This is the truth;
Further down the wrong track By @JulianBurnside Julian Burnside #AsylumSeekers #refugees this is #Australia #Auspol
It is clear enough that the revived Pacific Solution has not stopped the boats: it has not even slowed them.
In 2002 the boats stopped, some months after Pacific Solution Mk I was introduced. The supp
orters
of the policy said that it was the Pacific Solution that stopped the
boats: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. In 2012 boat arrival rates increased
after Pacific Solution Mk II was introduced. By the same logic we
could argue that the Pacific Solution caused arrival rates to increase.
Bob Carr has since said that the arrival rates would have been higher but for Pacific Solution Mk II. It is difficult to argue against that species of logic, beyond saying that it sheds light on the frontier which optimism shares with desperation.
Chris Bowen yesterday announced some running repairs on Pacific Solution Mk II. Because Nauru and Manus Island between them have no chance of taking the people who have arrived here by boat since the new policy was introduced (much less accommodating them for five years - the “no advantage” principle at work), people will be allowed into the Australian community on bridging visas, but they will not be allowed to work and they will have to wait for five years (the “no advantage” principle again).
While this announcement will, for a while, prevent the Pacific Solution from imploding, it just takes us further down the wrong track.
Almost everything that has happened in refugee policy over the past 11 years has been informed and supported by dishonest rhetoric. Specifically, calling boat people “illegals” and “queue-jumpers” is not only false, it is calculated to prejudice the public against a tiny group of weak, vulnerable people who deserve our help, not our hatred.
The poison was started by John Howard, but it is still streaked through the Coalition rhetoric. Earlier this week Tony Abbott shamelessly referred to boat-people as “illegals”, and spoke of them entering Australia “illegally”. Either his policies are founded on a gross misunderstanding of the facts, or he is being dishonest. With him, It’s hard to tell.
To be clear: it is not illegal to come to Australia without papers and seek asylum. Boat-people do not commit any offence by their manner of arrival.
Furthermore, the notion of “queue-jumpers” is equally wrong, and is used with equally malevolent intent. Most of the boat-people who have come here over the past 15 years have been Hazaras from Afghanistan. Hazaras are an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. They have been persecuted since the middle of the 19th century. The Taliban are intent on wiping them from the face of the earth. Imagine a Hazara who wants to find safety from the Taliban, but has heard Australia’s criticism of “queue-jumpers”. Suppose he decides to do things the way Tony Abbott would approve: he looks for the Australian Embassy in Kabul in order to seek asylum. Sadly for him, the address of the Embassy is a secret, for security reasons.
Not much of a queue, if you are not allowed to know where it is.
But leave aside that the location of the Australian Embassy is a secret, the larger point is that refugee flows are always untidy. The idea that desperate people will conduct themselves as if waiting for a bus to take them to the shops is not only ludicrous, it reveals a complete lack of empathy, or even understanding, of why refugees flee for safety in the first place. The instinct to survive generally trumps an instinct for good manners.
If John Howard had not poisoned the public debate so effectively between 2001 and 2007, perhaps more Australians would be concerned about the present government’s treatment of boat-people. Make no mistake, all human rights NGOs, and most Western countries, regard our treatment of boat-people as wantonly cruel. We are a rich, secure nation, insulated by sea from most of the world’s refugee flows. How different our international reputation might be if all Australians understood a few basic facts:
boat-people are not illegal; they have not broken any law by getting here;
there is no queue;
about 90% of them are ultimately accepted as genuine refugees, legally entitled to protection;
the numbers getting here are tiny, by any measure. This year, total boat-people arrivals will amount to less than 8% of our annual migration intake;
boat-people do not represent a failure of border control. Around 4 million people cross our borders with permission each year (mostly for tourism, business or study). If 20,000 boat-people get here this year without authority (it will likely be fewer), it will mean that border control is successful 99.5% of the time. It takes a special form of deceit to reframe this as a “failure of border control”. Let me make my meaning clear: members of the Coalition who criticise boat arrivals as a failure of border control are either dishonest or so utterly uninformed that they should not speak publicly on the subject;
indefinite mandatory detention costs a spectacular amount of money, and causes untold psychiatric harm to people who are already vulnerable.
The latest announcements about boat-people have us heading further down the wrong track: a track marked out by the Howard government for political reasons, and sold to the public by dishonest rhetoric which the Coalition continues to peddle. The result is that we are spending vast amounts of money on indefinite mandatory detention (at least $1 billion per year, but increasing as we spin them off to more remote, more expensive, places).
The cost of indefinite detention has to be clearly recognised. Detention on-shore costs around $150,000 per person per year. It costs about $350,000 per person per year to hold them off-shore. But the cost goes further. Since most boat-people are ultimately recognised as refugees, and are accepted into the community, they come into the community profoundly damaged by their detention experience and (in some cases no doubt) resentful rather than grateful. They are less able to contribute fully to the Australian community because of the damage we inflict on them. This is a profound irony, given that boat-people show great courage and initiative by getting here the way they do. In principle, they are just the sort of people we want here.
The number of boat-people who get here is small, by any measure. This year we might get 20,000 boat-people arriving, but it is likely to be fewer. Just recently Greece – not in great financial shape right now – volunteered to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees. If Greece can manage 20,000 refugees in one hit, I dare say Australia can cope with 20,000 in a year. Incidentally, the population of Greece is about half that of Australia.
If things keep going as they are, we will lock them up, ship them off to Nauru, or condemn them to a life in the shadows as a new underclass prevented from working for five years regardless of their true status as refugees. To put this in perspective, each of these responses involves Australia in breaches of various international human rights standards but more importantly it sits badly with our vision of ourselves as a generous, decent nation.
There is an alternative.
If I could re-design the system, it would look something like this:
· boat-arrivals would be detained initially for one month, for preliminary health and security checks, subject to extension if a court was persuaded that a particular individual should be detained longer;
· after initial detention, they would be released into the community, with the right to work, Centrelink and Medicare benefits. Even if none of them got a job, it would be cheaper than keeping them locked up;
· they would be released into the community on terms calculated to make sure they remained available for the balance of their visa processing;
· during the time their visa applications were being processed, they would be required to live in rural or regional areas of Australia. Any government benefits they received would thus work for the benefit of the rural and regional economy. There are plenty of towns around the country which would welcome an increase in their population.
It would take a bit of political selling, although I suspect that rural and regional Australia would be quick to see the benefits of this new approach.
But it should not be too hard to persuade the community that we can do better than we are doing now. The present system is supported by lies. Of course criminals should be treated as criminals. But when you see that boat-people are not criminals it is more difficult to understand, much less accept, our treatment of them.
I believe most Australians are decent, generous people. Our record in both world wars stands as a tribute to our national character; our response to the Asian tsunami is another. It was tragic to see our national character brought down by the Howard government’s deceptive rhetoric about boat-people (most of it calculated to win back voters who had drifted to One Nation). It is equally tragic to see our national character being damaged by a Labor government which does not have the political spine to tell it as it is: to point out to voters that there is a better way; that we are better than this.
Bob Carr has since said that the arrival rates would have been higher but for Pacific Solution Mk II. It is difficult to argue against that species of logic, beyond saying that it sheds light on the frontier which optimism shares with desperation.
Chris Bowen yesterday announced some running repairs on Pacific Solution Mk II. Because Nauru and Manus Island between them have no chance of taking the people who have arrived here by boat since the new policy was introduced (much less accommodating them for five years - the “no advantage” principle at work), people will be allowed into the Australian community on bridging visas, but they will not be allowed to work and they will have to wait for five years (the “no advantage” principle again).
While this announcement will, for a while, prevent the Pacific Solution from imploding, it just takes us further down the wrong track.
Almost everything that has happened in refugee policy over the past 11 years has been informed and supported by dishonest rhetoric. Specifically, calling boat people “illegals” and “queue-jumpers” is not only false, it is calculated to prejudice the public against a tiny group of weak, vulnerable people who deserve our help, not our hatred.
The poison was started by John Howard, but it is still streaked through the Coalition rhetoric. Earlier this week Tony Abbott shamelessly referred to boat-people as “illegals”, and spoke of them entering Australia “illegally”. Either his policies are founded on a gross misunderstanding of the facts, or he is being dishonest. With him, It’s hard to tell.
To be clear: it is not illegal to come to Australia without papers and seek asylum. Boat-people do not commit any offence by their manner of arrival.
Furthermore, the notion of “queue-jumpers” is equally wrong, and is used with equally malevolent intent. Most of the boat-people who have come here over the past 15 years have been Hazaras from Afghanistan. Hazaras are an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. They have been persecuted since the middle of the 19th century. The Taliban are intent on wiping them from the face of the earth. Imagine a Hazara who wants to find safety from the Taliban, but has heard Australia’s criticism of “queue-jumpers”. Suppose he decides to do things the way Tony Abbott would approve: he looks for the Australian Embassy in Kabul in order to seek asylum. Sadly for him, the address of the Embassy is a secret, for security reasons.
Not much of a queue, if you are not allowed to know where it is.
But leave aside that the location of the Australian Embassy is a secret, the larger point is that refugee flows are always untidy. The idea that desperate people will conduct themselves as if waiting for a bus to take them to the shops is not only ludicrous, it reveals a complete lack of empathy, or even understanding, of why refugees flee for safety in the first place. The instinct to survive generally trumps an instinct for good manners.
If John Howard had not poisoned the public debate so effectively between 2001 and 2007, perhaps more Australians would be concerned about the present government’s treatment of boat-people. Make no mistake, all human rights NGOs, and most Western countries, regard our treatment of boat-people as wantonly cruel. We are a rich, secure nation, insulated by sea from most of the world’s refugee flows. How different our international reputation might be if all Australians understood a few basic facts:
boat-people are not illegal; they have not broken any law by getting here;
there is no queue;
about 90% of them are ultimately accepted as genuine refugees, legally entitled to protection;
the numbers getting here are tiny, by any measure. This year, total boat-people arrivals will amount to less than 8% of our annual migration intake;
boat-people do not represent a failure of border control. Around 4 million people cross our borders with permission each year (mostly for tourism, business or study). If 20,000 boat-people get here this year without authority (it will likely be fewer), it will mean that border control is successful 99.5% of the time. It takes a special form of deceit to reframe this as a “failure of border control”. Let me make my meaning clear: members of the Coalition who criticise boat arrivals as a failure of border control are either dishonest or so utterly uninformed that they should not speak publicly on the subject;
indefinite mandatory detention costs a spectacular amount of money, and causes untold psychiatric harm to people who are already vulnerable.
The latest announcements about boat-people have us heading further down the wrong track: a track marked out by the Howard government for political reasons, and sold to the public by dishonest rhetoric which the Coalition continues to peddle. The result is that we are spending vast amounts of money on indefinite mandatory detention (at least $1 billion per year, but increasing as we spin them off to more remote, more expensive, places).
The cost of indefinite detention has to be clearly recognised. Detention on-shore costs around $150,000 per person per year. It costs about $350,000 per person per year to hold them off-shore. But the cost goes further. Since most boat-people are ultimately recognised as refugees, and are accepted into the community, they come into the community profoundly damaged by their detention experience and (in some cases no doubt) resentful rather than grateful. They are less able to contribute fully to the Australian community because of the damage we inflict on them. This is a profound irony, given that boat-people show great courage and initiative by getting here the way they do. In principle, they are just the sort of people we want here.
The number of boat-people who get here is small, by any measure. This year we might get 20,000 boat-people arriving, but it is likely to be fewer. Just recently Greece – not in great financial shape right now – volunteered to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees. If Greece can manage 20,000 refugees in one hit, I dare say Australia can cope with 20,000 in a year. Incidentally, the population of Greece is about half that of Australia.
If things keep going as they are, we will lock them up, ship them off to Nauru, or condemn them to a life in the shadows as a new underclass prevented from working for five years regardless of their true status as refugees. To put this in perspective, each of these responses involves Australia in breaches of various international human rights standards but more importantly it sits badly with our vision of ourselves as a generous, decent nation.
There is an alternative.
If I could re-design the system, it would look something like this:
· boat-arrivals would be detained initially for one month, for preliminary health and security checks, subject to extension if a court was persuaded that a particular individual should be detained longer;
· after initial detention, they would be released into the community, with the right to work, Centrelink and Medicare benefits. Even if none of them got a job, it would be cheaper than keeping them locked up;
· they would be released into the community on terms calculated to make sure they remained available for the balance of their visa processing;
· during the time their visa applications were being processed, they would be required to live in rural or regional areas of Australia. Any government benefits they received would thus work for the benefit of the rural and regional economy. There are plenty of towns around the country which would welcome an increase in their population.
It would take a bit of political selling, although I suspect that rural and regional Australia would be quick to see the benefits of this new approach.
But it should not be too hard to persuade the community that we can do better than we are doing now. The present system is supported by lies. Of course criminals should be treated as criminals. But when you see that boat-people are not criminals it is more difficult to understand, much less accept, our treatment of them.
I believe most Australians are decent, generous people. Our record in both world wars stands as a tribute to our national character; our response to the Asian tsunami is another. It was tragic to see our national character brought down by the Howard government’s deceptive rhetoric about boat-people (most of it calculated to win back voters who had drifted to One Nation). It is equally tragic to see our national character being damaged by a Labor government which does not have the political spine to tell it as it is: to point out to voters that there is a better way; that we are better than this.
