John Howard and refugee policy

Background: Refugees as political advantage.

Australia is famously a nation of immigrants, an idea which ignores a bunch of people who have been here for around 45 thousand years. The attitude of the white residents to further migration, however, has been split between a need for their skills and labour and a fear of competition for jobs. These fears have been used to provide political advantage from before Federation in 1901, until the end of the White Australia Policy in the late 1960′s.

A wave of asylum seekers arrived from Vietnam in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s. In the end 137 000 boat people arrived and were successfully resettled, in a country which had become proud of it’s pluralistic culture. But in the 1990′s when more refugees began to appear on Australian shores in small boats, John Howard’s government took a different view.

Boat people became queue jumpers according to then immigration minister Phillip Ruddock. In fact the issue was something of a political creation, as the numbers involved were never large, either in themselves or as a proportion of Australia’s normal program of migration. More importantly, a very high proportion of what were called “illegals” by the Howard government were determined by the courts to be genuine refugees entitled to resettlement in Australia.

The government claimed that it was important to discourage asylum seekers with brutal systems of mandatory detention. This all reached a head during the 2001 federal election campaign, with three events:

1. The rescue of 460 mainly Afghan asylum seekers by the Norwegan container vessel Tampa when their boat sank 140km north of Christmas Island. Captain Rinnan requested permission to land at Christmas Island, which was the nearest landfall. John Howard refused and a standoff developed until the refugees were transported by Navy vessel to Nauru and most eventually resettled in New Zealand. The government later excised Christmas Island and a large number of other coastal islands from Australia’s migration zone, meaning that refugees landing there would not be eligible to apply for refugee status.
2. The sinking of the SIEV X on 19 September, causing the drowning of nearly all the 400 refugees on board. This did discourage more boats attempting to reach Australia from Indonesia, and perhaps discouraged the government from its dangerous policies, as seen with the SIEV 4, of intimidatory tactics and refusing to take refugees on board intercepting navy boats.
3. The false claims a few days before the election by Phillip Ruddock and John Howard that refugees on another boat had thrown their children overboard to force the Navy to pick them up. Although never proven, it seems clear that the Government knew or should have known that these claims were false, but they were exploited for maximum electoral advantage.

Since 2001 the cruel detention conditions both in the mainland camps and those in Nauru and elsewhere (the Pacific Solution) have attracted condemnation from human rights groups as well as protest from Australians. Court decisions found the detention of children to be in breach of responsibilities under the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. Recently Department of Immigration mistakes in the cases of Cornelia Rau, Vivien Alvarez, have exposed the heartlessness of the Department, and it’s culture of obstruction and injustice.

West Papua

But the arrival of West Papuan refugees in Cape York has brought another crisis in refugee policy. The public in Australia is sympathetic to the West Papuans, because they draw a parallel between the Indonesian occupation of that territory and of East Timor, and mistrusts Indonesian assurances that the refugees need not fear retribution should they be returned. The Indonesian government, however, cannot understand why John Howard turns away asylum seekers from other countries and appears sympathetic to those from West Papua.

In the end the government turned once again to it’s “Pacific Solution”, and said refugees would be sent to third countries rather than accepted into Australia. Nevertheless the diplomatic fallout has been serious. At the same time, public anger over the whole matter of the treatment of refugees, from detention centres to children in detention to the Pacific solution to the heartlessness of the immigration department and the minister, is becoming to some extent crystallised by the situation, and protest has been increasing.

This is not to say that John Howard’s government is in any real difficulty as a result. It’s currently suffering far more from the fallout of the Cole enquiry, and the truth is that the opposition has been so ineffectual for so long that the Liberal Party has become justifiably complacent.