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Australia’s asylum policy “solutions” arrive just before elections. There’s a clue right there about exactly what they are trying to “solve”.
Kevin Rudd’s latest effort is the most blatantly reactive and rushed political fix we’ve seen. If it was a lasting, sensible, humanitarian, accepted policy response he was after, he wouldn’t be doing it this way.
But if it was a game-changing announcement that left the Coalition leader with nothing better to say than “Rudd’s got a good policy but we’d implement it better” then it worked a treat.
Rudd’s best chance of pulling off the biggest election upset in recent Australian political history is to take over all of Tony Abbott’s slogans. If Kevin is the guy who “axes the tax” and “stops the boats”, then where does that leave Tony?
Labor’s existing asylum policy is a disaster. With 15,610 people arriving this year the policy is quite obviously not meeting the government’s stated objective to stop or slow the rate of arrivals. And with 9,941 people in detention and another 16,948 now living below the poverty line on bridging visas with no idea when they might be eligible for permanent protection and work rights, it is also not humane. The fact that 805 men, women and children are confirmed to have drowned at sea since 2009 trying to get here adds tragedy to colossal failure.
But its new policy could be an even bigger disaster in the making. What exactly do we think refugees are going to do in Papua New Guinea with its unemployment “crisis”, entrenched poverty, high crime levels, high levels of infant mortality, rampant corruption, poor healthcare and tropical diseases. If we are shipping asylum seekers off there and paying for the resettlement of those who are genuine refugees, are we still responsible for what happens to them?
And no one in the government was willing on Friday to say what we are paying in this clearly commercial transaction. They were “working through the costs” we were told. We don’t yet know the price of “out of sight and out of mind”.
Other rushed changes on the eve of an election just fizzled away. Remember Julia Gillard’s “Timor Solution” in 2010. That’s now filed under “seemed like a good idea at the time”. This “PNG solution” might “stop the boats” – its only real aim – but it could also do real human harm in the process.
The expert panel on asylum policy was right when it said last year: “There are no quick or simple solutions to the policy dilemmas and the humanitarian challenges that asylum seeking creates. In addressing these dilemmas … we believe Australian policy can, and should, be hard-headed but not hard-hearted.
“We believe that the current impasse on Australian policy-making … is not a viable option for the future. The prospect of further losses of life at sea is one that demands urgent and decisive action on the part of the Australian parliament.”
But decisive action didn’t happen. Neither did bipartisanship. And in the absence of an answer or credible points of policy differentiation, the political debate descended further and further into hyperbole, unverifiable claims and statements that are just plain dumb.
The foreign affairs minister, Bob Carr, said the people turning up on our shores were “not people fleeing persecution”. “They are coming from majority religious or ethnic groups in the countries they're fleeing,” he said, “they are coming here as economic migrants.” But obviously people from majority religious and ethnic groups can still suffer persecution, for example because of their political beliefs. And how Carr could know the the refugee status of recent arrivals when the government hadn’t processed anyone since August 2012 is entirely unclear.
Contrary to all advice and all historical experience, Abbott said it was a problem Australia could solve alone.
“Mr Rudd is always trying to internationalise problems and that’s an excuse for inaction here in Australia. I say to Mr Rudd: stop making excuses, stop trying to say this is the world’s problem. It’s not, it’s our problem. We need to take the appropriate action in this country, by this country, for this country, to stop the boats and we need to do it now,” he said on Thursday.
And as human rights lawyer Julian Burnside wrote this week, both sides are increasingly using language that implies threat – including references to “national security”, “illegals” and “border protection”.
It all reinforces the belief many Australians already hold, that the people arriving are not genuine refugees, that they are taking advantage of us, that we should view them with anger and suspicion. Actually an average of 90% last year were found to be genuine refugees, but the mistrust grows, particularly when we hear so little of the refugees’ human stories.
And that lays the groundwork for this policy where we pay for someone else to take the problem away.
As the expert panel said, as the statistics clearly show, there is a real problem. Australians do want to find a way to control and regulate refugee arrivals. And everyone wants to find a way to stop the drownings.
The best chance of addressing it lies with a calm and preferably bipartisan discussion about domestic and regional policy-making.
But this really isn’t about calm decision-making.
It’s a political truism that good policy makes for good politics. Australia’s handling of asylum seekers proves the inverse is also right: reactive, partisan politics creates an almighty policy failure. Another rushed and reactive pre-election “fix” will probably make it worse. But it might just change the course of the election.
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