Since this article was written in June the "debate" about asylum seekers or, more accurately, those of them who arrive by boat, has re-erupted in the Australian media.  Again it has generated domestic division and political pointscoring with scant attention being paid to the root causes of people fleeing their home countries.

Within our region Australia should be setting the standard for dealing with the complexities of refugee processing.   It is not acceptable for children to be detained on Christmas Island or indefinitely in Indonesian detention centres.

Refugees will remain an ongoing international problem and Australia needs to lead the international community in finding durable solutions with appropriate resettlement options.

-  Dianne Hiles, 10th November 2009

Against a backdrop of tensions in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, the Horn of Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has monitored a global rise in refugees and displaced people. While Australia has an off-shore humanitarian program that is second to none, accepting in 2007–8 10,800 refugees for humanitarian resettlement, policies dealing with on-shore asylum seekers continue to be highly politicised.

International Law and Australian Policies

There is a growing recognition that those who arrive on our shores seeking our protection should be treated humanely, but there are yawning gaps between what we practice and what we accepted as our obligations when we signed such international treaties as the Refugee Convention, the Convention Against Torture, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights.

The Rudd Government moved quickly to close down the Pacific Solution in December 2007 and dismantled the Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) framework in the 2008 Budget. Furthermore, in July 2008, Immigration Minister Senator Chris Evans announced New Directions in Detention, the introduction of more humane policies, using risk-based assessments to determine if people should be detained or not. This did not amount to a change in the law. A future government can easily reinstate laws and policies that breach fundamental human rights.

Entirely in proportion with global trends, the number of boat arrivals has increased recently. The handful of hundreds of unauthorised arrivals they carry are being hyped by the media and Opposition as a surge in ‘illegal immigrants;' as if we need to be terrified by a spike in the number of potential terrorists reaching our shores. According to the Opposition, this Government cannot be trusted to maintain border security and protect us from... what exactly?

Rather than grasp the electoral nettle and explain once and for all our responsibilities under International Law, this Government continues to duck and weave; trying to do the decent thing without being seen to be doing so, for fear of invoking the clarion calls of ‘being soft on asylum seekers' or ‘giving the green light to people smugglers.' The fact is that domestic policy has very little impact on refugee movements. Desperate people take desperate measures to remove themselves from desperate situations.

Australia's 'Solutions'

Bizarrely, we seek to punish those most desperate for the means of their arrival, meting out to the 4% of asylum seekers who arrive by sea unconscionably different processing arrangements from those applied to the 96% who arrive by air.

We still maintain the farce of excising chunks of Australia from the immigration regime and have transferred the Pacific Solution to the Indian Ocean, with the cumbersome effect of all ‘boat people’ asylum seeker claim processing being conducted on an island 2,500 kilometres away from the mainland.

According to Amnesty International as at 2 June 2009, 86 children, 69 of them unaccompanied, were being held in totally unacceptable conditions on Christmas Island. At ‘A Just Australia’ (AJA), we estimate it costs $56 dollars a day to support asylum seekers in community detention, whereas the minimum daily costs per person on Christmas Island must be $1,500. In conjunction with Oxfam, AJA produced a report, A Price Too High which assessed the combined cost of the Pacific Solution and the naval indiction deterrent exercises as $1 billion. Add on another $500 million to commission and operate the ‘Indian Ocean’ solution, and then consider the impact $1.5 billion could have had on the UNHCR improving conditions for refugees, or contributing to recommendations Elizabeth Evatt presciently suggested in her Relaxed and Dumbing Down paper (2004). She wrote:

‘if we truly wanted to stem the flow of asylum seekers, should we not think globally? Should we not think about what Australia could do to prevent human rights abuses in the countries of origin and how we could do more to ensure basic standards of living in those countries? If we were to do that, we might understand that the world needs to work towards an effective and meaningful international system of human rights and that this must be necessarily linked to a fair and equitable global economic and financial system.’

Instead we pull up the drawbridge.

Regional Responsibilities

As well as not providing strong moral leadership domestically on this issue, the Government is missing the opportunity to do so regionally. Rather than setting the example that ‘we-have-signed-the-Refugee-Convention-but-really-wish-we-hadn’t — watch us wriggle out of our responsibilities,’ we need to encourage our northern neighbours to join us in signing it too. Persuading them also to provide resettlement options to refugees would significantly generate other bastions of hope between the Middle East and Australia. Wouldn’t $1.5 billion be better spent addressing the refugee problem this way, rather than assuaging the paranoia that we need protecting from leaky boats?

Apart from grave disquiet about the ongoing detention of children, activists continue to have many concerns about the lack of time limits on, or any independent review of immigration detention; the arrangements for community-based asylum seekers; the imposition of detention debts; and the potential harms of ‘Deported to Danger’ scenarios as exposed by Phil Glendinning from the Edmond Rice Centre. The roots of many of these problems lie with policies instigated by the Howard Government. The Rudd Government has rolled back some of the excesses but has not changed anything fundamentally to reflect our position as a rich country that respects human rights. We should be prepared to shoulder our share of the international burden and encourage other countries in our region to do likewise through example and diplomacy.

Time to Change Community Attitudes

Apart from grave disquiet about the ongoing detention of children, activists continue to have many concerns about the lack of time limits on, or any independent review of immigration detention; the arrangements for community-based asylum seekers; the imposition of detention debts; and the potential harms of ‘Deported to Danger’ scenarios as exposed by Phil Glendinning from the Edmond Rice Centre. The roots of many of these problems lie with policies instigated by the Howard Government. The Rudd Government has rolled back some of the excesses but has not changed anything fundamentally to reflect our position as a rich country that respects human rights. We should be prepared to shoulder our share of the international burden and encourage other countries in our region to do likewise through example and diplomacy.

The Detention of Children

As Australia deliberates the desirability of a Human Rights Charter the legal situation relating to the indefinite, mandatory detention of thousands of children in the harsh conditions of remote high security facilities, in breach of our obligations under the Convention of the Rights of the Child, is cited as one that would not have occurred had some form of human rights charter been in existence.

Through our collective wish to persecute those fleeing persecution, we are once more allowing the detention of children in remote high security facilities.

DIANNE HILES, July 2, 2009. Dianne is a founding member of ‘ChilOut, Children Out of Detention’ and Chair of ‘A Just Australia’.

KEEP IN TOUCH WITH THIS TOPIC
A Just Australia www.ajustaustralia.com.
Refugee Council of Australia www.refugeecouncil.org.au
Edmund Rice Centre www.erc.org.au

This article was originally published in Catalyst's new reader Equality Speaks: Challenges for a fair society

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed