they’re pinning it on the whims of public sentiment. So as the parties wait and watch for the boats, the onus is on the public to show they are unconcerned by the idea of these people living and working within the community. That’s the only way to truly and irrevocably purge the politics from our global commitment to accept the right of people to seek asylum.
Through whatever means it took, our major political parties have ensured an outcome for Australia that is one that we can finally be proud off. While clearly unintended, this is a great day for the nation. The humane treatment of asylum seekers on-shore and a commitment to being rapidly processed. Fantastic! While we are at it, let’s keep the commitment to bringing an additional 4000 people from Malaysia too. It is in our interests to do so AND it is the right thing to do. It will also take ‘demand’ away from the people smugglers. Simultaneously, let’s address the big issue of people smugglers cramming unsafe boats with desperate people by increasing the funding to ASIO activities and other such agencies to work with Indonesian authorities to crack-down on these dispicable people preying on human suffering.
To my mind this result is proof enough of the value we can get from hung parliaments. A dog of a policy was rejected and decent treatment of refugees ensued. Surely that is what we want parliaments to do. Legislating for executive control so as to avert parliamentary oversight was always a bad idea which should not have ben passed.
There ARE NO FRIGGING PEOPLE SMUGGLERS.
I think Charlie Pickering said it best last night on 7pm implying that the government finally came around to onshore processing without garnering any of the goodwill it could have received.
DavidK re hung parliaments. Couldn’t agree more.
In recent years 99% of asylum seekers arrived by air. Latest figures (2010) show 56% arrived by air and more air arrivals than boat arrivals fail the refugee test. Send Tony in his high visibility vest to stop the planes!