Tough talk about a return to the Pacific Solution

If Tony Abbott wants Australia to return to processing asylum seekers in poor Pacific countries he might first want to assess the carnage that remains from the Howard government’s past Pacific Solution policy.

When the Coalition announced a return to the Pacific Solution last week one Australian man wrote to his well respected colleague in Nauru: “Abbott was interviewed this morning and said no country had been approached as he is in opposition and can’t proceed yet with direct contact to any country ... But if a country approached him, that’s different. If you could screw the (Australian) Govt for say $100 million a year (4 times the budget) your lifestyle would improve and you would be able to get the phosphate industry running properly ...”

The response this man received from his Nauruan colleague read: “We have experienced this before and we do not want it. The asylum seekers give Nauru a bad name and it’s not worth the money. The minders from Australia want to live in paradise and they inflate our prices and other charges for goods and services. They think they own the place … The only Nauruans who benefit are those with contact at ministerial level.”

This view was shared by many I met on visits to Nauru between 2005 and 2008 along with a deeply felt resentment towards some of the more extraverted Australian workers living within the largely conservative Christian community. “They drink incessantly, flash their glowing white behinds out of car windows as they drive around the island and every second word is ‘F**k’”, said one Nauruan in 2006 about some of the Australian workers from the camp.

Asylum seekers were also resented by many of the Nauru locals and an IOM (International Organization for Migration) report released under FOI (Freedom of Information) notes that even doctors at the local hospital “showed reluctance in attending to the needs of the migrants [as they were called by IOM] that were referred to the hospital”.

Some Nauruans would surely welcome a return to jobs that would be available if the camps were reopened but in the past the positions usually went to people living in the Meneng district, where the centres were located, and new positions were largely offered to friends or relatives of those already employed. Divisions cut deeply across the country: “Nauruan people don’t help each other like they used to before the camps,” one local said to me in 2007.

Over in Papua New Guinea the deal struck between Prime Minister Merkere Morauta and Australia in 2001 was widely unpopular from the outset and when PNG Foreign Minister John Pundari openly disagreed with an Australian request to increase the capacity of the camp he was sacked. In 2002 when Australian journalists snuck into the country to report on the camp, from which all independent visitors were barred, they heard accounts from locals who had witnessed asylum seekers trying to hang themselves or cut themselves with glass.

Reports obtained under FOI note the cases of two pregnant women who became so depressed inside the PNG camp in 2002 that they had “verbally expressed their desire to abort their pregnancies”. By mid 2003 all but one of Australia’s remaining asylum seekers had either been transferred to Nauru or resettled elsewhere and in 2004 the PNG camp was mothballed and never used again.

Nauru continued to house asylum seekers for the Australian government but in return the country was often treated with contempt. The Australian government never lived up to it’s side of the deal to process people within six months, and in 2006 Nauru’s Foreign Minister was forced to speak out in the media after repeated requests to remove the remaining two Iraqis were ignored. When one of the men was evacuated to Australia after becoming suicidal Minister Adeang said on the ABC:

The processing centre is that. It is a processing centre, not a residential facility, security assessment or not. And frankly speaking, it does not reflect on us very well as a government, as a country and as a people to be held responsible for somebody who, on our soil, turns out to be mistreated to the point he becomes suicidal.

When in 2006 the Nauru government decided to charge the Australian government $100,000 to host the lone remaining Iraqi who had arrived on a boat in 2001, one Australian official told me that if Nauru wanted to play hard ball Australia would just take away their AID.

Any return to the Howard government’s Pacific Solution policy under a future Coalition regime would likely mean a repeat of the same dubious deals we saw structured outside of Australia’s normal AID programs that even Australian officials condemned. Mark Thomson who was head of Ausaid’s Nauru program in 2001 said on the record in 2007: “It's just an unmitigated bribe, while we preach the virtues of good governance and the rule of law to our Pacific neighbours.”

The now deceased ex Nauru President Rene Harris who brokered Nauru’s deal in September 2001 had no hesitation in milking his agreement with Australia for all it could produce. In June 2002 Harris complained to the media that the agreed six-month deadline for assessing the claims of asylum seekers in his country had been reached and Nauru had only received half the promised aid: “Tampa won it for them at the last election and I have an election coming up in ten months time and I’m not riding too well”, he said. One Nauruan MP told me later: “Every time Harris wanted more money he would start complaining in the media and he would be given more. No one knows where some of that money went”.

In 2004 Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs described Nauru as amongst the “most egregious examples of corruption, profligacy and mismanagement in the South Pacific” while Australia continued to pour in money into its coffers. Comments reportedly made by the Nauruan High Commissioner to Australia, Jarden Kephas, last week that “Nauru would be open for negotiation to see how it would benefit everyone” reveal a country with an historical revolving door of leadership and a recently deadlocked parliament which could potentially be vulnerable to dubious future deals to secure Australia’s money.

The Herald Sun last week, unreasonably, questioned Australia’s current $13 million investment in the redevelopment of one school in Nauru - anyone who has seen the state of schools in Nauru would understand the need - but how much more than our current Nauru AID budget would Australians be asked to invest to secure a new deal on asylum seekers?

The politicians involved in negotiating the original Pacific Solution agreements in 2001 are no longer in power in Australia, Papua New Guinea or Nauru and in spite of the Nauruan High Commissioner’s invitation to negotiate with a current Opposition party in Australia, there is little evidence that current Pacific leaders would choose to return to the same broken ground. Mr Kephas reportedly told the Sydney Morning Herald that he saw no detriment in housing asylum seekers in Nauru but, if these comments are correct, he is clearly unaware, or uncaring, of the damage caused from the past Pacific Solution policy to the reputations of Nauru and Australia in particular and to the hundreds of refugees who now live amongst us after their years in the offshore camps.

In 2005 the mental condition of the remaining 27 men in Nauru had deteriorated so dramatically after four years in detention that 25 were brought to Australia as a matter of urgency. Five years later these men are still dealing with the after effects.

One Iraqi man, who had already suffered greatly under Saddam’s regime before his time in both the Papua New Guinea and Nauru camps, says:

It’s become like a habit for me now, medicine to sleep … It’s very hard to lose everything, you lose freedom, you lose everything, it is not easy. They tell you you are not a refugee and they leave you for four years in detention and they know the situation in your country. In four years a child will start to talk. No one listened to us and day by day everyone feels his mental health and his situation become very much worse. Until now sometimes I have bad dream, I am feeling that I am in detention and when I wake up thanks for my god I am finished with detention. This detention is living with me for the rest of my life. Every one hour, you can’t forget four very bad years.

Others now in Australia are still struggling against addictions to alcohol and medications and with the nightmares that began in the offshore camps. “Four years is not easy time, it’s not four days or four months, it is a long time. Our mind is not the same as a computer, we can’t just delete it - we are still thinking about the situation when we were in the detention centre”, says one young man.

One prominent Nauruan believes that the past policy was never actually a “Pacific Solution” or an Australian solution but only a solution for John Howard, Alexander Downer and Rene Harris who all “screwed” each other. “That's what President Harris did in 2001. He screwed Howard, and Howard and Downer screwed him in return. In the end every Christmas they sent to each other a carton of the most expensive French and Australian champagnes and wines and laughed at their genius ways”, he tells me.

There is no actual evidence to support the Coalition’s claim that the Pacific Solution stopped the boat arrivals to Australia in 2001, and a range of other factors operating at the time, most significantly the fall of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and the subsequent return of millions of Afghans, seem more likely have had a stronger deterrent effect.

Look no further than the current government’s suspension on processing Sri Lankan and Afghan claims and hold the mirror to 2001 when the assessment of Pacific Solution Afghans was put on hold while the circumstances changed in Afghanistan. If Afghan people had been assessed on arrival in 2001 most would have been accepted immediately as refugees but by June the next year 697 Afghans in Nauru had been rejected and only 55 accepted. Many of the negative decisions were eventually overturned on appeal but 420 Afghans were worn down by the process and ultimately returned under pressure to their country where many again faced persecution and again were forced to flee.

Whether a repeat of this approach will have the same deterrent effect in the current environment is debateable but the intention from the current government, whether we agree with their actions or not, seems clear.

If a return to the so called Pacific Solution is truly Tony Abbott’s new policy on boat arrivals and not just an attempt to grab a headline, then we need the details. Are any countries likely to agree to house Australia’s refugees in the future and would the agreements again be brokered in exchange for those countries receiving AID from Australia?

In 2001 most of the countries approached to house our asylum seekers - including Indonesia, Kiribati, East Timor, Fiji, Palau, Tuvalu, Tonga, and France regarding French Polynesia - told Australia to bugger off. Only the impoverished nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea ultimately signed up and it is unlikely they would agree again unless forced to co-operate in exchange for their AID.

We need to know where people would be resettled if found to be refugees. Most of the 1,637 people detained in Nauru and PNG between 2001 and 2008 eventually ended up in Australia (705) or New Zealand (401) and a few more were taken by just a handful of other countries. The rest of the world had no interest in resettling people they saw to be Australia’s responsibility, especially when Australia only ever receives a small number of arrivals each year. Those who were brought to Australia on temporary visas eventually became permanent residents and are now citizens. Temporary visas are a nasty punishment for genuine refugees but they do not deter people from coming to Australia.

Temporary visas were introduced by the Howard government in October 1999 and Senate Estimates figures show that 9,461 people consequently arrived by boat between December 1999 and November 2001. From their inception to their abolition in 2008, 10,359 temporary protection visas and 854 temporary humanitarian visas were granted and as of May 2009 only 379 TPV holders were recorded as having departed Australia - often because they could no longer bear the enforced separation from children - 26 people had died and 9,841 had been granted permanent visas.

A reintroduction of temporary visas would require an increased level of bureaucracy to make multiple decisions on the same cases over many years, more lawyers will be needed to assist refugees with the extra complex applications that will be lodged and litigation will undoubtedly increase in response to decisions made about people who have already been found to be refugees. Most of these people will end up as Australian citizens anyway but only after we have truly made them suffer and paid our own heavy price.

Tony Abbott’s tough talk about a return to the Pacific Solution may provide him with some political capital, it may cut through to those who want asylum seekers dumped anywhere but on our soil, but where is the “solution” component to be found in abandoning vulnerable people on poor Pacific islands? How long will people be left in these countries in our names? Will it be four or five years again? How much will it cost us and who will foot the bill for the mental damage done to the people who will be detained under this policy?

As we continue to clean up the carnage from the last Pacific Solution policy we need some explanations from the current Opposition leader on exactly who would be screwing who this time around.