The Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, said on 6 September 2015 that Australia is already doing a lot when it comes to accepting asylum seekers, and that “we take more refugees than any other through the UNHCR on a per capita basis.”
Shadow Immigration Minister, Richard Marles, repeatedly refused to contradict that claim on Radio National’s AM programme on 7 September.
It is characteristic of the impoverished conversation about refugees in Australia these days that the Prime Minister gets away with such misleading statements and that the Shadow Immigration Minister doesn’t know the facts sufficiently to set the record straight.
To see the way Abbott misleads the public on the matter, it is important to know that there are three streams of refugees who arrive in Australia each year.
First, there is the offshore resettlement stream. Along with a few other countries, Australia handpicks people from UNHCR refugee camps in other countries and brings them safely to Australia. It is an admirable scheme. The quota each year varies, but at present it is set at 13,750 people per year. We resettle them in the community, and it is a scheme we can be proud of. That is the refugee intake Mr Abbott was speaking of.
Second, there are refugees who come by aeroplane. These are people who are able to get travel documents from their country of origin and a visa to come to Australia: typically, a business or tourist visa. Once the person has cleared Passport Control in Australia, they apply for a protection visa. Until their refugee status is finally determined, they live in the community and cause no anxiety at all. Most of them are ultimately assessed as not being refugees. Mr Abbott never speaks about this group.
Third, there are people who are unable to get travel documents from their country of origin or are unable to get a visa to come to Australia. These people are unable to board a plane to fly to Australia, since airlines will not allow a person to board a flight to Australia unless the person is holding an Australian passport or a valid visa to enter Australia. The reason for this is simple: if an airline brings a person to Australia who is not entitled to enter Australia, the airline has to return the person to their point of embarkation at its own expense.
The people who are unable to get travel documents or a visa to enter Australia have no choice but to use people smugglers. They arrive as “boat people”. We lock them up or we take them by force, against their will, to Nauru or Manus Island. Almost all of them are ultimately found to be refugees. Mr Abbott is obsessed with this group and puts his proclaimed Christianity to one side in order to have them treated as harshly as possible.
In order to decide whether Australia is generous in the way Mr Abbot and Mr Marles seem to think, it is important to see which group we are talking about.
Not every country has an offshore resettlement scheme. If we compare our offshore humanitarian intake, we rank well against those other countries which also have an offshore resettlement programme. but this involves comparing us to a small group of countries, and it ignores the reality that most countries receive refugees who are on the move, not sitting in UNHCR camps.
If we compare the number of refugees we receive across all categories, our performance crashes. For example, here are some figures showing the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers in just a few countries, and a calculation of how those numbers look on a per capita basis:
Country: | Germany* | Turkey* | Nauru | Australia |
population | 82,600,000 | 75,000,000 | 10,000 | 23,000,000 |
refugees | 216,000 | 1,587,374 | 389 | 35,582 |
asylum seekers | 350,000 | 1,500,000 | 733 | 21,518 |
refugees as % of population | 0.26% | 2.12% | 3.89% | 0.15% |
asylum seekers as % of population | 0.42% | 2.00% | 7.33% | 0.09% |
* the figures for Germany and Turkey are very recent estimates, taking account of the arrival of substantial numbers of Syrian refugees in the past few weeks |
The comparisons become all the more striking when you consider that countries like Lebanon and Jordan now have millions of refugees from Syria, for the obvious reason that those countries are very close to Syria.
So, a few simple facts:
- Australia is NOT the most generous country when it comes to resettling refugees
- Australia IS the only western country which punishes people for seeking asylum, even though seeking asylum is not a crime: boat people are NOT illegal.
- Australia spends vast amounts of money to lock up and mistreat refugees.
- Tony Abbott either does not know the facts or he wilfully misleads the public, by pandering to our natural desire to do good. He could encourage us to be generous, but instead promotes cruelty while pretending that we are being generous.
- Richard Marles either does not know the facts or sees political advantage insupporting the Abbott government policy.
- Tony Abbott is unfit to be Prime Minister and Richard Marles is unfit to be shadow Immigration Minister.
The question all Australians should ask is this: What sort of country are we? Are we selfish or are we generous? Are we willing to mistreat terrified human beings who have the courage, and the initiative, to escape to safety?
Thanks for setting out the facts, Julian. It beggars believe that politicians and commentators can get away with making outrageous claims on Australia’s refugee intake. Perhaps more worrying, is that the Australian media is not taking them to task on these claims!
So much for Christian values
To torture people fleeing from torture.
Misrepresentation of the facts are everywhere……
Thank you for the facts. Australian society can comfortably take more refugees and detention centres should be seen for what they are – unlawful and cruel imprisonment.
I have passed on your great article to our Buddies Refugee Support Group, on the Sunshine Coast.
A couple of comments. Many of the “boat people” travel by plane to Indonesia maybe transiting via other countries. I agree we can and should increase the number of refugees we accept via the UNHCR. If we agree to take a number of refugees what are the solutions when quota+1 comes in? Also if I was living in the community, applied for refugee status and was refused I would be a mug not to the disappear rather than be sent back to some shithole.
It’s distressing and diabolical the Prime Minister and Opposition Immigration Marles can be so seriously intentional with lies when they know they are going to be scrutinised.
If it is a bad thing to mislead the Parliament what about the public on a daily basis?
3 strikes and we put you in the stocks?
My blog about leaving the ALP because of this issue above. Thankyou for your stamina!
Julian, you are an absolute imbocile!
Many thanks for clearing that up. As usual, noone could ask for a better advocate.
Can I make one more comment? I think we should get rid of the term ‘people smuggler’. No one has been ‘smuggled’ into Australia, to my knowledge. Asylum seekers have been taken into Australian waters and made there presence known to Australian authorities at the earliest opportunity.
When I was at school in Austria many years ago, my teacher, Miss Wilson, tried to get her lover from East to West Germany in the boot of her car. THAT was people (or person) smuggling.
Can we use a different term for the bringing of people openly into Australian waters? ‘Asylum claim facilitators’, ‘people movers’, ‘people carriers’? I have tried to raise this with the ABC and have met with a stony silence. I raise it because ‘people smuggler’ is a misnomer, it is inaccurate, and makes the people doing it seem like criminals before the listener or reader has had time to think about the act. As greater minds than me have pointed out, Dietrich Bonhoffer and Oskar Schindler were both ‘people smugglers’. For goodness sake, let us advocates not get sucked into the language of the torturers.