The High Court’s ‘Malaysian solution’ decision points the way.
Published in The Canberra Times, 6 September 2011
http://bit.ly/srklTw
Last week’s High Court decision vindicated what human rights advocates have been pleading for years: humanity must prevail over sovereignty.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard assures us that a ”genuine sense of Australia’s national interest and our national spirit” is what guides the Government’s charter on boat arrivals seeking asylum. Yet this is exactly what was at stake with the Malaysia solution.
Our national anthem sings in joyful strains: ”For those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share”. Indeed we have been ”renowed of all the lands” for our fair and welcoming character.
The Malaysian swap deal is a remnant of the condemned Pacific Solution: the cruel logic of dispatching desperate people to poorer neighbours: ”out of sight, out of mind”.
John Howard may have trumpeted about our right to ”decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”. But the High Court decision implicitly reminded us of our moral, humanitarian and legal obligations.
The Pacific solution demonised asylum seekers and dropped every dehumanising name onto them ”short of bombing them”.
While the High Court has effectively detonated the Malaysia solution, a new book will trace the fuse that ignited the Pacific solution. Overboard was written by Wallkey-winning journalist Ghassan Nakhoul, the first Australian to have interviewed people smugglers. It reveals that it was a convicted ring leader of people smugglers who ironically vowed that if we ”turn back a boat, just once, no one will be coming”.
Overboard reveals that the then attorney-general Phillip Ruddock twice affirmed that ”the strongest message that has ever been given was the message to turn around boats”. In an interview on SBS radio in July 2001, one of the most notorious – and now prosecuted – people smugglers, Keis Asfoor, had this to say: ”If Australia closes the door and … a ship is turned back, I will stop this thing’.
Five weeks later, the government became ”accomplices in the conspiracy of alienating rejected humans”. The asylum-seekers who were rescued by the Tampa were turned back with spectacular media theatrics that guaranteed international headlines to ”send a strong message to people smugglers”.
In the light of this contaminated conception, the Gillard Government should distance itself from any offshore ”solution”.
To find a sustainable solution, the Government needs to redefine the problem.
The problem is not the dishonesty of the desperate humans who risk their lives to seek asylum. In Australia, more than 90per cent of these ”boat people” are deemed genuine refugees, unlike those who arrive by plane. The problem is not the people smugglers, many of whom see themselves as saviours, as they will always feed on the desperation.
Unlike the Howard government , which vilified the asylum-seekers, the Gillard Government treats them as victims of the real villains – the smugglers. But a different description emerges from both Overboard and the recent report by the Centre of Policy Development, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees & Asylum Seekers: the latter states ”smuggling enterprises are innovative, entrepreneurial and easily move between legitimate and illegitimate activities”. Shifting the blame from asylum-seeker to people smuggler will never break the stalemate.
The problem is not the pull factors and the need to market Australia as inhospitable. All the money spent to prove that we are not a soft touch was misguided as asylum-seekers kept coming. There may have been fewer boats during the Pacific solution, but there were more people per boat, which meant that the voyage was more treacherous.
We cannot keep escaping the global problem of people fleeing from inhuman conditions, whether it is war, occupation, genocide, torture, persecution, famine or sinking islands.
Rather than a paranoid protection of borders, this requires global and regional cooperation, headed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The real problem is more the push factors than the pull factors. And the inconvenient truth is that we participate in military operations in favour of regime change in the name of human rights, which inadvertently and inevitably ”push” citizens to run for their life.
The Gillard Government should heed the warnings in the book and the recommendations of the report: maximum 30 days’ detention for adults, and 14 days for children, especially as 60per cent of those resettled in Australia are under the age of 25.
With rigorous on-shore processing, it is also recommended that mandatory detention is phased out and replaced with less expensive and less damaging alternatives.
The taxpayers’ money spent on inhumane detention centres is better spent on programs that arrange repatriation and resettlement.
With Australia only receiving 1.04per cent of the global total of asylum-seekers, we could take a fairer share off our poorer regional neighbours.
Refugees are among our most loyal and peace-loving citizens who take nothing for granted.
But the High Court reiterated that human rights should be taken for granted, and that this is genuinely our national spirit.