Australia’s
Maltreatment Of Asylum Seekers
And Refugees – Part II
By George Venturini
Countercurrents.org
By George Venturini * (
“The present policy was brought in by Labor, ... but
what the Howard government added was a public
scare campaign about invasion by boat people ...
As the initiator of
detention camps, Labor acted badly
but stealthily. Howard ea policy
became a nightmare,
with people seeking refugee status immediately
labelled as queue jumpers, their children incarcerated,
the barbed wire strengthened, and talk of arming the
guards with sedative-filled syringes.”
Donald Horne, Looking for
leadership (Melbourne
2001). Horne,
1921-2005, was one of
known public intellectuals.
The Gillard Government acted swiftly.
On 28 June 2012
Prime Minister Gillard and the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Bowen
announced that the Government had invited Air Chief
Marshal Angus Houston A.C., A.F.C. (Ret’d), the former Chief of
Australia’s Defence Force, to lead an expert panel to provide a report on the
best way forward for Australia to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives on
dangerous boat journeys to Australia.
The expert
panel also included Mr. Paris
Aristotle A.M., the Director of the Victorian Foundation for
Survivors of Torture Inc. (also known as Foundation House) and Professor
Michael L'Estrange A.O., the Director of the National Security
College at the Australian National University.
The terms of reference were narrowly specified:
“The Panel will provide advice and
recommendations to the Government on policy options
available, and in its considered
opinion, the efficacy of such options, to prevent asylum
seekers risking their lives on
dangerous boat journeys to
panel will take into account, and
provide policy advice on:
-
how best to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives by travelling to
-
source, transit and destination country
aspects of irregular migration;
-
relevant
international obligations;
-
the
development of an inter-related set of proposals in support of asylum seeker issues,
given
-
short,
medium and long term approaches to assist in the development of an effective
and
sustainable approach to asylum seekers;
-
the
legislative requirements for implementation; and
-
the order
of magnitude of costs of such policy options.
The Panel will consult government and
NGO s and individuals. It will have access to the
information it requires to support its
deliberations and finalise its advice.
The Panel will consult with the
Multi-Party Reference Group to understand and take into
account the views of the Parliament.
The Panel will provide advice to the
Prime Minister and Minister for Immigration and
Citizenship prior to the start of the
next sitting period in August 2012. The Panel’s advice will be released publicly.”
The Panel was to report back to Parliament after the southern winter recess.
The choice of membership,
coming from a Labor Government, was shockingly indicative -
a combination of despair and surrender to the ground of the Opposition. Significantly,
the Panel did not include a representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees, whose office has been a critic of the offshore processing and
mandatory detention policies.
The Panel chair, Mr. Houston, was all his life a military man through and through. He had spent 40 years in the Air Force, as Chief of Air Force since 2001 and acting Chief of the Defence Force since 2001. His only connection and merit in matters refugees was to have told the truth at the Senate inquiry in the children overboard affair in February 2002: he refuted the Howard Government’s claim during the 2001 election campaign that seafaring asylum seekers had thrown children overboard in a presumed ploy to secure rescue and passage to Australia.
The second
member is a completely ‘establishment’ man, and well known for his sympathy
with the Liberal Party. Bbetween 1989
and 1994 Dr. L’Estrange worked for several Leaders of the Opposition in a range
of policy advisory positions. In 1995 he was appointed the inaugural Executive
Director of the Menzies Research Centre, a Liberal Party ‘think-tank’ in
Nicely framed between those two preceding gentlemen was the third member of the panel: Mr. Aristotle, Director of the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture Inc. and Executive Member of the Forum of Australian Services for Survivors of Torture and Trauma. Since 2001 Mr. Aristotle has served on various Government bodies, as member of the Immigration Detention Advisory Group, Chair of the Council for Immigration Services and Status Resolution and, currently, as Chair of the Ministers Council on Asylum Seekers and Detention. Mr. Aristotle is also a member of the Refugee Resettlement Advisory Council and has over 25 years experience in the field of supporting refugees and asylum seekers.
Mr. Aristotle
was the only person with any expertise in the matters referred to the
Panel. The other two could be regarded
as experts in defence and security. That
would say very much about the Prime Minister’s approach to the problem: asylum
seekers seen as a threat to the security of
It would also explain why the ‘solution’ to drowning was certainly not envisaged in terms of human rights, international law, commitment to international treaties and conventions ratified by Australia and by which Australia should consider itself bound.
The Report of
the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers was released on
The Panel made 22 recommendations.
In Recommendation 1 the Panel said that, as a
matter of principles, the Panel recommended that the following should shape Australian policymaking on asylum
seeker issues (Report, paragraphs 2.6-2.22):
- The
implementation of a strategic, comprehensive and integrated approach that
establishes short, medium and long-term priorities for managing asylum
and mixed
migration
flows across the region.
- The
provision of incentives for asylum seekers to seek protection through a
managed
regional
system.
- The
facilitation of a regional cooperation and protection framework that is
consistent in
the
processing of asylum claims, the provision of assistance while those claims are being
assessed and the achievement of durable
outcomes.
- The
application of a ‘no advantage’ principle to ensure that no benefit is gained through
circumventing regular migration arrangements.
- Promotion
of a credible, fair and managed Australian Humanitarian Program.
- Adherence
by
Dealing with
“Recommendation 2
The Panel recommends that
- The
Humanitarian Program be immediately increased to 20,000 places per annum
(Report,
paragraphs 3.3-3.8).
- Of the
20,000 places recommended for the Humanitarian Program, a minimum of
12,000
places should be allocated for the refugee component which would double
the
current
allocation (Report, paragraphs 3.3-3.8).
- Subject
to prevailing economic circumstances, the impact of the Program increase
(recommended above) and progress in achieving more effective regional
cooperation
arrangements, consideration be given to increasing the number of places
in the
Humanitarian Program to around 27,000 within five years (Report,
paragraphs 3.3-3.8).
- The
Humanitarian Program be more focused on asylum seeker flows moving from
source
countries
into
- The
Humanitarian Program be more focused on asylum seeker flows moving from
source
countries into
As far as a possible regional engagement, the Panel
said:
“Recommendation 3
The Panel recommends that in support of the further
development of a regional cooperation
framework on protection and asylum systems, the
Australian Government expand its relevant capacity-building initiatives in the
region and significantly increase the allocation of resources for this purpose
(Report, paragraphs 3.26-3.28).
Recommendation 4
The Panel recommends that bilateral cooperation on
asylum seeker issues with Indonesia be advanced as a matter of urgency,
particularly in relation to:
- The
allocation of an increased number of Humanitarian Program resettlement
places
for
Indonesia (Report, paragraphs 3.20-3.22).
- Enhanced
cooperation on joint surveillance and response patrols, law enforcement and
search
and rescue coordination (Report, paragraphs 3.20-3.22).
- Changes
to Australian law in relation to Indonesian minors and others crewing unlawful
boat
voyages from Indonesia to Australia (Report, paragraphs 3.20-3.22).
Recommendation 5
The Panel recommends that Australia continue to
develop its vitally important cooperation with Malaysia on asylum issues,
including the management of a substantial number of refugees to be taken
annually from Malaysia (Report, paragraphs 3.23-3.24).
Recommendation 6
The Panel recommends a more effective
whole-of-government strategy be developed for engaging with source countries
for asylum seekers to Australia, with a focus on a significant increase in
resettlement places provided by Australia to the Middle East and Asia regions
(Report, paragraphs 3.29-3.33).”
With reference to regional processing, the Panel
proffered:
“Recommendation 7
The Panel recommends that legislation to support
the transfer of people to regional processing arrangements be introduced into
the Australian Parliament as a matter of urgency (Report, paragraphs 3.54 and
3.57). This legislation should require that any future designation of a country
as an appropriate place for processing be achieved through a further
legislative instrument that would provide the opportunity for the Australian
Parliament to allow or disallow the instrument (Report, paragraph 3.43).
Recommendation 8
The Panel recommends that a capacity be established
in Nauru as soon as practical to process the claims of IMAs [irregular maritime
arrivals] transferred from Australia in ways consistent with Australian and
Nauruan responsibilities under international law (Report, paragraphs
3.44-3.55).
Recommendation 9
The Panel recommends that a capacity be established
in PNG [Papua New Guinea] as soon as possible to process the claims of IMA s
transferred from Australia in ways consistent with the responsibilities of
Australia and PNG under international law (Report, paragraphs 3.56-3.57).
Recommendation 10
The Panel recommends that the 2011 Arrangement
between the Government of Australia and the Government of Malaysia on Transfer
and Resettlement (Malaysia Agreement) be built on further, rather than
being discarded or neglected, and that this be achieved through high-level
bilateral engagement focused on strengthening safeguards and accountability as
a positive basis for the Australian Parliament’s reconsideration of new
legislation that would be necessary (Report, paragraphs 3.58-3.70).”
Concerning family reunion, the Panel had this to
say:
“Recommendation 11
The Panel recommends that the current backlog in
the SHP [special humanitarian programme] be addressed as a means of reducing
the demand for family reunion through irregular and dangerous maritime voyages
to Australia, and that this be achieved through removing family reunion
concessions for proposers who arrive through irregular maritime voyages – with
these proposers to instead seek reunion through the family stream of the
Migration Program (Report, paragraphs 3.13-3.18).
Recommendation 12
The Panel recommends that in the future those who
arrive in Australia through irregular maritime means should not be eligible to
sponsor family under the SHP but should seek to do so within the family stream
of the Migration Program (Report, paragraph 3.71).”
The Panel added other recommendations:
“Recommendation 13
The Panel recommends that Australia promote more
actively coordinated strategies among traditional and emerging resettlement
countries to create more opportunities for resettlement as a part of new
regional cooperation arrangements (Report, paragraphs 3.35-3.37).
Recommendation 14
The Panel recommends that the Migration Act 1958
be amended so that arrival anywhere on Australia by irregular maritime
means will not provide individuals with a different lawful status than those
who arrive in an excised offshore place (Report, paragraphs 3.72-3.73).
Recommendation 15
The Panel recommends that a thorough review of
refugee status determination (RSD) would be timely and useful (Report,
paragraphs 3.74-3.76).
Recommendation 16
The Panel recommends that a more effective
whole-of-government strategy be developed to negotiate better outcomes on
removals and returns on failed asylum seekers (Report, paragraphs 3.81-3.83).
Recommendation 17
The Panel recommends that disruption strategies be
continued as part of any comprehensive approach to the challenges posed by
people smuggling and that relevant Australian agencies be resourced with
appropriate funding on a continuing basis for this purpose (Report, paragraphs
3.84-3.86).
Recommendation 18
The Panel recommends that law enforcement agencies
in Australia continue their activities in countering involvement of Australian
residents who are engaged in funding or facilitating people smuggling
operations (Report, paragraph 3.87).
Recommendation 19
The Panel notes that the conditions necessary for
effective, lawful and safe turnback of irregular vessels carrying asylum
seekers to Australia are not currently met, but that this situation could
change in the future, in particular if appropriate regional and bilateral
arrangements are in place (Report, paragraphs 3.77-3.80).
Recommendation 20
The Panel recommends that Australia continue to
work with regional countries in a focused way to develop joint operational
guidelines for managing Search and Rescue (SAR) activities in the region and to
address the need for any further regional and national codification of
arrangements across SAR jurisdictions (Report, paragraphs 3.88-3.90).
Recommendation 21
The Panel recommends that, in the context of a
review of the efficacy of the recommendations put forward in this Report, the
linkage between the onshore and offshore components of the Humanitarian Program
be reviewed within two years.
Recommendation 22
The Panel recommends that the incompleteness of the
current evidence base on asylum issues be addressed through a well-managed and
adequately funded research program engaging government and
non-government expertise (Report, paragraphs 3.38-3.40).”
This
last recommendation is puzzling. Is it a
sop ? Can it be serious, considering
that both Government and Panel have missed every opportunity to recognise an
already existing body of knowledge ?
Experts
on refugee matters from the academy and from the community sector have worked
hard to share their findings in respected journals and various popular and
online media. It would be fair to suggest that the settlement services
sector has increasingly been influenced by, and availed itself of, research and
research practitioners.
Had the Government been serious about its concern for the welfare of the asylum seekers and the tragedy of their drownings, it might have suggested a true specialist who has devote years to study, counselling and professional assist traumatised, desperate people from the detention centres.
But recent governments have demonstrated an antipathy towards research from the sector where it conflicts with ‘policy’ preconceptions.
If Prime
Minister Gillard had wanted an expert it could have invited to the Panel Dr. Louise
Newman, who is the Professor of Developmental Psychiatry and Director of the
Monash University Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology. A
practising infant psychiatrist with expertise in the area of disorders of early
parenting and attachment difficulties in infants, she has undertaken research
into the issues confronting parents with histories of early trauma and
neglect. Professor Newman has published
extensively in the areas of infant mental health, attachment disorders trauma,
and prevention of child abuse. She is co-author of the textbook Clinical skills in infant mental health
and of the forthcoming Contemporary approaches
in child and adolescent mental health.
But - and there is the but -
Professor is the Convenor of the Alliance of Health Professions for
Asylum Seekers and an advocate for the rights of asylum seekers and refugees.
She is the Chair of the Detention Expert Health Advisory Group, an independent
body providing advice to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship on the
health needs of asylum seekers. She has been involved in research into the
impact of immigration detention on child asylum seekers.
* * *
Elegantly presented in 162 pages, at an unusual speed between commission and delivery, it would be an arduous task to comment on how the Houston Report itself responded to the “more than 550 submissions” the Panel had received.
However, it seems possible safely to conclude that the solution proffered by the Panel reflects the composition itself: all honourable men - no doubt, in the general sense of the word, still none of them with any experience in the law, and two of them highly influenced by a life spent in the military and the bureaucracy. If one member devoted his life to flying airplanes, another spent his time on ‘piloting’ desks. More to the point: as to the chairperson, one would prefer not to incommode two Founding Fathers of the American Republic, Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton on civilian control of the military; it should be sufficient to remember Georges Clemenceau’s dictum that even “war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.” And as to another member, one should harbour no illusion about the nature of Australian bureaucracy. It is traditionally ‘conservative’ - that is to say: nothing should be tried the first time for fear of creating a ‘precedent’; always secretive; essentially loyal to itself first and foremost, until it was fully privatised by the Howard Government; forever mindful that Labor - even in the current phase, which is one of transvestism - is always perceived by the ‘average elector’ as being led by a band of incompetent amateurs, clowns who make some noise but are not expected ‘to be in town for long’. Australian bureaucracy is one particularly attuned to that, skilled and represented by men accustomed to navigate the perilous waters between service to a conservative government - which has been historically the case - and survival in the murky world of the ‘security industry.’
Perhaps it is safe to say that more than ‘Is it right ?’ the Panel asked itself ‘Can it be done ?’. And what was wanted is clearly indicated by the terms of reference, given by an exasperated Government bounded by an extraordinarily malevolent Opposition, which really correctly expressed the lack of feeling of the ‘ordinary Australian’ for the asylum seekers. They are perceived as dirty, untrustworthy, eager to find a job, eager to please, un-white if not dark, and possibly threateningly Muslim - ‘different’, which in a ‘culinarily multicultural society’ stands for racist. Let there be no bones about it.
The Panel had
received its marching orders from a daringly opportunistic, ‘flexible’,
no-principle-in-the-way, prime minister who really wanted to be forced to take
up and thus neutralise the obstinate position of the Opposition. In delivering what was expected, the Panel
also did land a body blow to the Gillard policies to date. By way of balance, it also blew out of the
water Abbott’s assertion that boats can be safely towed back to
What the Panel offered is a ‘can do’ solution, which in the end would respond to an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ desire on the part of the ‘average Australian’.
It is perfectly
understandable that the poorest of the seven attachments to the Report should
be on “
Heavier
water was made of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the
Sea (U.N.C.L.O.S.);
the International Convention on
Maritime Search and Rescue (S.A.R. Convention); and the International Convention
for the Safety of Life at Sea (S.O.L.A.S.) Convention.
But no reference
was made, for instance, to the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; the Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; the Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention Against Torture and Other
Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment; the International
Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members
of their Families; the Convention on
the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the International
Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance -
most of them continuously violated by Australian Governments when they
come to asylum seekers and refugees..
The Houston Report was compiled over a
six week period. As the Panel said: “In
this time we have consulted widely on asylum issues with political leaders,
other members of the Parliament, agencies and departments of government,
non-government organisations (NGO s), academics and other experts as well as
those in the wider community. We have also held discussions with representatives
of some refugee communities in
In all these processes, we have
encountered a broad cross section of views on asylum issues
and on the direction that Australian
policymaking should take. Those views are deeply held
and have been strongly argued.
We have applied an overriding priority
to addressing the complex and difficult task we have
been given.”
The main purpose of the Report is
stated in the foreword as being “to propose a way forward that meets the tests
of reasonableness, fairness and humanitarian need. In proposing a way forward,
our guiding light has been to find practical ways in which to advance the
Australian national interest in achieving progress towards the goal of more
effective regional cooperation on asylum issues.”
To meet the challenge, the Panel
believed “that Australian policy can, and should, be hard headed but not hard hearted;
that practicality and fairness should take precedence over theory and inertia;
and that the perfect should not be allowed to become the enemy of the good.”
After such flowering rhetoric, the
Panel went to the contingent point: “ The loss of life on dangerous maritime
voyages in search of
Those strategies need to shift the
balance of Australian policies and regional arrangements to give greater hope
and confidence to asylum seekers that regional arrangements will work more
effectively, and to discourage more actively the use of irregular maritime
voyages.”
The Panel’s recommendations were aimed at better achieving “changes in Australian policies and more
active support for an enhanced regional cooperation framework on asylum issues.”;
at increasing “Australia’s Humanitarian Program to assist in making regular
migration pathways work better.”; and at suggesting “disincentives to irregular
maritime voyages to Australia by establishing a clear ‘no advantage’ principle
whereby asylum seekers gain no benefit by choosing not to seek protection
through established mechanisms.”
Naturally, the Panel thought that the “recommendations
put a fundamental emphasis on fairness and reasonableness. They constitute an
integrated set of proposals. The incentives and disincentives we recommend complement
each other. In our view, they need to be pursued in that comprehensive and
integrated context as the most effective way of discouraging asylum seekers
from risking their lives on dangerous maritime voyages to
Certain consideration underpinned the
Report. They are:
“i. The international community faces
diverse, difficult and complex challenges in relation to the irregular movement
of people across borders. In the context of those challenges,
A consensus in the Australian
Parliament on how to best respond to this current and prospective situation,
regionally and globally, is proving elusive. Furthermore, while a regional
cooperation framework to address the range of these challenges in the Asia
Pacific region is both necessary and desirable, its practical development is
still at an early stage.
ii. These realities and pressures
engage
iii. These complex and diverse
challenges for Australian policymaking frame the central issue in the Panel’s
Terms of Reference: to assess ‘the policy options available… to prevent asylum
seekers risking their lives on dangerous boat voyages to
iv. Australian policy settings do
influence the flows of irregular migration to
Those settings need to address the
factors ‘pushing’ as well as ‘pulling’ the trend toward greater numbers of
dangerous irregular maritime ventures to Australia.
Australian policy settings, however,
cannot resolve current challenges in isolation from the regional and
international realities to which they relate. A focused and sustained response
to the asylum seeker issue also needs to encompass more effective Australian
strategies in the main source countries for irregular migration flows into
South-East Asia and Australia; it needs to facilitate a more practical
framework of shared management and responsibility involving Australia and
countries in our region; and it needs to actively promote a more productive
engagement by the wider international community in addressing the global
phenomenon of forced displacement and irregular people movement.
v. The single most important priority
in preventing people from risking their lives on dangerous maritime voyages is
to recalibrate Australian policy settings to achieve an outcome that asylum
seekers will not be advantaged if they pay people smugglers to attempt
dangerous irregular entry into Australia instead of pursuing regular migration pathways
and international protection arrangements as close as possible to their country
of origin. That is why a regional cooperation framework on protection and asylum
issues, reflecting a comprehensive regional approach, is so fundamentally important
and such a central focus of this Report.
vi. A comprehensive regional framework
to address asylum seeker issues, encompassing joint approaches and common
standards on protections, processing and durable outcomes is an objective to
which regional governments are committed. It is also a goal towards which
progress will be incremental.
vii. Some of the building blocks on
which a regional cooperation framework can be established are able to be
implemented immediately; others will take time and extensive negotiations.
viii.
ix. Australia’s priorities – in our own
national policies and in our engagement within our region and beyond – need to be focused on shifting
the current balance of risk and incentive that makes dangerous irregular
migration a preferable option for too many people.
x. At the present time, there are risks
and incentives in decisions to take dangerous irregular maritime voyages to
xi. By contrast, the use of regular
migration pathways and established international protection arrangements have
their own risks and incentives – the risk of indefinite delay with inadequate
protections and without any durable outcome, set against the incentive of
possible resettlement and a new life. The balance of those risks and incentives
is too often insufficient to convince asylum seekers that regular pathways are
more productive than irregular ones.
xii. The shift in the balance of risk
and incentive that is necessary requires a set of circuit breakers in
Australian policymaking which need to operate in a phased and coordinated way
at two levels.
xiii. At one level, there is a need for
new measures to expand regular humanitarian pathways and make the international
protection arrangements more effective.
Such measures need to build confidence
and hope in established processes through genuine incentives for asylum seekers
in the region to participate in needs-based, well-managed, regionally
coordinated, safe, orderly and timely processing that delivers durable
outcomes.
xiv. Such measures to sustain a more
practical, better managed and more coordinated regional framework of
cooperation, to address asylum seeking, and to counter people smuggling
operations should identify and pursue common interests and shared objectives
among regional countries. From
xv. There also needs to be policy
circuit breakers operating at a second level. This is required because
incentives to utilise existing migration pathways and established international
protection arrangements, operating in national or regional contexts or both,
will be necessary but they will not be sufficient in their own right as an
effective strategy to counter irregular migration flows. Circuit breakers are
needed to reduce the attractiveness of
xvi. Incentives to use regular
migration and protection pathways need to be complemented by policy measures
that send a coherent and unambiguously clear message that disincentives to
irregular maritime migration to
Over time, a genuinely regional
framework will reduce the lure of irregular maritime migration options through
a common approach to the processing of claims and provision of outcomes based
on need. Until such a regional framework is established in a practical way, and
within a framework of appropriate safeguards, the active discouragement of
irregular maritime migration to
xvii. To support such processing within
the development of a comprehensive regional cooperation framework, the Panel
believes that the Australian Parliament should agree, as a matter of urgency,
to legislation that would allow for the processing of irregular maritime
arrivals in locations outside
xviii. In that context,
Papua New Guinea (PNG) for the
processing of protection claims by IMA s to
xix. In addition to the facilities in
are relevant to the transfer of a
number of IMA s to
xx. Other measures to discourage
dangerous and irregular maritime voyages to Australia should include changes to
family reunion arrangements as they relate to IMA s in Australia, a more
effective focus on the return of failed asylum seekers to their home country
and more sustained strategies for the disruption of people smuggling operations
both in Australia and abroad. A thorough review of the efficacy of Australian processes
for determining refugee status would also be timely.
xxi. The Panel is of the strong view
that there are a range of conditions that need to be fulfilled for the safe and
lawful turnback of boats carrying asylum seekers. The Panel does not believe
those conditions currently exist, although they could at some stage in the
future, in particular if appropriate regional and bilateral arrangements are in
place.
xxii. In this policy agenda designed to
shift the balance of risk and incentive in favour of regular migration and
against irregular options, the engagement of governments and civil society – in
Australia, in our region and internationally – will become even more important.
This engagement needs to embrace more comprehensive and cooperative arrangements
in relation to policy development processes and the implementation of policy
decisions. In addition to effective disincentives to irregular boat voyages,
there needs to be greater hope and confidence that applying through the regular
processes of international protection, including in source and transit
countries, can work better and more quickly.
xxiii. The costs of the recommendations
made in this Report are set out in Attachment 11.
These costs need to be offset against
savings that the Panel believes will be made from expenditures currently
incurred as a result of managing the flow of unauthorised arrivals in
Australia. The forward estimates presented in the 2012-13 Budget estimate such expenditure
incurred by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) alone over the
period 2011-12 to 2015-16 inclusive to be at around $5 billion assuming that arrivals
remain at around the level of 450 per month from 1 July 2012. With the levels of
irregular arrivals averaging over 1,300 per month since April 2012, the Panel
notes that if this rate of increase were to be sustained the costs of dealing
with these IMA s would likely be a significantly larger amount than the costs
of the recommendations in this report.
xxiv. In the Panel’s view, the
recommendations in this Report will promote greater efficacy, fairness and good
management in Australian policymaking on protection and asylum issues. Our
recommendations will include new costs; but they will also, in our view, result
in significant savings in expenditures currently being incurred.
xxv. The need for circuit breakers, and
effective follow through, in Australian and regional policymaking on the asylum
seeker issue is an urgent one. Too many lives have already been lost. Too many
others are in danger of being lost. Clear and sustained policymaking, in
Australia and at a regional level, are required to change the balance of risk
and opportunity. Such an outcome will advance Australian national interests on
this issue. It will strengthen effective regional and international
cooperation. It will more effectively address humanitarian needs and it will
also save lives. These are the objectives to which the recommendations in this
Report are directed.”
The Panel’s Report presented an
‘integrated blueprint’.
The Panel had
accepted the reality of population flows across the globe with people fleeing
dreadful situations of persecution. Its ultimate aim is to set up a regional
system which provides a genuine alternative pathway for asylum seekers who otherwise
will attempt to reach get refugee on leaky boats seeking a durable solution to
their woes.
Perhaps the
Panel did not realise that there are objective difficulties in realising a
regional solution for a regional problem and yet maintain respect for the
Refugee Convention: only three countries near Australia have ratified the
Convention: Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
The Panel
strongly endorsed the need for offshore processing in the short term. The Panel
conceded that the so-called ‘Malaysia Solution’ as negotiated by the Gillard
Government falls short and should not be resurrected until it can be ‘built on
further’.
In particular,
the Panel noted the concerns of many Australians that the Malaysia agreement is
not legally binding and is - at best
- very vague on standards of
treatment especially for unaccompanied minors. The Panel believed that “the
operational aspects need to be specified in greater detail” and that
“provisions for unaccompanied minors and for other highly vulnerable asylum
seekers need to be more explicitly detailed and agreed with Malaysia.”
The Panel
insisted on the need for “a written agreement between Malaysia and UNHCR.” This
is particularly welcome for those Australians who have been straining to understand
the diverse nuances in media interviews by U.N.H.C.R. personnel insisting that
they had not endorsed the deal in the first place.
The Panel also
saw the need for “a more effective monitoring mechanism” of human rights
protection in Malaysia, including participation by Australian “senior officials
and eminent persons from civil society.” The chances of Malaysia agreeing to
this interference with its sovereignty would not be great. So it will be some
time before Malaysia will be a serious possibility. Meanwhile, the Panel urged a return to the
2001-2007 ‘Pacific Solution’, transporting asylum seekers from boats to Manus
Island and Nauru. The Opposition would feel vindicated by this recommendation.
But there is an enormous practical problem as well as an ethical dilemma. The
best advice to the Australian Government was that Papua New Guinea and Nauru
would not provide the deterrent that the Government expected from any offshore
arrangement.
This is where
the Panel’s recommendations seemed fairly inconsistent. On one hand, the Panel
saw Manus Island and Nauru as such unattractive options that asylum seekers
will decide not to disburse large sums of money to take a boat in Indonesia
headed for Australia. On the other hand, Australia would retain responsibility
for asylum seekers while they are processed on Manus Island and in Nauru,
and -
in addition - Australia would be the only country
responsible for providing resettlement places.
How to advance
a solution which would remain respectable was a huge task for the Panel. It is
for the purpose that the Panel recommended that the asylum seekers transported
to Manus Island and Nauru would “be provided with protection and welfare
arrangements consistent with Australian responsibilities under international
law, including the Refugees Convention.”
In particular, for Nauru, the Panel specified:
- treatment consistent with
human rights standards - including no arbitrary detention;
- appropriate accommodation;
- appropriate
physical and mental health services;
- access
to educational and vocational training programmes;
- application
assistance during the preparation of asylum claims;
- an appeal mechanism against negative
decisions on asylum applications which would enable merits review by more
senior officials and N.G.O. representatives with specific expertise;
- monitoring of care and protection arrangements
by a representative group drawn from government and civil society in Australia
and Nauru;
- and
providing case management assistance to individual applicants being
processed in Nauru.
However -
and this is most important
- the Panel recommended that the Migration Act should be amended so as to
enable the Government to declare a country for offshore processing, and that
such designation of that location would be ‘a disallowable instrument’. So the
Government would be free to name an offshore processing country without
Parliament stipulating any criteria, although either House of Parliament could
be able to disallow such a designation; there would be no need for prior
parliamentary approval nor any prospect of review by the courts.
The Panel’s
recommendation would entail repealing s.198A of the Migration Act which was inserted by request of the Howard Government
in 2001. This provision required the Minister to be satisfied that appropriate
protection and welfare measures are in place. In 2011 the High Court took upon
itself to establish whether in law and in fact the offshore country -
in the case, Malaysia - did provide the relevant protections. Such a repeal was among the least
commendable views of the Panel.
* * *
In the early morning of 13 August 2012
the Panel briefed both Prime Minister Gillard and the Opposition on its
recommendations.
The Government had received the Houston
report at 7 a.m. Labor Caucus discussed the Houston
package. Left members of Parliament had
raised objections to indefinite mandatory detention on Manus Island and Nauru,
but their objections had been voted down.
The same members had requested as delay to give Caucus time to consider
the Report, but their motion had been lost.
The Government simply agreed to a proposal for Caucus to monitor the
detention regime.
Then Ms. Gillard
announced that her government had accepted all the Panel’s recommendations. “What
this report is calling on parliamentarians to do is to compromise and to act.
This report is telling us not to stay in our fixed positions but to act and get
things done.” she said. “When our nation looks at what is happening at sea, too
many lives have been lost.” She also
said: “We want an outcome, here. We want change. We do not want pedantry and
politics. That is the spirit the government is taking into this.”
She added that the Australian people were sick of the long-running policy deadlock, after earlier legislation was rejected by the Senate in June.
“They’re over
it, I’m over it, we’re all over it. It’s time to get something done.” she told
reporters in Canberra. Ms. Gillard said
that agreeing to return to the Howard Government policies scrapped in 2008 was
not easy. “But I tell you what is a
harder thing - that is watching more people drown, and we
are not going to do that.”
After more than
a year of clinging to the ‘Malaysia Solution’ project and refusing to adopt
Nauru without the people swap, during which time almost 11,000 asylum seekers
had arrived and almost 300 had drowned, the Prime Minister said that she would
introduce legislation immediately to reopen the Howard Government processing
centres.
It was a
‘splendid’ brilliant ploy by Prime Minister Gillard: appoint a
committee of ‘experts’ whom she ‘knew’ would always recommend the vile and
inhumane offshore processing of refugees.
If they recommended the ‘Malaysia Solution’ then all the better. If they
recommended Nauru then that would give Labor the cover to retreat. The ‘experts’ recommended dumping refugees on
Nauru and in Papua New Guinea. They did not rule out Malaysia; they just said
it needed more work.
Essentially
what the Panel served up is the Opposition’s deterrence policy, with a few sops
thrown in about increasing the humanitarian intake a little. It is basically a
policy of punishing the refugees. It strips asylum seekers of the meagre rights
they currently have. This is worse than
Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’.
There will be
no time limit on how long asylum seekers can be kept on Manus Island or in
Nauru. This is to ensure they will spend longer there than they would have in
Indonesia or Malaysia. Given that some refugees rot their lives away in
Malaysia, asylum seekers could be held indefinitely in Australia’s
concentration camps on Manus Island or Nauru.
Those coming by
boat will also lose family re-union rights.
Labor, Left and
Right, seemed joyfully and joyously implementing a vile policy worse than
anything Howard dared introduce.
The Houston
Report disgracefully but not surprisingly recommended turning back the boats
where that is legally and physically possible. It is not yet, so Mr. Houston
wants the legal and other ‘niceties’ repaired to ensure it can be done.
At the heart of
the Report - and of Labor -
is this notion that harsh words and action on the part of Australia will
stop the boats. But people fleeing war, civil war, dispossession,
rape and the like are desperate. A journey of a few days across the sea to a
better life eventually, even if it puts their lives at risk or means they will
spend time in Nauru before coming to Australia, is better in their eyes than
being killed. Of course indefinite
detention is a ‘natural broth’ for mental illness so, once there, many of them
may try to kill themselves to escape a life of indefinite imprisonment for no
crime.
Some of the
refugees are from Iraq, or Sri Lanka.
Others come from Afghanistan. Often the latter are Hazaras, a persecuted minority under the Karzai Government that
‘western’ troops - including Australian forces -
have imposed on the people of Afghanistan. As head of Australia’s Defence Force, Angus
Houston was one of the planners and organisers of the invasion strategy.
Withdrawing ‘western’ troops from Afghanistan would help stop one of the
reasons for refugees fleeing from there to Australia. Instead of recommending
ending ‘western’ invasions, the Panel recommended more cruelty on the very
people the invasions forced to flee their homes.
Given that both
the Government and the Opposition are in favour of brutalising asylum seekers,
the Panel was never going to recommend a sensible, caring approach to caring
for refugees.
If it really
wanted to save lives at sea, Australia could process all of the asylum seekers
in Indonesia - about 4,000 and then turn to the 100,000 in
the hell holes of Malaysia, who present
a different problem from the few in Indonesia.
If Australia
cannot process them there, then it could process them onshore, not by forcing
them to flee in rickety boats to Australia but by sending Australian ships and
planes to bring them to Australia for processing.
Of course
neither this Government, nor a future Abbott Government would do that. Despite their proclamations, when it comes to
the votes, they are the silent leaders in racism -
and the followers, too. Their policies are driven by the desire to
appeal to and deepen the crimson thread of racism which runs through
sections of the ‘working’ as well as of the hardly defined ‘middle’
classes. For some in an alienated
population in an alienated society, attacking others restores a seeming sense of
their own worth.
Only the Greens
would absolutely oppose the recommended legislative changes. But they are few
against the collusion of the two weighty parties of the Westminster System.
* * *
Events
developed quickly.
At the
beginning of a press conference at midday of 13 August, Mr. Houston, speaking
for the Panel, emphasised its main
recommendation for offshore processing in both Nauru, Papua New Guinea and
Malaysia while strengthening safeguards and accountability for the people swap
deal.
Mr. Houston said: “We
recommend a policy approach that is hard headed, not hard hearted.”
Given
that more than 100 boats carrying over 7,500 suspected asylum seekers have
arrived in Australia in the first eight months of 2012, after the Government
failed to have enacted legislation aimed at deterring them by sending them to
Malaysia, and that some 964 asylum seekers and crew had lost their lives at sea
while trying to making it to Australia since late 2001, with 604 of these
perishing since October 2009, it was appropriate for Mr. Houston to say: “Like all
Australians, we are deeply concerned about this tragic loss of life at sea.”
and “To do nothing is unacceptable.”
Boat arrival to Australia is dramatically
summarised in the following chart:
Mr. Houston emphasised that boat arrivals should
“gain no benefit” over refugees who are accepted in government programmes.
Had the Government adopted the 22 recommendations
of the Panel it would also have removed asylum seekers’ automatic right to
apply to sponsor family once they have been granted a protection visa. This measure was reported the previous week
and it was seen as one which would free places for refugees accepted in camps
outside Australia to bring relatives after current places in a special
humanitarian programme were swallowed by boat arrivals.
The option of towing boats back to Indonesia had
been ruled out for the time being but the Panel noted that the situation could
change with appropriate regional arrangements.
The Panel
called on the Government to work closely with Indonesia, a transit country for
many boat people, and Malaysia to stem the influx of maritime arrivals as well
as lift its annual humanitarian intake. Neither country has subscribed to the
Refugee Convention.
If one
looks at the map of southern Asia, one may notice that from the western border
of Pakistan all the way to Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste at the South and
the Philippines at the North, no country except Cambodia has signed the Refugee
Convention. Cambodia is out of the way from
any flux of refugees, many of whom are in Indonesia but most of whom are in
Malaysia.
Furthermore,
the Panel seems to have taken no account of what Shane
E. J. Prince, a Sydney barrister, submitted with reference to Indonesia.
First
of all, claims for asylum made from Indonesia are not numerous.
U.N.H.C.R. figures show that the
numbers of people seeking asylum in Indonesia have not been higher than 6,600
since 1994 - excluding refugees from Timor Leste. In 1997 and 1998 there were only 69 and
109 people claiming asylum respectively. These low figures were not due to the
Howard Government ’s vicious Operation
Relex, which was not in place until 2001. Operation Relex
involved the use of the Australian Defence Force for border
protection in the country’s northern approaches conducted between 2001 and
2006. The operation was instigated following the Tampa affair
in September 2001 and its focus was on ‘illegal immigration.’ Assets of all
three services of the Defence Force were committed to the operation to prevent
the arrival of Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels
in the Australian migration zone.
At the end of
2010 only 811 registered refugees were awaiting resettlement in Indonesia, with
2,071 waiting in the pipeline for processing by the U.N.H.C.R.
These numbers are relatively stable. There were approximately 2,000 asylum
seekers in Indonesia in 2009. By the end of 2011 the U.N.H.C.R.
figures show that there were only 4,239 asylum seekers and refugees in all
of Indonesia.
Between 2001
and 2010 only 560 refugees were resettled in Australia from Indonesia,
an average of 56 per annum. During the same period approximately 130,000 places
were allocated for refugee and humanitarian visas. There are only two U.N.H.C.R.
staff in Indonesia to process all claims for refugee status.
The number of
refugees taken from Indonesia in 2009 were 109, and in 2010 were 457. In the first five months of 2012 to 31 May
2012 only 24 refugees were resettled in Australia via Indonesia. No wonder
refugees and asylum seekers take a huge risk and get on a boat. They get sick
of waiting !
Nauru or Papua
New Guinea will have no deterrent effect
- for asylum seekers they will
always be preferable to the death camps at home. Instead of punishing people
for exercising their legal right to seek asylum, why not: -
bring those registered as refugees in Indonesia to Australia by plane or
safe boat - increase the number of staff in Indonesia
processing claims by asylum seekers, and
- make the maximum waiting time in
Indonesia two years ? If there is a
speeding up of the processing of claims, and asylum seekers know that the
maximum time they may have to wait is two years, the incentive to get on a
dangerous boat voyage is reduced.
Furthermore,
the large number of asylum seekers in Malaysia and Thailand are overwhelmingly
from Myanmar - 93 per cent and 98 per cent,
respectively - and they have never been able to enter
Indonesia or to reach for boats.
The Panel
said that the Nauru and Manus Island centres should be re-established as soon
as possible as part of a “comprehensive regional network.” "Over time, a comprehensive regional
framework will reduce the lure of irregular maritime migration but until then,
the panel believes Australia needs to include the prospect of processing
options outside of Australia." the Report said.
“To
support this, it is the panel’s view that the Australian parliament should
agree, as a matter of urgency, to legislation that will allow for the
processing of irregular maritime arrivals in locations outside Australia.”
The Australian Government had long resisted
re-opening a processing facility on Nauru and this was a blow to the
Government’s position.
The Panel also said that the Government’s Malaysian
deal should “be built on further, rather than being discarded or neglected.”
The
so-called ‘Malaysia Solution’ would have seen boat people arriving in Australia
transferred to the Southeast Asian nation, with Australia resettling thousands
of that country's registered refugees in return. The proposal was scuttled by the Opposition
and the Greens, who refused to pass laws allowing off-shore processing,
prompting the government to ask the Houston Panel to review the policy in hopes
of breaking the political deadlock.
And rather than
dumping the Government’s controversial and illegal ‘Malaysia Solution,’ the
report recommended building on the deal “through high-level bilateral
engagement focused on strengthening safeguards and accountability.”
Under the
so-called ‘Malaysia Solution,’ Australia would have sent 800 asylum seekers to
Malaysia for processing each year in exchange for 4,000 confirmed refugees.
However, the
High Court ruled the deal invalid in August 2011 on the grounds that, as a
non-signatory to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, Malaysia has no legal
obligation to protect asylum seekers, something required under Australia’s Migration Act.
Mr. Houston
said that turning back boats heading
towards Australia “can be operationally achieved” -
but only with certain conditions attached. The conditions are not met at the moment -
but could be in the future. As he
said during a long press interview, he was in Defence the last time the Government
tried to turn boats back and he has a good appreciation of the issues involved.
On eight
occasions between 2001 and 2003, the Navy attempted to return boats to
Indonesia waters. Five of those boats
were eventually returned and three sank during the interception process,
forcing the Navy to rescue the passengers and put them into Australian
detention facilities. A 2010 document
from Australia’s Border Protection Command released under Freedom of
Information laws earlier in 2012 warns that a turn-back policy would risk
virtual hand-to-hand combat between navy sailors and asylum seekers. The document warns that such a policy would
lead asylum seekers to sabotage their boats to get rescued and be processed on
Australian soil.
But the Panel
did not rule out the possibility that tow-backs could work if there were
cooperation from Indonesia. “Turning
back irregular maritime vessels carrying asylum seekers to Australia can be
operationally achieved and can constitute an effective disincentive to such
ventures, but only in circumstances where a range of operational, safety of life,
diplomatic and legal conditions are met.” it said.
Mr. Houston said that the humanitarian programme should be immediately increased from 13,750 to
20,000 and that it jump to 27,000 over the coming years. He said a family migration programme should
jump 4,000. He said that there was a
large backlog in the programme, which was acting as an incentive for
‘irregular’ migration by family members.
Current reunion concessions for immediate
family - where they are sponsored by a person who
arrived by boat - should be removed, he said. The Panel also recommended that people who
arrive by boat should not be eligible to sponsor family under the Special
Humanitarian Programme. “Those who
arrive by irregular maritime means who seek to bring family to Australia will
need to do so under the existing family stream of the migration program.” Mr.
Houston said.
The Panel found concerns with the Malaysia deal
could only be considered if protection for asylum seekers was better addressed.
Mr. Houston said that Parliament needed to agree as a “matter of urgency” legislation to
allow offshore processing to reopen Nauru and Papua New Guinea processing
centres immediately. He described
putting the Report and recommendations together as challenging. He said his recommendations addressed the
challenges. His view was that onshore
processing encouraged people to get onto boats.
“At the moment, onshore processing is seeing a very
big, in my view, pull towards Australia.
We’re seeing increasing numbers of boats arrive. It is my view that unless we do something
different ... the problem is just going to get worse.”
The reaction from the
Australian Greens was immediate. They branded the
recommendation to reopen asylum seeker processing centres on Nauru and in Papua
New Guinea as a return to the “bad old days” of the Howard Government.
Greens Leader Christine Milne labelled most of the
22 recommendations from the Panel as cruel and disappointing, and likened them to the so-called ‘Pacific
Solution’ of processing illegal boat arrivals offshore. She said that the recommendations took away
people’s human rights and offered cruelty to people most in need. “That is the proposition that John Howard put
forward.” Senator Milne said. The Greens would not be party to something which
was cruel to people and caused them more pain than they had already suffered in
their journey as refugees, Senator Milne added.
The Greens
welcomed the recommendation of increasing the number of humanitarian places,
but condemned offshore processing. “This is about a policy that strips out
legal protections in Australian law.” said Senator Milne.
Senator Milne reiterated that the Australian Greens
will not be party to something which is cruel to people and “sets up a chain of
detention centres right across the Pacific.”
Her colleague Sarah Hanson-Young said that the
proposed family reunion changes would unfairly hurt unaccompanied minors who
will suffer “years and years of torment locked up on a remote island only to
finally be found to be genuine refugees.”
This is about “the harsh, the cruel, the mean policies of the Howard
Government.” she said.
The Refugee
Action Coalition strongly condemned the Houston Panel’s recommendations for
offshore processing.
“Mr. Houston
and his colleagues had an opportunity to listen to the experts, escape the
major parties’ persecution of refugees and inject reason into the asylum seeker
debate.” said Nick Riemer, spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition.
“But the Panel
has made no recommendation that will improve the situation for refugees who
have no other choice than to get on boats. All we have seen is a return to the
cruelty and inhumanity of the policies of the past.
If the Panel’s
arrangements are implemented, refugees will suffer and languish on Nauru and
Manus Island, just as they did under the Howard Government. The only people
these recommendations will help are the major parties.
The Panel has
claimed to be motivated by humanitarian considerations, but all its
recommendations are about outsourcing Australia’s responsibilities to poorer,
less-equipped neighbours. People desperate enough to sacrifice everything to
get on a boat deserve our help. But the Panel wants to shunt them off to places
in our region where they have no hope of living in safety. The only place that
can give refugees the security and support they need is Australia. Refugees
should be welcomed into the community.” Mr. Riemer said.
“The Panel
stressed that its aim was to provide incentives for ‘regular pathways’. But by
giving the green light to the Malaysia Agreement, the Panel has not provided
any credible regular pathway for refugees to get to Australia. Would Australia
really turn away asylum seekers fleeing the desperate circumstances in Syria ?
While the panel
recommended increasing Australia’s overall refugee intake, without guaranteed
resettlement to Australia, refugees will still have no alternative but to
resort to boats. As the direct arrival of Tamils to Australia shows, war,
torture and persecution are not the kinds of situation that allow regular
pathways. No one with any knowledge of refugee movements thinks that there is
any way to prevent dangerous ocean crossings.
The no
advantage provisions for boat arrivals are extremely callous. The Panel’s real
attitude is revealed by the fact that they haven’t excluded turning back the
boats.
Refugees quite
simply have the right to risk their lives at sea if they think that those
journeys are worth that risk. Six hundred people have died at sea, but
thousands have successfully reached Australia. Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’
didn’t save lives either. The only way to save lives at sea is to decriminalize
people smuggling, to open Australian processing centres in the region, and to
massively increase our humanitarian intake without making vulnerable boat
arrivals pay for it.
To add insult
to injury, the one positive measure the Panel proposed -
to de-link the onshore and offshore humanitarian programs
(recommendation 21) has been left for two years to review.”
Other human
rights groups said that the recommendations were in breach of Australia’s
international legal obligations.
“Penalising
people based on their mode of arrival is clearly in breach of [Australia’s]
obligations.” Dr. Graham Thom, of Amnesty International, told A.B.C.
television. “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 penalising 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.”
Dr. Thom, released a statement saying that the
organisation was appalled by the recommendations:
“Sending asylum seekers to places like Malaysia,
Nauru and Papua New Guinea is unacceptable and a complete outsourcing of
Australia’s human rights obligations. It
is shocking to see the panel favour punitive measures that deliberately hold
vulnerable people hostage, separate families and leave them in limbo.”
Ms. Rachel Ball from the Human Rights Law Centre said that the recommendations are a
violation of Australia’s international legal obligations:
“The deterrence policies are unnecessary. Policies
such as offshore processing, the Malaysia solution, withdrawing family reunion
rights and boat turnbacks are cruel responses to the desperation of asylum
seekers who make the boat journey to Australia.” she said in a statement. ...
“These policies are also unnecessary, given that the greatest disincentive
to making the boat journey to Australia - the risk of death at sea - already
exists.”
Human rights lawyer David Manne told Sky News
the recommendations would violate Australia’s legal commitments to refugees:
“The fact is, as the High Court ruled, that we have
legal commitments to ensure that people who are in danger and come seeking our
help are protected here and not sent to situations where there are inadequate
protections or safeguards. All we would be doing if we pursue offshore
processing in this way is sweeping the dangers from our doorstep to dangers
elsewhere, it won't essentially provide a proper plan of action.”
The Coalition had incessantly claimed that
re-opening a processing centre on Nauru would quickly solve the issue. But
Professor Mary Crock, an expert on refugee and migration law from the
University of Sydney, said that is not the case: “In fact I think that one of
the reasons why they don’t want the Government necessarily to adopt all of
their policies is that they’ll be shown up as being a hollow claim. The tragedy for me, I think, is that we are
just riding roughshod over our international legal obligations and we're making
a right mountain out of a molehill.”
At any rate Nauru’s Government was also keenly
waiting for the Report, though a spokesman said that it had not been contacted
by the Panel. This circumstance is fairly important, because the same
government estimated that it would take at least three months to restore or
build a facility.
Amnesty
Australia said that the Government’s initial response to the Panel Report showed
short-term political gains trumping Australia’s obligations under the Refugee
Convention.
“Introducing
policies like offshore processing, with the ‘no advantage’ rule which will see
refugees on Nauru languish for years, will not make refugees safer but rather
undermine prospects for a genuine regional solution for refugees,” Dr Graham
Thom said.
“This
announcement sends a resounding message to the region that protecting refugee
rights is something to be avoided at all costs.” ...
“Ultimately, this will mean that more refugees in the Asia Pacific face
torture, exploitation, and even death.”
... “The tragedy of asylum
seeker deaths at sea must be addressed, but not by punishing people who have
already fled torture and persecution.”
... “Whilst we welcome the
initiatives that genuinely increase protection for refugees in the region,
Amnesty International is very concerned with the punitive measures, such as
offshore processing, that the panel’s report has prioritised. ...
“Amnesty International urges parties not to support any of the
recommendations that blatantly breach Australia’s human rights obligations.”
Ms. Pamela
Curr, of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, described the report as “a
comprehensive package of harm.” ... “People will still drown. What this [report]
is making sure is that people drown elsewhere and don't drown right in front of
us.” she added.
The Asylum
Seeker Resource Centre said that the options presented by the Panel do not reflect
the recommendations by the hundreds of submissions made to the expert panel.
“We are in
shock.” Ms. Curr said. “The only way
people will be able to leave Nauru or any place of offshore processing is
through death or a life threatening illness. It did not have to come to this.
There are other ways as presented by the majority of the over 300 submissions
to the expert panel.” ... “The recommendations are based on the premise
of a no advantage test for those who come by boat. If you arrive by boat you
will not be eligible for family reunion and offshore processing is at the heart
of the panel’s recommendations.”
... “The recommendation to send
asylum seekers to Nauru, Malaysia and PNG will come at a huge moral and
economic cost to Australia – not to mention the human cost to the individuals
sent away. The proposals are also in breach of our obligations under the
refugee convention as the recommendations seek to punish those seeking asylum
based on mode of arrival. It is worse
than we expected.” she said.
Asylum Seeker
Resource Centre Patron and former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser said
deterrence has not worked in the past and will not work in the future. “In six pages and 22 recommendations, the
expert panel has shredded the principles of the Refugee Convention.” ... “The
panel rewrote the terms of reference - from saving lives to deterring people to
seek asylum in Australia. Asylum
seekers rightly expect us to offer them protection. We rightly expected the
expert panel to hold this protection at the heart of their recommendations.
Sadly, we have been disappointed.” Mr. Fraser said.
The Uniting
Church in Australia expressed its disappointment in the recommendations of the
Panel and called for a new beginning in the national debate on asylum seekers. “The Expert Panel report is another fork in
the road in this vexed debate.” National Director of the Uniting Church's
justice unit, Uniting Justice Australia, Rev. Elenie Poulos said.
“As a
representative of a Church that has long advocated for a more compassionate
treatment of asylum seekers, we cannot welcome the re-introduction of offshore
processing to Malaysia, Nauru or Papua New Guinea where the care of vulnerable
asylum seekers and refugees cannot be assured.” ...
“What we can do is to urge all parties in this debate to reconsider the
principles of compassion and protection in what has been an ugly
conversation. For too long the debate
has focussed on punishment and a false logic of deterrence. The Committee
emphasised a ‘no advantage deal’ for asylum seekers arriving by boat. This
serves only to punish people based on their method of arrival here – an
approach that lacks compassion and breaches our international obligations.”
The Uniting
Church in Australia said that it is a long-standing supporter of onshore
processing, community placement for people on bridging visas, and an increased
humanitarian intake. “The Report’s
focus on ‘regular pathways’ ignores the reality faced by hundreds of thousands
of refugees languishing in horrendous conditions in Malaysia.” ...
“While we welcome the Special Humanitarian Program being increased by
4,000 places, removing current family reunion concessions will devastate families
who have already endured so much.
Increasing the Humanitarian Program places to 20,000 will begin to
alleviate the pressures on our regional neighbours, but unless we delink
onshore refugee claims from the Humanitarian Program, then asylum seekers
arriving by boat will continue to be demonised.”
The U.N.H.C.R.
cautiously indicated that it would need to study in more detail the proposals
for offshore processing in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. “The efficacy and
integrity of such proposals will need to be assessed against their ability to
deliver effective protection outcomes to refugees identified as needing
protection under international law, not least through the 1951 Refugee
Convention to which Australia is a party.” it said in a statement. The agency agreed with the Panel’s view that
there are no quick or simple solutions
to the problem of boat arrivals.
By late afternoon of 13
August the Prime Minister Gillard was expected to comment on
the report and its recommendations.
Hours after the
Report was released, Ms. Gillard had given her in-principle support to all its
recommendations and said that Parliament would meet the following day to amend
the earlier rejected bill to include the provision for processing centres on
Nauru and Papua New Guinea. “We will also move to immediately implement the
recommendations on family reunion.” she added.
Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison
said that the Panel’s recommendations supported the current Coalition
policy. “The Houston Panel has
green-lighted Nauru and they have red-lighted Malaysia and the people swap in
its current form.” he said. The findings
also “dispelled the nonsense that it is impossible to turn boats back.” he
added. “The vast majority of these
measures can be introduced as we speak (and) don't require legislation. They just require a government that is prepared
to listen and to fix the mess that they have created.”
Asked whether the Coalition would be prepared to
support the Malaysia arrangement, if the legally binding safeguards where put
in place, Mr. Morrison said: “That is a massive big ‘if’ and one that the
government has actually told me directly to my face the Malaysian government
would not accept.”
Mr. Morrison said that the Panel had endorsed the
deterrence policies long advocated by the Coalition. “In particular the proposal to get on with
the job of putting Nauru in place.” he said.
The Prime
Minister had used the cover of the Report to climb down from her previous
insistence that the opposition back the Government’s ‘Malaysia Solution’ as a
condition of re-establishing offshore processing on Manus Island and Nauru. The
Government would immediately introduce legislation which would authorise
offshore processing on the mentioned locations. “If people want to put up a banner [saying]
this is a compromise from the government, dead right, in order to start saving
lives.’’ Ms. Gillard said of the dramatic policy shift on Manus Island and
Nauru.
Government and
Opposition remained as divided as ever over the Malaysia people swap, the
re-introduction of temporary protection visas and increasing Australia’s
humanitarian intake.
The Prime
Minister said that the proposal to process asylum seekers offshore was
different from previous efforts, because asylum seekers would be forced to
spend an equivalent amount of time on either Manus Island or Nauru as they would have spent waiting in
a source or transit country under regular arrangements. She said that those
arriving on boats would also have no greater claim to family reunion than those
arriving via regular processes.
Both changes
were designed to reduce the incentive to pay a people smuggler and take a
dangerous boat journey.
Ms. Gillard
declared that the time for politicking was over and the Panel’s package would
ensure “you don’t get a better deal if you get on a boat.”
Is sending asylum seekers
to Nauru and Papua New Guinea the victory that Opposition leader Tony Abbott
did not want ? This is a question which might be asked after Mr. Abbott’s puzzling
silence following the release of the Panel Report.
But what was a
policy first sunk by the High Court and then by the Opposition in refusing to
allow asylum seekers to be sent to Malaysia may be a sticking point. The Malaysian option was regarded by the
Panel as a solution. But there are qualifications, that the Prime Minister has
skilfully decided to postpone. Ms. Gillard was unable to forge an acceptable
policy to break what she called “the people smugglers’ business model.”
She was now
speaking as if she had found her own way.
In fact it was her Panel of ‘experts’ which had found a true compass for
her to follow.
Ironically,
although Mr. Houston denied his Panel was motivated by any political
considerations, the outcome would rob Mr. Abbott of his policy wedge against
the Government, while giving him the victory he claimed to want.
Mr. Houston “fiercely defended the
Panel’s independence.” at a press interview of 13 August. “At no time did we
see our job as being to broker a political deal.”
As if to
underline that sentiment, the Houston Report sought to explode the national
deadlock by attacking dearly held positions of the Left, the Right and the
Centre of Australian politics. The
Report delivered solid and embarrassing blows to many of the entrenched policy
positions of Labor and the Coalition. It
effectively invited both major parties to retreat and reassess their position
in what the Panel regarded as the greater national good. It was a position that Labor was only too
eager to embrace, not least because it was trapped in a political cul-de-sac on asylum seekers from which
there was no obvious escape.
Prime Minister
Gillard had been so desperate for a circuit-breaker on the issue that her
government all but abandoned itself to the Panel’s findings before it knew
precisely what they were. For Labor,
the Panel’s recommendations provided a fig leaf for what is a historic retreat
on policy. The Government’s in-principle acceptance of all 22 of the Report’s
recommendations meant that Labor was embracing a policy which was bearing
almost no resemblance to that introduced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd when he
sought to dismantle the Howard Government border protection policies in
2007-2008.
By way of
consolation, the political pain for the Gillard Government of such an
inglorious policy retreat was lessened by the fact it had now wedged the
Coalition into an uncomfortable corner.
For the
Coalition the Report’s recommendations were equally problematic on several
levels. They called for the longer term
pursuit of the ‘Malaysia Solution’, that the Coalition opposed on the grounds
that Malaysia is not a signatory to the Convention on Refugees. The Panel further challenged the Coalition
position by calling for Australia to strike deals with other countries in the
region which are not signatories to the Convention on Refugees. The Panel also rejected the Coalition’s plan
to use the Navy to turn back boats, saying that the appropriate legal,
humanitarian and diplomatic conditions are not in place to allow for the safe
turn-around of boats. “The conditions
necessary for effective, lawful and safe turn-back of irregular vessels
carrying asylum-seekers to Australia are not currently met, but this situation
could change in the future, particularly if appropriate regional and bilateral
arrangements are in place.” the Report said.
The fundamental
‘philosophy’ of the Report is that asylum seekers who arrive by boat should not
gain an unfair advantage over those who seek to arrive through traditional
means. “The balance of risk and
incentive must be shifted . . . away from dangerous maritime migration.” said
Mr. Houston. But he also warned that the
package of measures should not be tampered with. “This is an integrated package to be looked
at as a whole.” he said. “You wouldn't want to mess with the balance of
incentive and disincentive,” or else it may not work.
Arguably the
weakest aspect of the Panel’s findings is its optimism about the diplomatic
negotiations required to win support in the region for its measures. As Mr. Morrison said, so far Malaysia has
been reluctant to agree to extra safeguards for asylum seekers held in that
country.
There is also
no guarantee that Indonesia will agree to a range of proposed measures for
closer co-operation on asylum seekers, an issue which remains relatively low on
Jakarta’s list of political priorities.
During the
press conference on 13 August, Prime Minister Gillard dismissed a journalist’s
question about the likelihood of psychological damage being inflicted on the
detainees. “First and foremost I’d say stay where you are, don’t move: message
number one.” she declared Ms. Gillard declared cynically. “Don’t get yourself
to Nauru in these circumstances.” she threatened. And, after explaining that
refugees could agree to be deported to their country of origin instead of
waiting indefinitely to be permitted into Australia, Ms. Gillard continued: “I
am not trying to shy away from the toughness of this policy, but if I can put a
rhetorical question ... what’s the mental health trauma for that person who
lost six of their relatives when a boat went down at sea ?”
No one asked
any question as to the legality of what had been proposed and accepted. The sole reference to the law was made by
Prime Minister Gillard, when she ridiculed “lawyers’ games about working with
legislation.”
The Prime
Minister’s tough talk was supported by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, who
warned people smugglers: “From this point forward, anybody who comes by boat
runs the risk of being transferred to an offshore processing place.” Mr. Bowen had used tough words before. In 2010 he had said that the ‘Pacific
Solution’ was a “cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise
introduced on the eve of a federal election.”
Full
implementation of the Panel recommendations would cost $1 billion a year,
including $1.4 billion over forward estimates for increasing the refugee
intake, $800 million for offering more family reunion placements, $1.4 billion
to operate Nauru for 1500 people, $900 million for 600 at Manus Island and $80
million for the Malaysian deal.
As to the cost of
implementing the recommendations, the following table is illustrative.
The Panel
warned the $5 billion budget over the forward estimates would be blown anyway,
with the 450 average arrivals budgeted for increasing to an average of 1,300 a
month since April.
If that flow
continued, the cost of managing the influx would be greater than the $1 billion
a year to reopen Nauru and Manus Island and implement the other measures.
One of the Panel’s recommendations dealt a blow to
the Australian Government’s Malaysia people swap, deeming the deal not yet up
to protection and security standards needed.
After more than a year of clinging to the deal and refusing to adopt
Nauru without the people swap, Prime Minister Gillard said she would move
immediately to reinstate the Howard Government processing centres in Nauru and
Manus Island.
Ms. Gillard said that she would not claim a
‘victory’. “I will compromise in order
to enact the recommendations of this report.” Ms. Gillard said. “What this report is
calling on parliamentarians to do is to compromise and to act. This report is
telling us not to stay in our fixed positions but to act and get things done.”
she said. “When our nation looks at
what is happening at sea, too many lives have been lost.”
* * *
The Labor
Government was readying itself to work with the Opposition Liberal-National
Coalition to enact legislation which would reinstate the Howard Government’s
so-called ‘Pacific Solution’.
Under it,
refugees would again be illegally deported to Nauru and Papua New Guinea, where
they would be detained indefinitely, potentially for decades. The new measures
would be openly flouting international law and mark a new benchmark in the
official Australia’s contempt for basic democratic rights. The Labor Party had
previously opposed the ‘Pacific Solution’ and in the 2007 election campaign
attempted to appeal to the widespread public hostility to the maltreatment of
refugees.
The specific
measures proposed by the Houston Panel, and quickly accepted by the Gillard
Government, would go further than any of the policies enacted under the Howard
Government. Whereas Mr. Howard had unlawfully excised several territorial
islands in the waters between Australia and Indonesia from the country’s
migration zone, the Houston Report effectively demanded that all of Australia
be deemed an excised zone. This is to ensure that refugees are likely to be
deported overseas just as easily if they land on the mainland as if they land
in the currently excised islands.
The Panel
insisted that a necessary “disincentive” would only permit refugees, even once
they are officially given such status, to come to Australia after being
detained overseas for a period “comparable to what would have been made
available had their claims been assessed through regional processing
arrangements”, i.e., as if they had
they never made the journey to Australia and remained languishing in refugee
camps in Africa or Asia.
Civil liberties
and refugees lawyer Julian Burnside, Q.C. pointedly asked in relation to such a
proposal: “How do you determine when a person would otherwise have been
resettled ? Do you measure the average time in an African camp ? Do you look at
the average time the same person would have spent in Malaysia or Indonesia ?
That will throw up a different answer ... The average time for resettlement can
range from 5 years to 40 years.”
The Howard
Government’s ‘Pacific Solution’ had caused numerous mental health breakdowns,
self-harm incidents, and suicides among traumatised refugees who were dumped in
isolated and appalling conditions in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Unlike what the Houston Panel had proposed,
and Labor accepted, Mr. Howard never openly proposed arbitrarily to detain men,
women and children after their refugee status had been approved, in order to
deter others from joining them.
The Houston
Report also recommended that after refugees are finally permitted to reside in
Australia, those who initially arrived by boat should not be given the same
opportunity as other refugees to bring their family to Australia, under the
family reunion programme. This deliberate separation of parents from their
children, men and women from their spouses, is another “disincentive” to what
the Report deemed “irregular maritime arrivals”.
The central
thrust of the Houston Report is to prevent refugees from being able to exercise
even the limited rights identified by the Refugee Convention, to apply for
asylum and not to be refouled, i.e.,
returned to where they are at risk of political, ethnic or religious
persecution. The various measures outlining discriminatory treatment of those
who arrive in Australia by boat rather than another mode of transportation are
in blatant violation of the Refugee Convention.
The entire
political and media establishment has cynically attempted to exploit the
genuinely felt sympathy among ordinary people for the victims of these
incidents to justify an ever more draconian ‘border protection’ regime.
Prime Minister Gillard
announced that Australia could be sending asylum seekers to Nauru and Papua New
Guinea within a month. The Defence Force had
informed her that it can construct
temporary facilities in both locations while the main centres are being
reopened.
“That means
that within a month we would hope to see people being processed in Nauru and in
Papua New Guinea.” she told reporters in Canberra. ... “That’s clearly subject to the work of the
recon teams that could go as early as [the following] Friday.”
Ms. Gillard
said she was counting on an expeditious vote on the legislation in the House of
Representatives. “The time for politics
is over, the time for action is here. It’s time to get this legislation
amended. We want this legislation
through.”
Ms. Gillard had
met with the Defence Force chief General David Hurley to discuss logistics and
spoken with the president of Nauru and the prime minister of Papua New Guinea
by phone. “Both of them have been positive about hosting [processing] centres.”
Ms. Gillard said. “Both of them have
said if legislation passes this week they would welcome the reconnaissance
teams from our Defence Force on [17 August].
They also had indicated they would work with the reconnaissance teams
and with Defence to facilitate the establishment of temporary facilities.” She meant by that tents and other temporary
structures.
Ms. Gillard said
that the time for “politics, the political scoring, the yelling, the shouting”
was over. “We need this legislation to
pass the parliament so that we can get on with that action.” she said.
The Prime
Minister could not confirm whether 44 Opposition M.P.s had been listed to speak
on the Government’s legislation. “My
understanding is the opposition has quite a large number of people who have put
their names on the speaking list.” she said.
Ms. Gillard
would not say whether she was comfortable with the prospect of asylum seekers
being held offshore for up to 10 years.
The Government would take careful advice from the United Nations refugee
agency before determining any time frame,
she said.
“It’s
fundamental to the proposition in the Panel’s Report that you don’t get an
advantage because you have got on a boat.
... Now there’s a need to implement that and work through what it means
and what processing times are in our region for example.”
The Prime
Minister said that she was still trying to contact her Malaysian counterpart,
who was travelling. “I certainly will be speaking to him as soon as it is
possible for us to do so.” she said.
She would explain the recommendations of the Houston Report and ask for
his agreement for officials to have further discussions about changes to the
proposed ‘Malaysia Solution’. The Panel had supported it, but only with
stronger human rights safeguards and the government has pledged to try to
negotiate the extra protections.
On 15 August 2012 the Refugee Council of Australia
accused the Government of displaying a stronger interest in the recommendations
on deterrence than in the measures for the protection of refugees.
The Council deplored that political debate and the activity within
the Parliament since the release of the
Panel’s report had focussed almost exclusively on just three of the Panel’s 22
recommendations - those related to re-establishing forced
transfers of asylum seekers to Manus Island and Nauru.
On that day the Council was one of 20 organisations, joined by
former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and seven senior academics and lawyers, to
write to the Prime Minister signifying their opposition to the legislation
before the Parliament, which was aimed at re-establishing offshore processing
of asylum claims. The letter raised serious concerns about the human rights
implications of the legislation and the absence of any measure to enable
regular Parliamentary scrutiny of transfer arrangements.
“The Refugee Council does not support the Expert Panel’s recommendations
about the reestablishment of offshore processing but we note that the Panel saw
these recommendations as part of a package of measures which included critical
steps towards improving protection options for refugees within Asia.” Mr.
Power, the Council C.E.O. said.
“We know that on [13 August] the Prime Minister and Immigration
Minister committed to implementing all 22 recommendations but we have heard
little or nothing since about any of the recommendations designed to provide
refugees with constructive protection alternatives to travelling to Australia
by boat.
The quality of the political debate from the Government and
Opposition this week yet again leaves many Australians despairing about whether
our political representatives have the interest or the capacity to deal with
the complex nature of the regional challenges in refugee protection. Australians
- and the many people across
Asia and beyond who are watching our national debate -
need to hear more detail as soon as possible about Australia’s plans to
expand refugee resettlement and focus greater attention on regional cooperation
and supporting refugee protection.”
The Council was pressing the Australian Government to give details
of its strategies to implement the following measures recommended by the Panel:
- An immediate increase in
the Refugee and Humanitarian Programme to 20,000 places and an increase to
27,000 places within five years.
- Increased funding for
U.N.H.C.R. to improve processing systems for asylum seekers in Asia and the
Middle East.
- Increased support for
capacity-building and service delivery programs among N.G.O.s and civil society
groups in the region.
- Focusing Australia’s Refugee and Humanitarian Programme on
asylum seeker flows moving from source countries into South East Asia.
- Regional engagement and
cooperation with Indonesia and Malaysia.
- A whole-of-government strategy to engage with source countries
for asylum seekers coming to Australia, with a focus on increased resettlement
from the Middle East and Asia.
- Addressing the current
backlog in the Special Humanitarian Programme.
- Creating more opportunities for resettlement by promoting
coordinated strategies among traditional and emerging resettlement countries.
“If the Australian Government is serious about creating incentives
for asylum seekers to seek protection through established regional systems, it
needs to start this work now.” Mr Power said.
“That means committing to targets and a timetable to build the Regional
Cooperation Framework that stands the best chance of improving protections for
refugees and asylum seekers in the region and ensuring they don’t have to risk
their lives at sea to find basic protection.”
The letter to the Prime Minister on offshore processing legislation
read:
“The Hon Julia Gillard, Prime Minister
August 15, 2012
Dear Prime Minister
We are united in our opposition to the Migration Legislation
Amendment (Offshore Processing and Other Measures) Bill currently before
Parliament. We are also concerned that other legislative changes required to
implement the recommendations of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers will, if
passed, see the Australian Parliament remove legislative safeguards for asylum
seekers, reverse previous measures implemented to protect vulnerable people and
breach Australia’s international obligations. We oppose any form of offshore
processing and policies centred on deterrence and punishing people based on
their mode of arrival.
We are particularly concerned that implementation of the Expert
Panel’s recommendations will:
- Repeal the few human
rights protections included in the offshore processing legislation passed in
2001.
- See any country designated for offshore
processing, regardless of whether it is a party to the Refugee Convention.
- Punish asylum seekers
who arrive by boat in breach of the Refugee Convention.
- Implement a return to assessing asylum
applications in Nauru and Manus Island, ignoring past lessons regarding the
mental health impacts of holding people indefinitely with limited freedom of
movement.
- Facilitate the removal of child asylum seekers
from Australia.
- Facilitate the transfer
of unaccompanied minors who will have no guardian to act in their best
interests, in breach of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
- Prevent IMAs (whatever their age) from proposing family
members for the Special Humanitarian Program (SHP), creating greater incentive
for families who want to stay together to travel by boat to Australia.
- Leave open the
possibility that boats may be turned back in the future, contravening the
Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea.
We welcome recommendations which increase our annual humanitarian
intake and additional options for family reunion for refugee and humanitarian
entrants. We also welcome the much greater focus on developing refugee
protection options in South East Asia and a possible future review of the
policy which links onshore and offshore visa places. However, these positive
recommendations in the Expert Panel report must be legislated to ensure they
are enshrined in law.
We are concerned also that, if neither House of Parliament uses
the proposed disallowable instrument mechanism to vote down the transfer of
asylum seekers to a particular country, the transfer arrangement could remain
in place in perpetuity. At the very least, transfers of asylum seekers out of
Australia should be subject to regular review by Parliament. We ask the
Parliament to specify in legislation that every disallowable instrument
specifying a location as a place where asylum seekers may be transferred must
include a six month sunset clause to enable regular Parliamentary scrutiny of
transfer arrangements.
This consensus statement is signed by agencies and individuals who
are directly concerned with and involved in the support of refugees and asylum
seekers and academics with relevant expertise.
Yours faithfully
Amnesty
International Australia
Asylum
Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC)
Asylum
Seekers Christmas Island
Asylum
Seeker Welcome Centre (ASWC)
Bridge for
Asylum Seekers Foundation (BASF)
Balmain for
Refugees (BFR)
Brigidine
Asylum Seekers Project
Sonia Caton,
Migration Agent
CASE for
Refugees
Centre for
Human Rights Education, Curtin University
ChilOut
Coalition
for Asylum Seekers Refugees and Detainees Inc (CARAD)
Darwin
Asylum Seeker Support & Advocacy Network (DASSAN)
Rt. Hon
Malcolm Fraser AC, CH
Sandra
Gifford, Professor of Anthropology and Refugee Studies
Human Rights
Law Centre (HRLC)
Hotham
Mission Asylum Seeker Project (ASP)
International
Detention Coalition
Ged Kearney,
President, Australian Council of Trade Union (ACTU)
Melbourne
Catholic Migrant & Refugee Office
Professor
William Maley, AM FASSA
Dr. Anne
Pedersen, Associate Professor
Refugee
Council of Australia (RCOA)
Refugee and
Immigration Legal Service (RAILS)
Uniting
Church in Australia Assembly
Welcome to
Australia
Dr. Savitri
Taylor, Associate Professor and Director of Research
Tamara Wood,
Nettheim Doctoral Teaching Fellow and PhD Candidate”
It is not know what the Prime Minister replied, if any. Ms. Gillard was too busy to shore up her
political position, inside and out of Parliament.
The Prime Minister was more concerned with the implications and
consequences of the Bill before the House of Representatives than with the protestations
of the all sector of organisations, and most of the persons, involved in the
refugee policy.
The Panel’s
Report is an astute document which allowed the leaders to terminate the
Nauru-Malaysia deadlock. It gave cover
for Prime Minister Gillard to retreat and accept Nauru without insisting on
Malaysia as the required trade-off. It enabled Gillard to declare further
compromise was essential and virtuous. “I am over it, we’re all over it.” Ms.
Gillard said of the impasse.
Nevertheless, it was clear that the Opposition Leader had gained a
sonorous political victory. Mr. Abbott was not saying very much for the moment,
except for pointing out that Labor’s new bill was really his bill. He needed go no further than noting that
Labor, for years dismissive of the ‘Pacific Solution’, was now hasting to call
the President of Nauru and the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea to revamp the
initiative. And this is what the more than forty member of the Opposition who
were listed for speaking on the Bill would be reminding Ms. Gillard and her
Minister for Immigration. The Prime
Minister was busy executing exactly the plan of the Opposition.
The Prime
Minister was tainted by her reversal precisely because it was the issue over
which, when in Opposition, she had declared Labor’s moral superiority over
Howard’s policy.
During
the ‘debate’ many Opposition members tormented the Prime Minister, reminding
her that in 2002, in her capacity as the Opposition spokesperson on immigration
she had on more than one occasion said that: “The so-called Pacific
solution ... is nothing more than the
world’s most expensive detour sign. It does not stop you getting to Australia;
it just puts you through a detour on the way while Australian taxpayers pay for
it.” And that she had gone on to say:
“Labor will end the so-called Pacific solution, the processing and detaining of
asylum seekers on Pacific islands, because it is costly, unsustainable and
wrong as a matter of principle.”
By the early
afternoon of 15 August the urgent legislation promoted by the Government and
reinstating offshore processing centres for asylum seekers had passed in the
House of Representatives.
Only two
members - the Independent Andrew Wilkie and Adam Bandt
from the Australian Greens - had voted against the Bill.
There had been
other voices, from both sides of the major parties, to speak in terms at time
heartfelt about the Bill. But at the
end, the stolid practice of the Westminster System and its iron-clad
partisanship had demanded that both Labor and Conservatives would close ranks
and vote as required by their respective leaders. Consequences, particularly for Labor members
would have been draconian.
Labor M.P. Melissa Parke expressed her “deep sense
of discomfort” about aspects of the policy.
Ms. Parke questioned the premise that asylum
seekers coming to Australia by boat should not have any advantage over others
who pursued orderly migration paths, “not least because this idea of an orderly
path, or queue, is simply a myth.”
Under this principle, the detention time “could
well be indefinite because for many asylum seekers, including those coming from
places like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, there are no queues to join and no
orderly U.N.H.C.R. paths to safe haven.” she said.
Because of all the speeches in both houses of
Parliament Ms. Parke’s appears to have been the one coming from a thoughtful
person who was speaking both from a cultivated
mind and a warm heart, it may be of value to quote that speech at some
length.
Of the tone of the debate, and with the advantage
of having heard many of her colleagues, Ms. Parke had this to say:
“The discussion has often been so full of
distortion, misrepresentation, fear mongering, point-scoring and even
righteousness that it cannot be called a debate. To the extent that we regard
this outcome as a compromise it is still a compromise at the lower end of what
we are capable of as a nation. We strive as a country for excellence in so many
areas, and in so many areas we achieve that excellence. Here we have not
excelled. Both the parliamentary process and the wider political process in
which all of us, as parliamentarians and members of the media, share a part has
not excelled. We have not excelled in presenting the facts to the Australian
people, in crushing out the lies and easing the ill-founded fears, in lifting
the miasma of misunderstanding and intolerance, and in arguing from principle
towards reason and compassion.”
And further on:
“I would not be doing my duty on behalf of many of
my constituents and fellow Labor Party members if I did not convey the deep
sense of discomfort they and I feel regarding specific aspects of the path we
are embarking on today as a parliament. 'Cruel to be kind' is a cliché that I am not sure is ever
actually justified. In particular, there are strong concerns about the
devastating consequences, including severe mental health issues, of detention
of asylum seekers for indeterminate periods on Nauru and Manus Island. This was
the proved experience under the Howard government's Pacific solution and the
criteria have not yet been developed that would prevent such detention, in this
case being appropriately described as arbitrary and potentially indefinite.
As my predecessor, Dr Carmen Lawrence, has written:
“Not surprisingly, every
independent inquiry into immigration detention has drawn attention to the poor
mental health of detainees and the particular risks to children's well-being.”
...
Such research has
revealed high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and
panic attacks, attempted suicides and self harm. The longer people are held in
detention, the worse the symptoms are likely to be, adding to the already high
levels of psychopathology among those who've experienced persecution,
harassment, torture and physical assaults.
Certainly, if the key criterion for the length of
detention is the amount of time an asylum seeker would have had to wait if they
had pursued UNHCR assessment within the region, then the wait could well be
indefinite, because, for many asylum seekers, including those coming from
places like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, there are no queues to join and no
orderly UNHCR paths to safe haven in this country or elsewhere.
I also question the premise that asylum seekers
coming to Australia by boat should not have any advantage over others who
pursue orderly migration paths, not least because this idea of an orderly path
or queue is simply a myth. The only reason we have the sense in this country
that asylum seekers who arrive by boat are taking the place of those resettled
from refugee camps is that we have operated a quota system that throws these
two distinct categories together. This creates an administrative fiction, and
there is no reason that we could not have a category and quota for resettlement
in addition to meeting our fundamental obligation to assess the asylum claims
of those who quite legitimately and legally seek humanitarian refuge in
Australia.”
Coming to the end of her intervention, Ms. Parke
remarked:
“The political discussion in recent years about
stopping the boats and the people smugglers' business model has said very
little about what it means to be a refugee. My own UN [where she was a lawyer
between 1999 and 2007] experience tells me that people do not leave or stay away
from their homes without very good reason. In this context I would like to
recount the words of President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia, who fled her
country as a child after the Second World War. She made the following comments
at a 2001 meeting of parties to the refugee convention. She said:
“No one leaves their home willingly or gladly. When
people leave en masse the place of their birth, the place where they live it
means there is something very deeply wrong with the circumstances in that
country and we should never take lightly these flights of refugees fleeing
across borders. They are a sign, they are a symptom, they are proof that
something is very wrong somewhere on the international scene. When the moment
comes to leave your home, it is a painful moment.
...
It can be a costly choice. Three weeks and three
days after my family left the shores of Latvia, my little sister died. We
buried her by the roadside, we were never able to return or put a flower on her
grave.
And I like to think that I stand here today as a
survivor who speaks for all those who died by the roadside, some buried by
their families and others not and for all those millions across the world today
who do not have a voice who cannot be heard but they are also human beings,
they also suffer, they also have their hopes, their dreams and their
aspirations. Most of all they dream of a normal life.
...
I entreat you ladies and gentlemen when you think
about the problems of refugees, think of them not in the abstract think of them
not in the bureaucratic language of decisions and declarations, and priorities
in a sense that you normally think of things. I entreat you think of the human
beings who are touched by your decisions, think of the lives who wait on your
help.”
A Liberal backbencher, Ms. Judi Moylan, abstained
saying that the legislation did not contain effective protections or any sort
of timeline.
Earlier, the
House had rejected an Opposition amendment which called on the Government to
restore temporary protection visas and issue Defence with instructions to turn
back asylum seeker boats where it was safe to do so.
And the whole
House also rejected a Greens amendment which was designed to limit the Bill’s
measures to 12 months. “I would prefer
that mandatory detention did not exist; I would prefer that we had a much
speedier process for processing people’s asylum claims,” Greens’ deputy leader
Adam Bandt told Parliament. “But I would hope that 12 months represents a
reasonable time that all members of this House could agree to as being an
acceptable limit... That is not perfect, but it is a compromise that I hope
will be acceptable.” Any attempt in
that direction was defeated.
The Migration Legislation Amendment (Offshore
Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2011 was ready
to go to the Senate for consideration, where it was expected to pass by 16
August, just three days after Prime Minister Gillard had embraced the scheme.
Despite a
barrage of support for the Labor Government’s plan in the media, there are
signs of political shock and revulsion at the Right-wing shift that has
occurred. Letters to newspaper editors recalled that hostility to the Howard
Government’s policies had been a significant factor in Labor’s victory at the
2007 election.
A letter to The (Melbourne) Age denounced
“one of the most reprehensible decisions made by a Western government in the
21st century.” One to The Sydney
Morning Herald commented: “The asylum seeker ‘solution’ being pushed by
the Gillard government has got to be the final nail in its coffin for thinking
voters… If we wanted the Pacific solution we would have voted for John Howard
in 2007.”
Refugee groups
warned of terrible consequences. Amnesty International’s refugee spokesman, Dr.
Graham Thom, said it was “shocking to see the panel favour punitive measures
that deliberately hold vulnerable people hostage, separate families and leave
them in limbo… Ultimately, this will mean that more refugees in the Asia
Pacific face torture, exploitation, and even death.”
Nor was the Government prepared to listen to the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who warned that asylum seekers
must not be held on Manus Island or Nauru for so long that they suffer
psychological damage.
The U.N.H.C.R.’s regional representative, Richard
Towle, said the “legacy” of prolonged displacement on Pacific island states had
been severe psychological damage.
“So we’ve got to make sure that if people who are
genuine refugees are having to wait for solutions, it's not so long as to cause
damage.” he said.
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen had conceded that
regular processes “can be a long time.”
But he added that he had not yet had talks with the U.N.H.C.R. about the
new policy.
Disquiet has intensified in union and Labor
circles, too. Australian Council of
Trade Unions president, Ged Kearney was among those who had signed the
previously mentioned open letter to
Prime Minister Gillard condemning the legislation. Ms. Kearney said that the A.C.T.U. opposed
offshore processing. Australian unions had always advocated a humane approach
to asylum seekers, she said. “We are talking about human beings who should not
be treated as a political football.”
Senator Doug Cameron, a Left convener, said he had
a “very heavy heart. I don’t like Manus Island, I don’t like Nauru, but we’re
here because we couldn’t get an agreement on an approach that the U.N.H.C.R.
said was O.K., and that was Malaysia.”
Three boats
carrying a total of 200 people had been intercepted since 13 August, when the
Labor Government had accepted in principle the recommendations of the Houston
Panel Report. Australia had seen
‘unauthorised boat arrivals’ sky rocket in recent months. Up to mid-August
2012, more than 7,900 people have arrived in Australian waters. This compares
to about 4,500 people for the whole of 2011.
The Prime
Minister had intimated on 13 August that all boat arrivals were “at risk of
being transferred to Manus Island or to Nauru”, where asylum seekers would
initially live in tents. She reiterated
the message in an interview with Sky News
on 15 August: “That is a very clear statement and a clear message to anybody
who is contemplating paying a people smuggler and getting on a boat.” This was an indirect response to the
Australian Greens’ challenge to commit to time limits for the detention of asylum
seekers at the centres, that the Government wanted operational as soon as
possible. Yet, she was still able to
acknowledge that “These issues involving human beings both tear at your heart
and challenge your thinking.” ... “Because we do have to extend compassion to
people who are fleeing persecution but we don't want to create any incentive to
risking your life at sea.”
The Opposition
Leader, Mr. Abbott, said he had no problem with people living in tents. “People who arrive illegally by boat need to
be treated humanely but they can't expect five-star treatment or even
three-star treatment.” he quipped
- as it is his excellent
want. Liberal Party backbencher Dennis Jensen accused the government of being a “soft
touch” for refugees. “Now, it’s time for the iron fist.” he said. The Opposition Leader also suggested that
Prime Minister Gillard was responsible for the deaths which occurred at sea.
Meanwhile, almost five years after John Howard was voted out of office,
Australia was clamouring to reinstall some of the policies which made him so
unpopular. Refugee advocates were furious. As the Asylum Seeker Resource
Centre’s Pamela Curr said: “People will still drown… It’s just that we won’t
see them drown.”
Only the Greens
Leader Christine Milne said tent accommodation was inhumane. “On the one hand Angus Houston is saying
people will be treated better this time and in the next breath we are going to
be setting up these huge, temporary tent camps and we are taking away people's
human rights.” she told reporters in Canberra.
In vain
Independent Senator Nick Xenophon intimated that he wanted a “thorough” debate
of the Bill when it reached the Senate.
* * *
As the military was readying to begin preparing the
processing centres, former Defence Force chief Chris Barrie complained that the
use of defence personnel was a travesty. “The military shouldn’t have to do
it.” he said, as a private contractor would be cheaper and more efficient.
Labor had re-opened one of the darkest chapters in
Australia’s history of refugee policies. In a final capitulation, Prime
Minister Gillard had embraced the Howard Government’s ‘Pacific Solution’,
forcing laws through parliament with the support of the Coalition immediately
to reopen offshore processing centres on Manus Island and Nauru.
Ms. Gillard had gained the despicable honour of
implementing a policy which is crueller than Howard’s. The legislation allows
indefinite detention on Nauru and Manus Island -
and Ms. Gillard was already talking about “four or five years” of
punishment for asylum seekers, or in her words, detention long enough to
“equalise treatment” with the wait for resettlement in Indonesia or Malaysia.
She said the detention centres could be up and
running within a month and was even sending the Army to Nauru to begin
restoring the camps. In a display of sheer mercilessness, Immigration Minister
Chris Bowen declared that any asylum seeker who had arrived after 4.45 pm on
Monday 13 of August, the day of the announcement, may be subject to the new
arrangements.
The Government’s fake humanitarian concern about
lives at sea could not conceal that this is what Ms. Gillard had wanted all
along: a ruthless measure to “stop the boats”. The Prime Minister ‘Expert
Panel’ consisted of border protection experts.
It was no surprise that it recommended offshore processing.
Was the Government really
intent on saving lives? Ms. Gillard had cast aside human rights concerns about
the policy, which have been raised by a plethora of refugee and advocacy
groups, saying, “what’s harder is watching people drown.” But it is the
government’s own “stop the boats” policies which have caused the drownings.
Australia’s search-and-rescue efforts for asylum
boats had been subordinated to a callous disregard for the lives of asylum
seekers - telling boats to go back to Indonesia, where
refugees face Australian-funded Indonesian prisons, or the scandalous 36 hours
that Australian authorities spent sitting on their hands in June, knowing a
boat was in distress. That delay cost 90 lives.
The Sydney Morning Herald revealed
that a boat of 67 refugees, many of them Palestinian, has been lost at sea on
late July. Australian authorities had
done nothing in response to panicked calls from relatives for up to three
weeks.
There is plenty that could be done to stop the boat
tragedies if the Government abandoned its ‘Fortress Australia’ mentality. Yet
the Houston Panel refused to consider proposals to decriminalise people
smuggling. It should not be illegal to use such irregular travel networks to
seek asylum - and should not be illegal to organise the
boats either. Criminalising people smuggling, combined with Australian
authorities sinking or burning the boats which make it to Australia, means
unsafe vessels not fully prepared for the trip would be used.
One of the few positive Houston Panel’s
recommendations was to increase resettlement of asylum seekers directly from
Indonesia and Malaysia, to give asylum seekers there a realistic alternative to
getting on a boat. But the Government had ignored this, simply saying it
supports increasing the refugee intake “in principle”, saying that this would
be it is too expensive, while at the same time preparing to spend $1.4 billion
for a detention camp on Nauru.
The Australian Government is reinforcing the myth
that there is some kind of ‘orderly queue’ for refugees and that those who come
by boat are ‘queue jumpers’ to justify their policy of deterrence. The fact is
that refugee resettlement from camps overseas is more a ticket in a lottery
than a place in a queue. Less than 1 per cent of the world’s refugees are
resettled in any one year. If they all joined a ‘queue’ the wait would be close
to 135 years.
Just as under Howard, Gillard’s cruelty will not
stop refugees from attempting to reach safety in Australia. Deterrent policies
can never work unless the Australian Government becomes more ruthless and
brutal than the regimes refugees are fleeing.
But off-shore processing will make getting refugee
status tortuously slow and inflict mental anguish and misery on some of the
most vulnerable people in the world.
The last detainee on Manus Island, Aladdin Sisalem,
had spoken out, explaining how the offshore detention centres are factories for
mental illness: “When you see that a government watched by the world can do
this to you, you can be gaoled for infinity, and no one can do anything about
it, you are under a great injustice and [do not] even know how long you will be
in this gaol and what is going to happen to you after. ...
One day, or two days, or even after two years, you end up having a
breakdown or a trauma, post-traumatic stress and other psychological issues.
You have to live with it for the rest of your life.”
A former U.N. Human Rights Commission Secretary,
Dr. John Pace, had visited Nauru in 2001 for Amnesty International and
reported: “Conditions are harsh, with the heat and the humidity in the upper
thirties, and health conditions are basic.”
One ageing desalination plant provides the island’s
only water. Refugee advocate Phil Glendenning, told the A.B.C. that when he
visited Nauru in 2010, it, “was off between 9:00am and 5:00pm… [people] were
unable to flush toilets in those hours.”
While the Bill was being
discussed in the Senate, news arrived that the Papua New Guinea Government had
announced that it would not take any asylum-seekers until Australia’s financial
commitments were finalised.
The Papua New
Guinea High Commissioner to Australia Charles Lepani said tha Prime
Minister Gillard had acted prematurely by announcing Manus Island would host a
processing centre, warning his nation did not want to be seen as “a little
brother of Australia.”
Australia
should look back to how former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser handled asylum
seekers with compassion, rather than revert to Howard-era policy, the Senate
was told.
Fighting back
tears, Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young told the chamber the
Government had cherry-picked recommendations from the Houston Panel. She said that the legislation did not
increase Australia’s humanitarian refugee intake, as the panel recommended.
As Mr. Fraser
watched on from the Senate gallery, Senator Hanson-Young urged Australia to
learn from his leadership during the 1980s, handling Vietnamese and Chinese
refugees. “This legislation will not
save lives, it will kill people.” she said.
“It will send brave courageous people insane.”
Senator
Hanson-Young accused the Government of having lost its moral compass. “Many of these people cannot get to
Australia by plane because we do not give them visas.” she said. “Our whole policy is designed to push people
onto boats.”
Greens Senator
Lee Rhiannon said that there had been the opportunity to come up with a
solution which would have saved lives, respected refugee rights and honoured
international obligations, if Labor had been willing to work with the
Greens. Instead, it had chosen to work
with the Coalition and return to the ‘Pacific Solution’.
“There are even
aspects that make it worse than what we saw in those years.” Senator Rhiannon
said, adding that an island prison would be established.
The Government
and Opposition had teamed up to push the Bill through the Senate, despite
Australian Greens efforts to delay its passage and make amendments.
The Greens
denounced the major parties for failing to set time limits on detention,
rejecting calls for a 12 month review and shirking on Australia’s international
human rights obligations.
Greens Senator
Hanson-Young claimed that there were ten unaccompanied children on Christmas
Island at risk of being deported to Nauru and who won’t have any legal guardian
protection under this legislation.
“Under Julia
Gillard’s ‘Pacific Solution’ - which is what this legislation is -
there are even less protections [than in Howard’s time].” she said.
Labor
frontbencher Senator Kate Lundy said that granting unaccompanied minors special
treatment would be the “height of irresponsibility” because people smugglers
would send boatloads of children without their parents. Senator Lundy confirmed that there were ten
unaccompanied minors among the new arrivals, who may be deported to Nauru.
For
backbenchers in Labor’s Left faction, the legislation would leave a bitter
taste. Labor Senator Gavin Marshall told
the Senate that the Labor caucus was not unanimous in its decision to support
the measures. “Many of us have great
difficulty reconciling this decision with our personal values and I admit it
conflicts with my own.” he told the Senate.
“But as the party of government we do not have the luxury of indulging
in our self-righteousness.”
He remained
gravely concerned about the Bill’s punitive aspects and the effectiveness of
the no-advantage principle as a disincentive.
The Opposition
gleefully pointed out Labor's u-turn on the ‘Pacific Solution’. Liberal frontbencher George Brandis said he
had no doubt about the good intentions of former Immigration Minister Chris
Evans when he announced proudly in 2008 that he would dismantle the Howard
government’s “inhumane” asylum seekers policy.
“How often have we heard the road to hell is paved with good intentions
?” Senator Brandis said.
After passing
by the Senate on 16 August 2012 the legislation proceeded for royal assent.
* * *
The
passing of the Bill caused protests from overseas humanitarian organisations. Thus Human Rights Watch wrote from
Washington, D.C. that “The Australian
parliament’s swift approval of an “offshore processing” law marks a shift in
refugee policy that appears arbitrary and discriminatory on its face.”
“Australia’s new offshore
processing law is a giant step backward in the treatment of refugees and asylum
seekers.” said Bill Frelick,
refugee programme director. ... “Australia again seeks to shunt desperate
boat people to remote camps, perhaps for years, to punish them for arriving
uninvited by sea.”
...
“The new law authorizes the government to transfer irregular migrants arriving
by sea to the Pacific country of Nauru or to Manus Island, a remote malarial
island that is part of Papua New Guinea. The legislation was rushed through the
House and Senate just days after a government-appointed panel of experts issued
a 22-point plan for addressing the issue of asylum seekers who arrive by boat.
While
the legislation adopted the [Houston] panel’s recommendation to reinstate
offshore processing, it did not include most of the panel’s other
recommendations, many of which were geared toward improving the capacity of
Australia, transit countries, and source countries to provide asylum seekers
with safe alternatives to irregular boat departures. The House rejected an
amendment that would have set a one-year limit on the time asylum seekers could
be held at the offshore sites.
The
legislation only targets asylum seekers who arrive irregularly by boat. The
claims of asylum seekers who arrive by air, even with improper documents, will
continue to be processed while they remain in Australia. In most cases they
will continue to be given ‘bridging visas,’ which allow them to live and work
in the community.
People escaping persecution often have good reasons not to ask the authorities
for permission to travel before they flee,” Frelick said. “To set up a system
that discriminates against asylum seekers just because they arrive irregularly
by boat flies in the face of both basic fairness and fundamental refugee
protection principles.”
Human
Rights Watch then dealt with the failure of the ‘Malaysia Solution’ and its
aftermath, and continued:
“But the government found common ground with
the opposition this week when both agreed to enable offshore processing at
Nauru and Manus Island by scrapping section 198A of the Migration Act,
circumventing the High Court ruling.
The
new law adds that “the designation of a country to be an offshore processing
country need not be determined by reference to the international obligations or
domestic law of that country.”
Refugee
processing was closed at Manus Island in 2004 and at Nauru in 2008 after the
so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ was criticized for being both costly and inhumane.
Nauru Island became a party to the Refugee Convention in 2011, but has not yet
demonstrated its capacity to provide effective asylum procedures and refugee
protection, two additional criteria set forth by the High Court for
compliance with section 198A. Papua New
Guinea is also a party to the convention, but it has entered many
reservations to it and also lacks a national refugee determination procedure.
Australia’s
prime minister, Julia Gillard, said that asylum seekers could be sent to Nauru
as early as September where they would initially live in tents, and could be
expected to wait there as long as five years for their applications to be
processed.
Gillard’s minister for immigration and citizenship, Chris Bowen, should not
designate any countries for offshore processing, since the legislation, on its
face, is discriminatory and is almost certain to result in arbitrary
detention.”
“Parliament may have skirted the High Court’s ruling by cutting human rights
protection from the Migration Act, but not the principle on which the ruling
rested.” Frelick said. “Should this plan go forward, Australia will be shirking
its obligations under the Refugee Convention by punishing asylum seekers based
on their arrival and indefinitely detaining them offshore where their rights
won’t be ensured.”
United Nations
agencies, too, expressed their concern about Australia’s refugee policy. On 17 August U.N.H.C.R. and the United
Nations Human Rights Office alerted that Australia’s plan to reopen detention
centres on remote Pacific islands for asylum seekers and migrants who arrive by
sea could violate their human rights and harm their mental health.
“We do not want
to see a return to lengthy delays in remote island centers for asylum seekers
and refugees before durable solutions are found. We are also concerned about
the psychological impact for those individuals who would be affected.” Adrian
Edwards of the U.N.H.C,R. told a news briefing in Geneva. Technically, the plan did not appear to
violate the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, ratified by Australia. “But we have to look at how
this is implemented.” he said. The plan
was announced after a Report said 964 asylum seekers had died since 2001 while
making the dangerous sea journey from their homelands to Australia.
“While
applauding the goal to protect the lives of the migrants and asylum seekers who
seek entry to Australia, we are concerned that a reopening of offshore
detention centers could result in violations of human rights, including
potentially indefinite detention.” U.N. Human Rights spokesman Xabier Celaya said
in a statement. “The U.N. Human Rights
office has long-standing concerns about Australia's mandatory detention
regime.” he said.
Immigration
detention should be a “measure of last resort, only permissible for the
shortest period of time and only when no less restrictive measure is
available.” Celaya said.
Refugee policy
is an emotive subject in Australia, even though the country receives only a
small number of the world's asylum seekers each year. the U.N.H.C.R. Office
noted. The U.N.H.C.R. said that
Australia received 11,500 asylum claims in 2011, down nine per cent from the
year before, out of 441,000 lodged in ‘the West’ that year. “Asylum levels in Australia remain below
those recorded by many other industrialized and non-industrialized countries.”
the U.N.H.C.R. said in March 2012.
Encouraged by such solidarity, an Australian
organisation returned to the subject.
The Human Rights Law Centre deplored the passage
of the Migration Legislation
Amendment (Offshore Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2011. The Bill,
which was passed by the Senate on 16 August 2012, enshrined extensive and
alarming violations of human rights in Australian law.
“The law, which authorises the transfer of asylum
seekers who arrive by boat to offshore locations where they will remain
indefinitely, even if they are assessed to be genuine refugees, violates
Australia’s obligations under the Refugee Convention and the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The law also strips away special
protections for children in violation of our obligations under the
Convention on the Rights of the Child. Parliament rejected proposed amendments
to the Bill which would have limited offshore detention to one year and
protected children’s rights.
This law entrenches the ‘deterrent’ strategies
contained in the Expert Panel Report, while failing to enshrine any of the
human rights protections recommended by the Panel. As a result, asylum
seekers may be exposed to arbitrary detention, physical and mental
health risks and the prospect of return to the dangerous territories from which
they fled, all in violation of Australia’s international human rights
obligations.” said Rachel Ball of the Human Rights Law Centre.
The Government has also failed to undertake a firm
commitment to any of the ‘incentives’ to regular migration recommended by the
Panel. “The Gillard Government is setting up a regime which does not offer the
safeguards or investment in regional options for regular migration that were
essential to the Expert Panel’s Report.” said Ms. Ball. “It’s a regime
designed to punish a desperate and vulnerable population and does nothing to
respond to the crisis that causes people to get on boats in the first place.”
The H.R.L.C. had written to the Parliamentary Joint
Committee on Human Rights calling for an urgent inquiry into the Bill.
According to Ms. Ball, “Even though the Bill has now passed, such an inquiry
could play a constructive role in identifying human rights risks associated
with the Act, and contribute to ensuring that such risks are monitored and
mitigated.”
The H.R.L.C. had also joined with other nineteen
leading refugee and human rights organisations in an open letter
to the Prime Minister condemning the Bill.
And there was more. In the view of the Human Rights Law
Centre, several of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers’ recommendations
violate Australia’s international law obligations and, once adopted, would
ravage Australia’s claim to human rights compliance and good international
citizenship, according to Ms. Ball.
“The Expert Panel promised to deliver an integrated
policy package that adhered to Australia’s international obligations.
Regrettably, many of the recommendations fail this test and are incompatible
with Australia’s obligations under international human rights law.” Ms. Ball
said.
The Human Rights Law Centre welcomed
recommendations to increase regional cooperation on refugee and asylum seeker
issues. “Such recommendations are
consistent with the Panel’s brief of preventing asylum seekers from risking
their lives at sea in a way that is compatible with our international
obligations.” Ms. Ball said.
The Human Rights Law Centre was very concerned that
the Panel’s recommendations do not reflect the substantial, evidence-based
recommendations or advice made by over 50 human rights and refugee experts to
the inquiry.
“Policies such as off-shore processing, the
Malaysia solution, withdrawing family reunion rights and boat turn-backs are
cruel responses to the desperation of asylum seekers who make the boat journey
to Australia.
The human rights that are at risk under such
arrangements include the obligation not to return a person to a territory where
they would face a violation of their human rights; freedom from prolonged and
arbitrary detention; the right to the highest attainable standard of physical
and mental health and the rights of the child.
It is complete nonsense to maintain that such
policies are for the benefit of asylum seekers who would come to Australia by
boat. These policies are also unnecessary given that the greatest disincentive
to making the boat journey to Australia
- the risk of death at sea -
already exists.” Ms. Ball said.
On 17 August 2012 the Refugee Council of Australia
declared that the new Australian
legislation undermines global asylum system.
Parliament’s passing of legislation to deter
boat arrivals was acting against Australia’s national interest and would
undermine the international system of asylum.
The organisation’s C.E.O. said that the
amendments to the Migration Act 1958
would have a limited impact as a deterrent to asylum seekers considering boat
journeys to Australia and would set back efforts to build better regional systems
of refugee protection.
“Australia should be exercising leadership in
promoting better standards of protection for refugees. Unfortunately, our
leadership this week has been of the most negative kind.” Mr. Power said.
“It’s in Australia’s national interest to encourage
its neighbours in Asia to take the protection needs of refugees seriously.
Instead, we are creating a situation in which constructive regional cooperation
on refugee protection issues is less likely to occur.
We have seen this happen in Europe, which for over
ten years has been trying unsuccessfully to build a common regional process for
assessing asylum claims. This system still isn’t up and running, in large part
because many European countries have focused more on shifting responsibility
for refugee protection elsewhere than on working cooperatively with their
neighbours.”
Mr. Power also said that the R.C.O.A. was
deeply disappointed that the Senate did not support amendments by the Greens to
introduce a regular system of Parliamentary scrutiny of the new
arrangements. “If the Government
is confident it is implementing the right policy, it’s difficult to understand
why it would be opposed having these new arrangements scrutinised by the Parliament.”
Mr. Power said that the legislation had effectively
stripped away hard-fought improvements to Australia’s treatment of people
seeking protection.
“The strong opposition expressed by the Labor
Party and some Coalition MPs to the Pacific Solution has been wiped out. We
realise that this legislation was developed in response to concerns about loss
of life at sea but the Australian Parliament has taken the wrong approach. Our Parliamentarians have not matched the
concern they expressed for lives lost at sea with a similar level of concern for
the tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers living in appalling
situations throughout South East Asia.
It is these appalling situations that force desperate asylum seekers and
refugees to see no other option than to risk their lives on a boat to seek
protection in a country like Australia.
Until Australia takes the refugee protection needs
of refugees and asylum seekers in South East Asia seriously, this problem will
not go away.”
Mr. Power said that the Refugee Council of
Australia would be watching carefully to see whether the Government was serious
about its commitment to implement all 22 of the recommendations of the Expert
Panel.
“We have seen the punitive legislation proposed by
the Expert Panel passed within three days of the report being handed down but
the Government is yet to give any details of the recommended expansion of the
Refugee and Humanitarian Program or the strategies aimed at improving refugee
protection.” Mr. Power said.
“The Prime Minister has raised questions
about the cost of additional refugee places but cost did not seem to be a
factor at all in establishing offshore processing in Nauru and PNG. Our concern
is that an all-too-familiar double standard may be applied – that positive
measures are dismissed as unaffordable while there is no limit to the funds
available for deterrence and detention.”
Australian Defence engineers
sent to inspect the Papua New Guinea detention centre found it mainly run down
and ‘unliveable’.
Royal
Australian Air Force engineers arrived on Manus Island on 17 August to begin a
survey of old buildings to assess whether they could be used again. The 40
buildings they looked at were dilapidated and overgrown by jungle. On a first look the facilities showed a destination
which is far from habitable.
Run-down and
termite-infested wooden houses of the old detention centre were surrounded by
overgrown bushland. Over 30 demountable
buildings are in very bad condition. Most are full of termites.
A major
reconstruction operation would have to take place if a new facility is to hold
refugees.
A spokesman for
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the Government would have to wait for the
engineers to report before deciding how many people could be housed at either
centre.
On 17 August
2012 also a spokesperson for the Malaysian Government said that the government
remained willing to work with the Australia Government in the interests of
pushing forward with the agreement. “We
believe that the agreement between Malaysia and Australia is the best way to
tackle the menace of people traffickers, in a way that protects the interests
of Australia, Malaysia and, above all, the immigrants involved.” the
spokesperson told the Australian Associated Press. “Recent tragedies have all too vividly
demonstrated the disregard that human traffickers have for the rights of the
individuals they target. ... "We
hope that by pushing forward with the agreement and working with the Australian
government, we can stop this trade in human misery.”
The Malaysian Government was
still willing to work with Australia to revive the asylum-seeker exchange
agreement, saying that it remains the best option for combating people
smuggling.
In the haste to
revamp ‘Pacific Solution’, Prime Minister Gillard might not have reflected on the
possibility that No. 2 could be overwhelmed before it can be put into action,
with record numbers of asylum seekers continuing to arrive. Four asylum vessels were picked up in
Australian waters on 16 August, the most to arrive in any one day since Labor
took power in 2007. Another vessel was
intercepted off Cocos Island on 17 August carrying about 30 people and more
were expected to arrive.
Close to 500
asylum seekers arrived in Australia since the Prime Minister announced on 13
August that the Government would accept the Houston Report and reopen the two
Howard Government-time Pacific detention camps.
A Government
insider said that the rush of boats was partly a result of the people smugglers
getting as many asylum seekers as they could out of Indonesia before the full
impact of the new immigration regime came into force. “They are moving all the
stock out of the warehouse.” the source crudely said.
The Prime
Minister had warned that any asylum seekers who arrived from the start of the
week risked being sent to Manus Island or Nauru, but by some counts the likely
capacity at those camps may already be a third full.
The combined
capacity of the two camps on Nauru under the Howard Government was about 1,500
beds. Manus Island never held more than 500 people.
While the
Coalition voted through laws allowing the re-opening of the two camps, it has
been careful to warn that the boats will not stop arriving unless the full
suite of Howard-time deterrents were implemented -
including temporary protection visas and the turning back of boats to
Indonesia by the Navy.
The performance offered by the Australian
Parliament on the issue of asylum seekers and refugees after the delivery of
the Houston Report will go down in history as one of the most infamous since
the original invasion. And how would
the resumption of offshore processing differ from early Australian history,
when England decided to solve its ‘convict problem’ by sending them around the
world to Botany bay - out of sight, out of mind ?
For the pretext of saving lives at sea became the
socially acceptable way of saying: “We do not want you here.” This is the way Australia treats even its
own ‘miscreants’ - however defined from time to time.
During ther Howard’s years the depiction of asylum
seekers offered by the Government covered a range of undesirable
characteristics and were deliberative provocative to an Australian domestic
audience. The Labor Party joined in a
dehumanising rhetoric on border control, the usual ‘national interest’, and the
suggestion by irresponsible media shock-jocks that asylum seekers should be
sent away - shot if necessary.
Despite all, Government and Opposition went on
talking about protection, which is not provided for in the legislation,
whereby - instead
- thousands of people face years
offshore and being denied their right to natural justice in detention centres. And why not call them for what they are:
concentration camps ?
The legislation thrashes Australia’s obligations
under international law, conventions on the rights of the refugees, on the
protection of children, and the very Universal Declaration of Human Rights
which bears the imprint of a true Labour man.
The Government claims that the harshness of the
legislation will save lives because its treatment of asylum seekers is so harsh
that people will stop attempting to reach Australia.
“The same airplanes, navy ships that the Government
will employ to take asylum seekers thousands of kilometres to Nauru could be
used to bring asylum seekers safely from Indonesia to Australia. But the
government is not really interested in saving lives.” said Mr. Ian Rintoul of
Refugee Council of Australia.
“Indefinite detention damages children, indefinite
detention violates children’s rights and indefinite detention kills people.
This legislation will not save lives; this legislation will kill people. It
will send brave, courageous and resilient people insane. We know it will
because it did last time.” Senator Sarah Hanson-Young warned the Senate.
The United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon
has reminded Australia that its obligations to refugees are not optional.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio
Guterres said “Our preference is always that these situations are solved in
Australia itself” - in other words that processing takes place
in Australia. Guterres emphasised the requirement that “people … have humane
reception conditions, they will not have arbitrary detention, that they have
access to education systems and employment. ...”
... “Detention is the area in
which we would like improvements to be made in the sense that detention should
be more an exception and less a rule and that of course detention conditions
should be improved.” he said.
The legislation goes further than arbitrary
detention. Detention is mandatory and
indefinite.
Nowhere does the Gillard Government acknowledge its
legally binding international legal
obligations, let alone the part it plays in contributing to what is a
growing global humanitarian crisis.
Whether it be Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan,
Libya, Syria, Iran, each new war adds to the millions of desperate people
fleeing for a safe haven.
“You invade our country, reduce it to rubble, cause
sectarian divisions, and when some of us manage to escape and come to your
country for shelter you turn us away or lock us up as though we are criminals.”
Ahmed, a Middle-Eastern political refugee said.
The Australian Greens and Independent Andrew Wilke
were the only members of Parliament to take a principled stand and vote against
the legislation. From the ‘Liberals’ only Ms. Judi Moylan abstained. Even
attempts by the Greens to amend the legislation to limit detention to 12 months
and to provide some limited protections were ruthlessly rejected.
Not a single Labor parliamentarian had the courage
to take a principled stand against the denial of the most basic of human rights
to people fleeing persecution, torture and the threat of death -
not one, not even those calling themselves ‘Left’. Several members of
Parliament had “heavy hearts”, but opportunism stood in the way of their taking
a stand to defend human rights and save lives.
The Australian Greens were adamant in their
exposure of the Bill and the government’s lies surrounding its contents during
the parliamentary debate. The Opposition blurred the issue by focusing on the Government’s
change of heart.
“This is not a border security problem. This is a
humanitarian crisis. It escapes me how anyone in this place could seek to implement
any solution not underpinned by our lucky country’s moral framework and our
obligations both written and implied as one of the original signatories to the
United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees.” Wilke told the House
of Representatives. He reiterated his
opposition to mandatory detention and offshore processing. He asked: “How can
we as a nation and as a parliament accept an immigration detention regime which
we know makes people mentally ill and for some to attempt suicide….?” ... “When
people’s lives are at stake, I will not put my support behind legislation that
takes us back to the time of the Howard-era Pacific solution with some
modifications that make it even worse. The Australian public unambiguously
rejected the Pacific solution at the 2007 federal election. How quickly we have
forgotten.”
“People live in those processing facilities in
limbo. They cannot work, they cannot go to school and they have no entitlement
to health care. They are in absolute limbo and sometimes with no prospect of
being resettled for 20 years.” Greens Senator Larissa Waters pointed out,
referring to the conditions of people being held in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Greens Senator Penny Wright summed up the intention
of the Bill: “… we are being asked to compromise so that we can treat some
people so harshly that it will send a message of punishment and deterrence to
others contemplating making the journey. We will have to treat them so harshly
that it compares with the situations they are fleeing from…” When eventually freed, the plan is to send
them anywhere but Australia.
Art. 14 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights states: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries
asylum from persecution.” That includes in Australia.
The legislation will provide that the rules of
natural justice do not apply. The minister, as Greens leader Christine Milne
pointed out, “personally determines what is in the national interest, and he is
then exempted from providing natural justice to a person seeking asylum.” As
previously stated, there is nothing in the Act about the interests of the
asylum seeker, only what is in “the national interest” that the minister can
arbitrarily determine.
Art. 16 of the Refugee Convention states: “A refugee
shall have free access to the courts of law on the territory of all contracting
states.”
The Act does not provide for legally binding
provisions covering the treatment of asylum seekers in other countries. Despite
claims to the contrary by the government, the minister is not obliged to
provide parliament with details of any verbal or written agreement - if
one exists - with
a country taking and incarcerating asylum seekers from Australia.
Senator Hanson-Young summed it up: “The whole point
of this legislation is to have as little scrutiny as possible, as little regard
to people’s rights as possible, to write out of current legislation any legal
obligation that we have under the UN convention and to put precisely in the
legislation that none of these documents that the Houston report says are
important and that the government and the minister here tonight continue to
rabbit on about even have to exist.”
The Act will not provide the protections
recommended in the Houston Report. There are no obligations to provide access
to basic services, for adequate accommodation, legal assistance or safety of
those locked up indefinitely. The Government
admits that the asylum seekers will initially - no
one knows for how long - be housed in tents, behind barbed wire
fencing, with drop pits (toilets) and bucket showers, and limited power on
Nauru. Apart from the primitive facilities and lack of services, people held on
Manus Island face the additional risk of malaria.
The inmates could also be forcibly transferred to
centres in Indonesia, Malaysia or elsewhere, to even more appalling conditions
and no guarantee of basic human rights.
The Act will provide for mandatory detention of
children, absolve the minister of previous responsibilities as guardian of
unaccompanied children when in detention and provide no guarantees of their
protection. It will also remove
restrictions on the involuntary removal of unaccompanied children to detention
centres in other countries, to which the High Court objected when planned for
Malaysia.
“For all their lives all these children will know
is poverty, desperation and in many situations cruelty. They will not be
afforded basic human rights.” Greens Senator Rachel Siewert told the Senate. “[The Bill] will allow the transfer of child
asylum seekers from Australia and the transfer of unaccompanied minors, who
will not necessarily have a guardian to act in their best interests - in breach of the Convention on the Rights of
the Child.” she said. “It will allow banishment to Nauru, or Manus Island or,
essentially, anywhere but here.”
The Act abolished special family reunion provisions
for refugees. This is cruel and totally unwarranted. The most likely outcome is
that instead of one adult family member attempting the voyage, more families
including children will risk their lives.
The adage goes “judge a country by its treatment of
children.” Australia could not sink much lower.
“We can be
doing things now to save people’s lives. Those who submitted to the Houston panel
said it very clearly: increase the ability to assess people’s claims and give
them an opportunity to apply for protection in Australia in the places where
they are. We know they are in Malaysia and we know they are in Indonesia;
commit to doing that there and bring them safely to Australia.” Senator Hanson-Young
said. “If we were saving lives at sea
we would be bringing these people safely to our shores.”
The Refugee Action Coalition said: “The only way to
save lives at sea is to decriminalise people smuggling, to open Australian
processing centres in the region, and massively to increase our humanitarian
intake without making vulnerable boat arrivals pay for it.” Money would be far better spent on
humanitarian programmes than locking people up and destroying their lives.
The legislation will not stop people attempting to
come to Australia by boat. As Senator Hanson-Young pointed out, it will not
save lives. It is a callous, calculated, hard-hearted political manoeuvre to
try to neutralise the effectiveness of the Opposition Leader’s populist “stop
the boats” line in next year’s federal elections. It even removes some of the
protections introduced by the Howard Government in 2001.
When the Rudd/Gillard Labor Government was elected
in 2007, it promised to bring an end to the ‘Pacific Solution’ and abolish
offshore processing of asylum seekers. Labor strongly opposed the inhumane
system and turned policy around.
During the ‘debate’ the Coalition taunted Labor
with earlier quotes from Gillard’s damning the indefinite detention of refugees
in the hell-holes of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
One wonders how many of our political
representatives know that Australia is not doing its fair share in helping
asylum seekers. Australia is currently home to only 0.2 per cent of the world’s
refugees. Per capita Australia ranks 68th in the world.
Compared with other refugee-hosting countries,
Australia receives a very small number of asylum applications. Per capita and with reference to the Gross
Domestic Product Australia ranks 77th.
* * *
The consequences of the ‘new policy’ were not long
to appear.
Towards
the end of August 2012, another boat, sailing from Indonesia and attempting to carry refugees to Australia,
had sunk. Unconfirmed reports indicated that only 54 people had survived, after
being stranded in the water for almost 24 hours before help arrived. It was
thought that there were aboard 150 passengers from Afghanistan.
One of them had
twice contacted the Australian Maritime Safety Authority -
A.M.S.A. Rescue Coordination Centre early on 29 August at 4.20 a.m. and
5.05 a.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time and reported that the vessel was in
distress. A.M.S.A. said that the boat was 8 nautical miles south-west of Java.
Later, it amended that report to the effect that the vessel would have drifted
to a location about 50 nautical miles west of Java.
A.M.S.A. did not launch a search and rescue operation; instead it passed
the information to its Indonesian counterpart, Badan SAR
Nasional - Basarnas, Indonesia’s national search and rescue
organisation.
Basarnas received the
report at 1.30 a.m., its time. However
the organisation is not provided with night-time search equipment and delayed
sending out a search helicopter and two boats until 7.15 a.m. A Basarnas
spokesperson told The Sydney
Morning Herald that: “The helicopters are not equipped with devices
designed for night-time flying. And in order to dispatch boats we normally must
get a permit [from the harbour] but the harbour office doesn’t do it at night
time.”
Indonesian search
and rescue vessels are also not equipped to operate far from the coast or in
heavy weather between Indonesia and the Australian outpost of Christmas Island,
that most refugee boats try to reach.
Indonesian
authorities called off the search in the late afternoon, 12 hours after
receiving the A.M.S.A. report. It was not until
The first six
survivors were rescued by the Liberian container APL Bahrain at
According to
the survivors, they were in the water after their ship’s engine failed and the
pumps became inoperable. Because the Australian Government seizes and destroys
all intercepted refugee boats, some are poorly maintained or mechanically
unsound, significantly increasing the danger for asylum seekers attempting to
reach
A.M.S.A. and
the Australian Border Protection Command dispatched two planes and the patrol
ship H.M.A.S. Maitland on the morning
of 30 August to assist the Indonesian authorities and three merchant vessels to
conduct search operations. The Maitland
arrived at
When
journalists questioned Australian Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare about the
poor initial response, he asserted: “Don’t underestimate how difficult this
task is; don’t underestimate how big the sea that we're searching is.” Yet the
record demonstrates that accurate plotting was possible. The real issue was the
Labor Government’s ‘new policy’, implemented by A.M.S.A., of denying
responsibility for search and rescue operations that supposedly occur in
Indonesian waters.
The tragedy
also exposed the dangerous consequences of the Australian Government’s
accusations, shared by the Opposition, that asylum seekers are resorting to
‘false alarms’ of distress in order to force the Australian authorities to
rescue them and transport them to Christmas Island. The latest boat is the
fourth known to have sunk en route to
In order to
reinforce the Labor Government’s determination to wash its hands of refugees in
distress, and deter asylum seekers from exercising their right under
international law to seek refuge from persecution, the rescued passengers were
being forcibly taken back to Merak, in western Java, rather than to
A Basarnas spokesperson told the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation of an overnight plan to transfer the
survivors from the H.M.A.S. Maitland
to Indonesian authorities, so they could be shipped to Merak. In the past,
survivors have been taken to
At his media
conference, Home Affairs Minister Clare reiterated the Labor Government’s
position of blaming ‘people-smugglers’ for endangering refugees’ lives. He
accused boat organisers of stepping up voyages in order to thwart the
government’s preparations to consign all asylum seekers to indefinite detention
in camps on
Prime Minister
Julia Gillard’s government has dispatched military teams to both
These responses
only underscore the fact that the latest disaster is the product of
The tragedy at
the end of August came just days after more evidence emerged that Australian
authorities had delayed action to aid a refugee vessel in distress off
These events
demonstrate that the Gillard Government’s insistence on shifting responsibility
for rescues to the Indonesian authorities is causing disasters. Further, the
growing numbers of boat sinkings, like the deaths of 353 people aboard the SIEV
X refugee boat in 2001, raise questions about whether the Australian Government
is complicit in permitting tragedies to occur, as a means of deterring asylum
seekers.
When the survivors
reached the Indonesian
There were now 55
survivors; about 100 others had drowned.
One of the survivors would die on the night.
One of the survivors
spoke to a journalist of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and told of
how they had been deceived. Once rescued
by the Maitland, they had been told
that they would be taken to
"First we
thought it was sort of medical aid or something but as we approached this boat,
we could see the sign and then we started requesting them not to send us on the
boat... please keep us on the Australian boat and take us there."
Apart from
that, the survivors complained that they had been denied medical treatment and
food on the Maitland. “[The personnel
on the Maitland] said, ‘we are not
allowed to because we don’t have any medical system or doctor or anything’.” he
said.
“I haven’t
slept for seven days already and I haven’t eaten for seven days already.”
another survivor said. “I haven’t [had
a] drink [since] yesterday when I arrived on the Australian boat - I
got water from a rain can and that's all.” He told the A.B.C. that the
Australian vessel did not carry enough food to provide it to the asylum
seekers.
“They didn’t
have enough for everybody. They had for their own selves.” he said.
The survivor
said: “Three days we were in the boat. After three days the boat broke... after
four days of waiting, we were in the water, without boat, without lifejacket,
without everything. ... We are in a tough situation. We didn't save
medical things, we are all injured.”
His
organisation is one of many international groups trying to move A.S.E.A.N,
the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations countries, like
As at
As Australians digest news
of yet another asylum-seeker boat tragedy, the Gillard government increasingly
would have been concerned that the message about its tougher border protection
regime is not being heard in the region.
It was almost
three weeks since Prime Minister Gillard publicly embraced 22 recommendations
in the Houston Report aimed at stopping the flow of asylum seeker vessels to
* * *
Despite the
fracas surrounding the Houston Panel recommendations, in and out of the
Australian Parliament, and the preparations necessary to send new boat arrivals
to
By the end of
August 1,864 asylum seekers had arrived on 32 boats, more than had come in
July: also 32 boats and 1,798 persons. The Gillard Government had tried to
brush these figures away, arguing that the boat arrivals in recent weeks were a
last gasp as asylum-seekers rush for sanctuary before the
“I’ve been
saying for about six months that people-smugglers are running a closing-down
sale.” Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare said, referring to the sharp increase
in boat arrivals. “They’re telling people: get on the boat before there’s no
more chance to come to
The trouble
with the closing-down sale analogy was that the shop actually ‘closed’ on 13
August, raising fears that the people-smugglers and their customers are not
taking the Gillard Government's ‘new policy’.
The Gillard Government may still be proven right; the message about
Asylum seekers
who attempted to reach Australia in August,
including those on the boat which
sank off the Indonesian coast on 29 August with the loss of about 100 lives, presumably
did so despite being aware of the ‘new policy’ on offshore processing.
The problem for
the Gillard Government was to know whether its message was being heard loudly
and clearly by those who are thinking of paying for a boat journey to
At the
beginning of September, using YouTube, posters and other means, the Immigration
Department launched an information campaign about the ‘new policy’. The
publicity was carefully directed towards those refugee groups in
But the worry
for the Australian Government was not so much that potential asylum seekers may
be unaware of the ‘new policy’. Rather, the Government was fearing that they
are aware of it but still do not consider it sufficiently tough to deter them
from making a perilous voyage. The
Opposition was faulting the Government for having adopted only one-third of the
Howard Government’s policy: deportation to
On the other
hand, the Government was concerned that if the rate of boat arrivals were to
continue, the 600 places on
The situation
was complicated by two additional difficulties: 1) the camps were not ready to
receive the deportees, and 2) both
The latter
difficulty was even more complicated, for two reasons: 1) it crashed with the
recommendation of Houston Report that asylum seekers be kept on Manu Island and
Nauru for the same length of time as they would have had they stayed in U.N.
refugee centres in Asia, and thus remove any advantage of taking a boat; and 2)
it contradicted the provision under the Memorandum of Understanding signed by
Nauru with Australia which recognised “the need to ensure as far as possible
that no benefit is gained through circumventing regular migration
arrangements.”
On
Dr. Keke’s
comments came hours after a spokesman for the church, Major Paul Moulds,
questioned whether the Topside processing centre on Nauru, erected over the
previous five weeks and capable of housing up to 500 asylum seekers, was ready
for women and children. “'We certainly
would be keen to see more development happen with facilities prior to that
happening.”' he said.
Home Affairs
Minister Jason Clare told reporters in
On the same day
a second group of asylum seekers
- 36 single Tamil men -
landed on the island after being flown overnight from Christmas Island,
taking the asylum seeker population on Nauru to 86. That number was expected to rise to more
than 150 before the end of September and will continue to grow as more asylum
seekers are sent from the overpopulated
Immigration
Minister Chris Bowen announced the new arrivals on 18 September, and also
revealed that four Australian Army C-130 Hercules carrying 25 Defence
personnel, heavy moving equipment and other supplies were en route to the other
revived Howard-time camp on
Dr. Keke
welcomed the
“[The asylum
seekers] haven’t as yet made application in
Neither Dr.
Keke nor Mr. Bowen would be drawn on the specifics of the new system. When asked whether asylum seekers would be
able to appeal negative findings by the Nauruans through Australian courts, Mr.
Bowen would only say he would be implementing a paragraph of the
Once back in
the
The survivor
spoke of his fear that the Indonesians would disperse then to various detention
centres around Java. A policeman
confirmed that at least three in the group had already attempted the journey to
The survivors
said that they had risked everything to reach
Whatever the
costs and risks, and whatever the threats of deportation to Nauru or Papua New
Guinea’s Manus Island emanating from Canberra, it is difficult not to foresee
that at least one, if not all, will attempt the fatal crossing again.
At
Speaking on the
telephone with a journalist of The (
In a letter to
Australian newspapers, one of the inmates said: “Our hunger strike is on; our
friends are saying that we will continue our hunger strike until we are
informed that we are not going to be transferred to
The Australian
Government confirmed that one person had been hospitalised, but refused to
disclose the cause of the injury. As at 29 August up to nine people remained on
hunger strike. The following day officials claimed that all had been seen
eating again, but there was no independent confirmation.
The asylum
seekers’ desperate act of protest is the inevitable outcome of the anti-refugee
provisions trumpeted by Prime Minister Gillard in August: refugees who arrive
after 13 August would be shipped to
As a result,
many more refugees will be forced into similarly drastic acts in the hope of
gaining asylum. In time, more than 700
refugees have been informed that they would be sent to the islands. Among them are pregnant women, small
children, torture victims and at least 12 unaccompanied minors.
The Labor
Government responded with indifference to the hunger strike. Treasurer and
Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan refused to comment directly on the events at
Christmas Island, but said it was “very important to send a deterrence message
to those who are contemplating getting on boats and risking their lives.” Foreign Minister Bob Carr declared that he
did not expect a repeat of the desperate actions taken by refugees in
So the
Australian Government did not mind forcibly removing some asylum seekers to
As the Tamil
men were being transported to
Under heavy
security, the Sri Lankan men were loaded onto the flight from
Another
planeload of Tamils was expected soon, within days, followed by the first group
of Afghan Hazaras equally soon. By then, the camp would house more than 150
asylum seekers.
For the time
being the refugees are sleeping in tents on army cots of metal and canvas
without air conditioning, despite the tropical heat and humidity on the
island. Reliable reports have it that
large rats arrive at dusk.
At a
How such
measures could be an intimation to the so-called “people smugglers” to desist
is beyond comprehension.
Despite
previous promises by Mr. Bowen that Labor’s system on
It is hard to
believe that such distorting measures could be applied in the name of
‘humanitarianism.’ The Australian Government has exploited the tragic deaths of
hundreds of refugees on voyages to
To give Labor’s
policy some pretence of international legitimacy, the Houston Panel urged that
the U.N.H.C.R. and the International Organisation of Migration be involved in
administering the centres on
Since 13
August - the date when the ‘new policy’ was
embraced - 3,200 asylum seekers have been intercepted
on 52 boats attempting to reach
In response,
the Gillard Government is now seeking to revive its ‘Malaysia Solution’,
despite the fact that
In fact,
refugees are confronting a more draconian regime than that imposed by the
Howard Government, which - it should be remembered -
led to numerous instances of self-harm, including attempted suicides,
and the sewing together of lips. By condemning asylum seekers to indefinite
detention, the Labor Government is ensuring that such acts will occur.
Details
continued to emerge about the inhumane living conditions that refugees will
face on
Even
So, on 24
September 2012, “The position of the government of Nauru, which we’ve made
known to the Australian Government, is that while it is still a tent city, that
we perhaps restrict [arrivals] to the men until more comfortable accommodation
is provided.” Dr. Vatucawaqa said.
When asked if
the medical situation at the camp was adequate, Dr. Vatucawaqa said: “Given the
situation, yes. And things can only get better.”
The Nauruan
health authorities had received briefings from
Ms. Gano
Mwareow is
Another issue
which worries asylum seekers’ advocates is the possibility that Immigration
Minister Chris Bowen may send pregnant women or children to the island before
proper facilities are built. “There is
what some people would call a hard message, that you can’t get an exemption by
sending women and children.” Mr. Bowen has previously said. “If I start issuing
blanket exemptions … the people smugglers will be out there using that.”
Dr. Vatucawaqa
said he did expect any pressure to be placed on the Nauruan health system by
the arrival of pregnant asylum seekers, but did reveal that the hospital has
one maternity ward - refurbished by AusAID [the Australian
Government Overseas Aid Programme] in 2011
- with eight beds and two
delivery bays.
Conditions on
Immigration
Minister Chris Bowen said that the men asked not to be transferred to
The men boarded
a charter flight to
The Australian
Government released part of its contract with the International Health and Medical Services, an organisation which manages health systems on behalf of governments and international
organisations, the health provider at the camps. The intention was to show the staffing levels
at the offshore processing centres. Each
offshore processing centre will have a handful of psychologists and mental
health nurses, but no full-time psychiatrist, Mr. Bowen acknowledged.
The Greens said that that is completely inadequate,
but Mr. Bowen retorted that it is “broadly consistent” with what would be
available in
“I think that
the Greens are just making political points. I mean the Greens are continually
complaining and continually criticising, we’re actually getting on and
implementing the policy in a way that recognises the challenges but does so in
a way that assists people in what is a very difficult process.” Mr. Bowen might have paid no attention to
what Dr. Vatucawaqa had said.
Anyway, Greens
Senator Hanson-Young had earlier called for an increase in the level of mental
health services in the processing centres.
“There are only two counsellors under this contract for refugees in
Nauru.” she said.
“At peak
capacity, when there are 1,500 people in that facility, there’ll only be two
counsellors. ... No permanent
psychiatrist. Those numbers, of course, need to be increased.”
The Senate had called on the Government to release its contracts with offshore processing services providers I.H.M.S., Transfield Services and the Salvation Army. However, the Government only released the contract with I.H.M.S., and that contract’s value remains confidential.
* * *
As the pretence
of saving refugee lives becomes increasingly threadbare, the logic of Labor’s
policy is clear: it is to take ever harsher measures to deter refugees from
asserting their fundamental legal and democratic rights to seek asylum. The Gillard Government has cynically
attempted to justify its harsh, punitive regime as a measure to save lives -
by deterring refugees from risking drowning in attempts to reach
That basic
document was promoted by an illustrious Australian and a real Labour man, Dr.
Herbert Vere Evatt, who was President of the General Assembly on
But the
‘average Australian’, secure in her/his fortress, fattened by his ‘culinary
multiculturalism’, self-satisfied, wilfully ignorant, thoroughly indifferent to
every matter of the spirit, impervious to real liberty, equality and
fraternity, is likely to ask: Dr. Who ?
S/he has the government S/he deserves.
Make no bones
about it.
************************
* Dr. Venturino Giorgio Venturini devoted some sixty years to
study, practice, teach, write and administer law at different places in four
continents. He may be reached at [email protected].