By common agreement, Australia’s political impasse on boat-borne asylum seekers is increasing the number of people risking their lives to come here. As a result, people are dying.
Onshore processing, which is the Greens’ policy, has become the de facto Australian government policy because of the intransigence of the Coalition and the Greens, and the High Court’s overruling of the government’s Malaysian deal. Plainly, it doesn’t work in deterring asylum seekers from attempting to reach here by boat. Some form of offshore processing, under which asylum seekers who reach Australia by boat don’t have any guarantee of being resettled in Australia, is the only seemingly effective solution.
This rules out Nauru, which is onshore processing by another name. Short of leaving asylum seekers permanently locked up on Nauru, or finding other countries to take them, Nauru is simply a transit point to Australia, like Christmas Island is.
Nor do temporary protection visas work. Indeed, the evidence is they only encourage more families to attempt to reach Australia by boat. Only the ignorant or the immoral can argue for temporary protection visas.
Nor does a policy of turning the boats back to Indonesia, which even the Coalition struggles to credibly maintain is a serious option.
In the absence of workable, moral policies from the Greens and the Coalition, the government has offered a suite of policies — transferring asylum seekers to Malaysia to remove the incentive to come by boat, increasing Australia’s humanitarian intake so there is a little less pressure on the alleged “queue” in refugee camps in the region, providing additional funding to the UNHCR to help it increase its rate of resettlement of those unable to travel by boat. The much-maligned Chris Bowen has also begun the process of removing families from mandatory detention, another policy that was plainly not working as a deterrent.
For all the calls of bipartisanship and the need to find a solution in the aftermath of the latest boat sinking, the risk is that public pressure will see Parliament reach for a solution that simply won’t work — like Nauru. This issue needs a policy resolution, not a political resolution. Or more people will continue to perish because Australia’s politicians prefer putting political advantage over human life.
Clearly the solution is to not only allow them to come but to actively assist them so as they don’t risk their lives in perilous ocean crossings in boats ill equipped for such journeys.
There is no hope for a solution, the lnp want to capitalise on this as much as they can, there will be no letup.The zealous laborites should give it up methinks. The greens’ stance has been laying out the red carpet for lord Tony to storm in as PM. It will lead to the dismantling of the vast environmental reform policies when Tony assumes power, and to the resurrection of the nasty destructive policy and demonisation against asylum seekers from a ruthless lnp government. The foxy greens can try to prevent the repeal of the carbon tax by creating as many compensation clauses as they want, but tony doesn’t care because he likes to give tax payers’ money to business anyway.
It’s one thing to have principle but it is another to know how to formulate workable effective policy which incorporates the principle, leading the discussion and take the people along with you. Being in denial and being dismissive of populace’s justifiable widely shared concerns about the broken policy that leads to incentives, enabling many more people to risk their lives, thus driving the heartless profiteering people smuggling trade resulting in higher fatality rate, and creating an inequitable system for those who have the money to buy the travel package from the people smugglers which consequently crowds out the humanitarian resettlement quota and reduces the chance of resettlement for those refugees awaiting in camps as a result is not leading the debate, it is being arrogant and destructive to the refugees in the long run. There is no two way dialogues with the public shown from the greens on this topic, they’d been ramming it down people’s throat in the same manner as the oppositions’ stance on refugees, except that the opposition is capitalising on fear and it is easy for them to make tremendous gain from it.
There’s no net benefit from the current policy as it does not increase the number of refugees given a new life in Australia due to the constraint of the annual quota, but it leads to more negative consequence instead, increasing a net lost of lives at sea and more financial cost to deal with the whole situation. One must take into consideration the unknown number of boats missing and lives lost at seas. One must also realise that it is impossible for the rescue team to be able to rescue people always, when the weather is too dangerous for them to carry out the mission, and the rough sea can swallow asylum seekers’ boats in an instance long before rescue team can get to them, even more devastating is when it occurs in difficult condition at night . Being welcoming to refugees should not override the prudent concern for the safety of asylum seekers during the boat journey, the promotion of both discourses is essential for a responsible, civilised, compassionate and humane society. The reckless dismissal of people’s genuine concern for the safety and the treatments of refugees, by the greens and the lnp respectively, is the precipitation for a divided disharmonious society. Surprisingly, the alp is not the one being dismissive but they are caught in the middle trying to find a fair and balanced approach -although it is also part of their strategy to differentiate their policy and political stance – while there’s no goodwill avail from the other parties.
It was rather amusing to hear the greens’ proposition for the solution is that what we need to do is to go after the “big fish” people smugglers. There are billions of fish in the seas, big or small they will multiply to billions more no matter how many you catch, just like the war on drugs this exercise has become. That is just as delusional as the lnp, calling boat people ‘illegals’, picking on them for not having papers as if somehow asylum seekers who come through the airports with documents are anymore legitimate and are more genuine. In this day and age, all one needs is money and connections to get all the papers required and the travel package from the people traffickers; and know how to play the game to beat the system. It does not matter if they come here with documents by plane, or if they are picked from the camps there will be disputable refugees in the mix (with some exceptions where the camps are immediate to the war zones which the refugees are fleeing from), migrants claiming to be refugees have been occuring since the fifties. Many of them are people who tried to escape from the dreary lives under totalitarian or oppressive regimes although they were not in danger of persecution, and a few are economic migrants. Anyhow, it is rather sad to see the lnp and the greens in denial and twisting the narrative to suit their political purpose.
Unfortunately, the refugee law created in the 50’s did not anticipate dynamics of the massive refugee movements intertwining with other types of migrations the world is facing today. There is no elaborate queuing system, no resource for on ground investigation into people’s claims by the UN and the recipient nations, no formalised workable system of to deal with refugees in transit countries. Such grave administrative structural deficiency is leading to an increase in the proportion of disputable refugees and economic migrants amongst asylum seekers arriving by both air and seas since they are more financially equipped to acquire the travel package from the people traffickers, whereas those awaiting in camps cannot work to save up money and are less likely to have the resources to buy the travel package. But hey, I would do the same thing if I was in their situation in order to get out of the hole of the countries they were in, and if I can smuggle genuine refugees into Australia safely I would do it for free.
I don’t expect to see the politicians showing humility anytime soon. If either labor’s or the opposition’s policy is enforced it is bound to fail. The people smugglers can crack the Malaysian solution unless the government don’t limit the swap number to 800 people. If they adopt the Nauru solution instead it will also be broken by the people smugglers unless the processing time on Nauru is so long that it will make no sense for asylum seekers to make the trip. A combination of both Malaysia and Nauru solutions might have some chance of success but unfortunately the end of the impasse is nowhere in sight. One way to break the the impasse is to leave the politics behind and nominate a bipartisan committee, 2 from each party, alp, nats, libs and greens to work on new policy with the advise from the immigration and the intelligence departments.
The greens are now starting to talk about a regional solution, but they still insist on Indonesia and Malaysia to sign the UN convention ignoring the fact that Indonesia and Malaysia were parties to a regional solution with Australia and Thailand during the Fraser and Hawke years which worked well despite the fact that they never did sign the convention. They seem to want both the regional co-operation and on-shore processing at the same time, but I am afraid it will not work this time around like it did during the Fraser and the Hawke years. The people smugglers will continue to supply travel packages in high demand by people who want to get to Australia quicker which is the real reason for such large number of boat arrivals, but unlike the Vietnamese refugees who captained their boats and were normally the owners themselves escaping with their family and tried to ensure as best they could to have safe and not overloaded boat, the heartless profiteering people smugglers could not care less about people’s lives; it is incredibly insulting to Oskar Schindler’s memory to have these sharks compared to him. A regional processing centre can have some impact if other wealthy nations also get involved and share a decent load of resettlement burden and lessen the waiting time, but they will unlikely be taking many refugees from there as they also have to deal with their own refugees and immigration problems.
The only hope for labor is a mega economic performance and by some miracle Rupert and his minions decide to back the alp, or some major climate change event occurs which validates the urgency for environmental policy reforms where Tony can’t present an alternative, but I would not put my money on this. I don’t think the 30% hardcore alp supporters will forgive the greens so easily and turn into greens supporters after the next election. The greens will also find it difficult to expand their base since it is unlikely that those wealthy-wannabe swinging voters will switch from the lnp to the greens. Be prepared for the long ‘barren years’, as they call it, to come back again.
Well there is one solution…change the migration act and remove ourselves from the UN Refugee convention. It was designed after world war 2 when war was a global affair and not appropriate for today’s localised conflicts.
If we did that, we would then be able to send asylum seekers to Malaysia under a bilateral agreement without having to have the necessary safe guards of sending asylum seekers to a “safe” country. Would be totally legal. We could still receive legitimate refugees from non-signatories to the convention as well (like Malaysia) as they also will not have to have the burden of having to send to a “safe” country. So the swap of legitimate refugees for boat people could occur as per the original agreement.
But there would be a black lash internationally from the NFP’s (like Amnesty International). Morally, it’s a bit grey. But if you want a solution that will ultimately save lives, that’s one of them.
Let them in.
Or at least don’t seize and destroy the boats involved in bringing people here, as the current policy actively discourages people assisting refugees to use boats of any value (and hence seaworthiness).
And stop contributing to illegal wars that encourage people to flee their homeland.
On Sunday an Iranian asylum seeker rang me from Indonesia in distress because his friend was on the boat and he believed that he must have drowned.
In the same call he told me that he intended getting on a boat ” to try very soon”. He told me that he had no other choice, that he had lost faith in the UNHCR process.
This man spent 2011 locked up in an Indonesian detention centre waiting for UNHCR to come and interview him. He told me in June 2011 that 53 people had paid the guards bribes and been allowed to escape but that he would wait and do it the right way. He was finally interviewed after 10 months and released this year to a hostel. Now six months later he says that he is going to try his luck on a boat even though he knows the risk becasue “this is my only chance.”
This is our current policy in action. We are funding UNHCR in Canberra and Jakarta to take up to 12 months to do the first interview of a person in detention in Indonesia, then up to another 12 months to give a decision. During this time people see those who have been found to be refugees waiting years for resettlement. This model does not work and puts people on boats. Time to change.
Putting the AFP in Indonesia has not worked. they cant stop the boats. Replace them with Immigration officers and assess the claims, Processing claims off shore in Indonesia AND RESETTLING people in a timely and orderly way. This would improve our relations within the region as they would see that Australia the wealthy, politically stable neighbour was carrying its weight rather than trying to shunt asylum seekers onto their impoverished, populous neighbours.
Reducing the number of boats would also reduce the current hysteria about refugees which is so destructive to the fabric of this multicultural nation. Also allow their stories to be told so that Australians understand why people are coming. Most would be sympathetic if they understood.
Most importantly lives would be saved and “the people smugglers business model” would be undermined and replaced by an orderly formal program of resettlement. Right now there are hundreds of people assembled and desperate for a boat on the south coast of Indonesia. The agents are unscrupulous in telling these people that they will be travelling on safe boats. The boats are selected on the basis that they will be burnt on arrival so they are literally on their last voyage and dangerously unseaworthy.
Some will say that this would be a”pull” factor and of course other measures would have to be put in place to mitigate against this. Australia is more likely to get cooperation from our neighbours if we demonstrate a willingness to burden share commensurate with our economic and political position.
The current situation is a dog’s breakfast. The AFP, operating all over Indonesia, know these places, know the agents, they know when boats are leaving and they are powerless to stop it. The Indonesian police and military are benefiting from the bribes. This is a dirty business and no one has clean hands including successive Australian governments who set the conditions which make entry by dangerous boat journey the only means of knocking on the door and asking for shelter.
The Malaysia solution does not even make sense so it is not worth discussing. Nauru is just more of the same- lock them up at great expense to the Australian taxpayer and then bring them to Australia when they are mentally and physically ill.