Richard Ackland theguardian.com
Tuesday 2 September 2014
Nauru and Manus Island are untenable. The new Indonesian president, Joko Widowo, may be less compliant on turn-backs. And Morrison isn’t savvy enough to see what’s coming
‘Both the Coalition and Labor have fed into the same well of distrust and resentment.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers/Guardian Australia
The silver cup for stopping the boats takes takes pride of place in the Coalition trophy cabinet. The other chrome-plated election promise trinkets are for the abolition of the carbon and mining taxes. There are only three, sitting there side by side, and they are hailed as political triumphs, although not necessarily policy successes.
The execution of the Coalition’s boats policy, Operation Sovereign Borders, is dependant on variables that are outside the control of the government, and are not manageable by a minister singularly devoid of nuance and deftness.
Already there are signs that the Pacific Solution is fast approaching its endgame. Last month a departmental official told a parliamentary committee that no asylum seekers have been sent to Manus Island since February, and this reflected a request from the Papua New Guinean government.
The customs boat Ocean Protector kept 157 asylum seekers imprisoned at sea for nearly a month. The fact that they were not immediately dispatched to Nauru is as clear an indication as any that the “solution” of dumping people on the guano outcrop is fast approaching its finite point.
There would have been frantic amounts of pressure and bribes brought to bear on the Nauruan government to take this contingent of Tamils, who had refused to cooperate with Indian authorities dispatched to the Curtin detention centre in Western Australia.
Letting people rot in Australian-funded regional detention centres is a key component of stopping the boats. The other plank in the policy is turning back boats to Indonesian waters, with the Indonesian government, so far, being amazingly compliant.
We don’t know how many turn backs there have been. But it’s entirely possible that the incoming Indonesian president Joko Widowo and his government will not be as tolerant of the turn back policy as the current administration.
One thing is certain. The Indonesian authorities have largely turned a blind eye to the people-smuggling trade and there has been evidence that local police are involved with it directly and indirectly.
It is evident that a majority of Australians have been prepared to accept the dreadful humanitarian consequences of our policy, grotesquely dressed up as as a necessity to save lives at sea. According to polling this is around 60% of the electorate. About 40% are puzzled that what were once sound national humanitarian ideals have been so easily sold for political expediency.
There are a couple of explanations for that. Australians don’t like people smugglers profiting from the misery of asylum seekers and have come to accept that a proportion of those in the smuggling business are criminals. There is also the notion that an orderly queue for a humanitarian immigration program has somehow been jumped.
Implicitly Australians have decided that they don’t want immigrants who self-select. We want the government to do the selecting. Bob Carr fuelled this state of affairs by insisting that most asylum seekers coming on boats are economic refugees, even though most are escaping from conflict zones.
Both the Coalition and Labor have fed into the same well of distrust and resentment. But if we accept that the Pacific Solution is almost played out and turn backs are something that Indonesia will not accept indefinitely, where to next for our asylum policy?
Last month there was a big roundtable conference in Canberra trying to develop proposals for a better way to handle this divisive issue. It was organised by the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, the Centre for Policy Development and a non-partisan research organisation, Australia21.
The discussion took place around a document called “Beyond Operation Sovereign Borders: A long-Term Asylum Policy for Australia” prepared by two former senior people from the Immigration Department, Peter Hughes and Arja Keska-Nummi.
Participants included politicians, a former Indonesian ambassador to Australia, a strategist from Malaysia, lawyers, academics and former military people. A full report is coming later in the year.
There are also several influential backers of the Liberal party who have taken an interest in the development of a better policy framework. The thinking end of the governing party is aware that the current “success” of the boats policy is not guaranteed to hold and that Morrison will soon run out of options.
One logical approach would be to sit down with Indonesia and Malaysia and negotiate an agreement that we take a fixed number of asylum seekers that are in their camps at the moment.
At the moment refugees from Indonesia account for less than 4% of our humanitarian program.
Australia’s current humanitarian intake of more than 13,000 a year could be renegotiated so that we shift a significant proportion away from Africa and South America and put that component in Indonesia and Malaysia. In this way we could take 10,000 a year from our nearest neighbours to whom we owe a more direct and immediate obligation.
The processing would still be done offshore by recognised agencies, including the UNHCR, and at the same time Australia’s recently discovered respect for orderly queues would be fully realised.
For relieving our immediate neighbours of the growing pressures of displaced people in their own camps we could extract undertakings that in return they crack down on people smugglers and intercept boats of “queue-jumpers” bound for Australia.
In this way immigration self-selection would be cauterised, we fulfil our humanitarian obligations and salvage something of our reputation as a caring nation and, just maybe, it would stop the refugee debate descending into xenophobia.
All of this would require a savvy immigration minister, and there doesn’t appear to be one on the horizon.
A natural consequence of such a new, post-Operation Sovereign Borders framework is that more asylum seekers would inevitably turn up in Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago. This in turn would force a review of the current lax visa requirements in those places, which have traditionally been much more open to arrivals from other Muslim countries.
By no means would shifting the humanitarian intake closer to home be a comprehensive solution, but it would be a start of something more enduring and fairer, while at the same time being palatable to most Australians.
There’s something else that could work to our benefit. The government has given the go-ahead for visas to foreign workers who are prepared to do skilled and semi-skilled jobs at discount rates. Yet, we already have a supply of these workers sitting in wretched camps waiting to be processed on Christmas Island, Nauru, Manus Island and elsewhere.
A large proportion of them have useful skills. Those who aren’t so skilled are not “job snobs” and would be quite prepared to do work that Australians don’t like doing, such as working in hospitals, nursing homes, stacking shelves in supermarkets, working in mines and cleaning office blocks – sectors of the economy where there are labour shortages.
One of the reasons the Coalition has embraced a higher level of “legal” immigration is because it has a pro-business economic booster effect. More people, more demand, more production, more consumption, and ultimately more jobs.
Australia has at its disposal many people who are desperate to contribute to this country. Instead, the official policy is to deprive them of that opportunity, because successive governments haven’t had the intelligence or the courage to think beyond the catch-cry of “sovereign borders”.
