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Giving substance to wind

By Kali Goldstone - posted Tuesday, 26 November 2013


The refugee debate has become highly politicised in Australia as our government persistently tries to evade and overtly flout its voluntary legal obligations. Such policies lead to unnecessary and grave violations of the rights of those seeking protection. As George Orwell remarked: "Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

The Abbott government has officially reintroduced the Howard-era temporary protection visa's (TPV's) for those who arrive by boat, which the Rudd Labor government abolished in 2008. Under the Migration Act, the TPV only gives refugees protection for up to three years, with no right to family reunification. The policy also prevents the applicant from applying for permanent protection within the first five years of the first TPV being issued.

The Coalition government is also planning to reduce the Refugee and Humanitarian Program from 20,000 places to 13,750. However, the TPV program is separate to the reduced humanitarian program because the Coalition desires to prevent "someone who comes by boat from taking the place of someone who is waiting to come our country through the proper processes."

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Many asylum seekers cannot access such "proper channels" - including refugee camps like Kakuma in Kenya or the nine camps along the Thai/Burma Border or processing cities like Egypt and Lebanon - in order to undergo refugee status determination by UNHCR. Most refugees in such circumstances can spend an average of 10 years in limbo, in dire conditions, waiting to be resettled in a safe third country. Sometimes, their only means of escaping persecution and depravity is to get on a boat and apply for asylum.

Asylum seekers who reach Australian territory by boat are being sent to offshore processing centres in Nauru and Manus Island. Salvation Army staff at Nauru have "condemned the cruel and degrading conditions for those in detention," with "countless men suffering physically and psychologically. The mental health impact of detention in this harsh physical and policy environment cannot be overstated."

While former Head of Occupational Health and Safety, Rod St Georgewho worked at Manus Island says "it is not even fit to serve as a dog kennel." He has "never seen human beings so destitute, so helpless and so hopeless before."

According to the Coalition, if asylum seekers are found to be refugees, Australia "will work with other countries both within and outside the region to establish agreements for resettlement." However, Australia will provide TPV's "as a last resort for refugees assessed in offshore processing centres who cannot be placed in third countries."

Furthermore, Abbott has announced plans to deal with the backlog of nearly 32,000 people already in Australia on bridging visas in detention centres. The Coalition will introduce a rapid audit of their claims, by which a single immigration caseworker will decide the refugee status of people who had arrived in Australia by boat. TPV's will apply to those who arrived after March 24, 2012.

Amnesty International spokesman Graeme McGregor says the re-introduction of TPVs will undermine human rights protections for asylum seekers. "Once again, we have favoured punishment over protection of genuine refugees by choosing to repackage failed policies of the past," he said.

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"The use of TPVs during the first Pacific Solution was shown to have severe mental health consequences on recognised refugees, who in many cases have fled terror and torture."

The Refugee Council of Australia believes that the restrictive TPV policy "does not allow refugees access to the full range of services that are necessary for their successful settlement; compounds psychological strains of past trauma; ethnic communities are over-burdened by the high demand for assistance from TPV holders; and Federal funding restrictions shift costs and burdens to state and community services."

Essentially, if you have the means and the requisite visa (usually a tourist or student visa) to arrive by plane and then apply for asylum, you will be treated with dignity. However, if you are so desperate as to get on a boat and request protection, you will suffer the consequences for being so vulnerable.

The Coalition is also planning to remove government-funded legal assistance to asylum seekers who have arrived by boat, which would inevitably result in people being returned to persecution and grave danger.

RCOA chief executive officer Paul Power notes: "Australia's asylum process deals with serious matters where lives are often in the balance. For the system to work, to protect the lives which are most at risk, it is essential that claims for asylum are put clearly and soundly."

Moreover, such policies are a clear breach of Art.31(1) of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which Australia has signed and ratified:

"The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened . . . provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence."

Essentially, an unauthorised entry does not prevent an individual from gaining protection. The very act of seeking asylum is an indispensable element of the human condition. More than a thousand refugees have died trying to reach Christmas Island. But faced with intolerable circumstances at home, they keep coming. Asylum seekers who go in search of protection, in particular, outside their region of origin, should not be discredited for doing so.


So why is Australia acting in such a protectionist way? Why is Australia insistent on trying to stop the small but inevitable flow of refugees into this country? Why is there such sensationalist scaremongering when it comes to boat people? What are we afraid of?

The Tampa affair in August 2001, coupled with the events of September 11, pushed the issue of asylum seekers into the forefront of Australian politics and media. This is when the general view of asylum seekers and refugees around the world, and particularly here in Australia, changed.

From that moment all boat people were considered suspected terrorists – Australia's worst nightmare. Afghan and Iraqi Refugees account for half of all refugees. Australia has been, and still is, active in both these wars, yet we struggle to take responsibility for our role in the conflicts. For those who cannot see through the political opportunism, boat people have become strangers to be feared rather than vulnerable people trying to escape the same fundamentalists that we abhor and are so terrified of.

The recent 2013 Federal election saw the major political parties compete to outshine each other in their promises to mistreat boat people. They wanted to create a hostile reception so that it would appear more attractive for asylum seekers to stay in their homelands and face tyranny rather than flee for protection.

Promising to treat innocent people badly doesn't usually win votes and is often considered a sign of a degenerative society. Such a tactic won votes because the debate begins at the wrong place. It starts with the Coalition's statement that boat people are "illegal." It is premised with the language of "border protection" and "queue-jumping," jargon intended to make the average Aussie think that boat people are to be feared, people we need to be protected from.

We forget that boat people who come here to ask for protection are not illegal – they are exercising the right, which every person has in international law, to seek asylum in any country they can access. Over the past 15 years, 90% of boat people have been determined as refugees, entitled to our protection.

The arrival rate over the last 12 months has been higher than the historic average, but this has more to do with the fluctuation of violence around the world, rather than policy. Even now the rate of boat people represents only four weeks' ordinary population growth. Boat people do not present a demographic problem for Australia.

Moreover, refugees have the lowest offending rate of any community in Australia.99.87% of asylum seekers currently do not have a criminal record and have not been charged with a criminal offence. That's about 40 times below the national average. In fact more refugees were the victims of hate crimes in Melbourne in 2013 (20 people) than charged with crimes themselves (28 people nationally). It's refugees who need protection, not us!

Politicians suggest that they are concerned about the boat people who die in their effort to get to a safe country. But their concern is absolutely bogus. Instead of directly attacking refugees, which is their actual objective, they criticise the people smugglers. They have constructed the notion that people smugglers are the "scum of the earth," conveniently forgetting that Oskar Schindler was also a people smuggler. Australians have disregarded the fact that, without the assistance of people smugglers, asylum seekers are left to face persecution or death in their countries of origin, by any cruelty which threatens them.

Those of us who think Australia is greater than its behaviour are perplexed at how rapidly the country has misplaced its moral bearings. As Julian Burnside remarked: "Australia has constructed a myth about itself which cannot survive unless we forget a number of painful truths. We draw a veil of comforting amnesia over anything which contradicts our self-image."

Australians in 2013 have forgotten their fortuitous origins and are blinded by the politics of protectionism. We hold tight to a national myth of a kind and liberal society that welcomes new arrivals, a land where everyone gets a "fair go". It is agonising to recognize that we are now a country that chooses to exploit vulnerable people with the intention that other people in the same position will choose not to come and ask us for protection.

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About the Author

Kali Goldstone is an international human rights lawyer and journalist with a depth of expertise in managing diverse programs working with minority and vulnerable groups, refugees, IDPs and immigrants for the last 12 years in Australia, Denmark, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya and the U.S.

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