Monday 04th August 2014
AFTER the refusal of 157 asylum-seekers to be returned to India, their transfer to Australia’s detention centre on Nauru, revealed by Dennis Shanahan in The Weekend Australian, was no surprise.
Offshore processing is part of the Abbott government’s border protection policy. It was also the main thrust of the second Rudd government’s hardline policy to stem the flow of asylum-seekers to Australia. In July last year, Kevin Rudd announced all asylum-seekers who arrived by boat, without a visa, would be sent to Papua New Guinea and would never be settled in Australia. Opposition immigration and border protection spokesman Richard Marles had apparently forgotten that fact when he complained on Saturday that the transfer of the group to Nauru was “Morrison’s merry-go-round’’ and “it is the Australian public who are paying for it’’. He needs a reality check. Taxpayers also paid for Labor’s PNG initiative. Offshore processing was the correct policy a year ago and it remains so now. And it’s costing far less than it did a year ago when thousands of asylum-seekers arrived every month and some died in tragic accidents. Such deaths will be avoided, and less public money spent, if border-protection policies are sufficiently effective to deter potential asylum-seekers from getting on boats in the first place.
For those reasons, the opposition should show it has learned the lessons from its chronic mistakes when it lost control of Australia’s borders during the first Rudd and Gillard governments. If Labor is to salvage any credibility on the issue, Mr Marles and Bill Shorten must rise above point-scoring and show some maturity by lending bipartisan support to the government’s policies. Mandatory detention was originally a Labor policy, introduced by the Keating government in 1992. Unfortunately for Labor’s traditional voter base who value secure borders, the opposition has bent over backwards to avoid endorsing the Abbott government’s policy of turning boats back. As Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday, asylum-seekers are less likely to get on boats when others are sent back.
Taxpayers annoyed about costs might also question why the Human Rights Commission has waited until the Coalition is back in government to hold an inquiry into the vexed issue of children in detention. As Chris Kenny wrote on Saturday, the commission last examined the issue in 2001, under the Howard government, and boat arrivals had stopped by the time its report was tabled. The commission remained inactive while the problem escalated under Labor, when 50,000 asylum-seekers arrived in six years. But it is again agitating on the issue, at a time when the number of children in detention is dropping, from 2000 a year ago to fewer than 800.
News Corp columnist Miranda Devine made a legitimate criticism of Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs on Saturday for her insult that “however threatened by refugees’’, Australians “will hang their heads in shame’’. Australians, in fact, are generous at welcoming refugees. But they have had enough of their generosity being abused by people-smugglers and by the people former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr labelled “economic refugees’’ while those without the money to self-select wait for years in refugee camps.
The Australian does not like children being in detention and is concerned about the problems raised by medical bodies. It is even more appalling that children’s lives have been lost on the dangerous sea voyage to Australia. These are some of the best reasons for strong border protection.
The 157 people transferred to Nauru had been held at sea for three weeks on a Customs vessel before being transferred eight days ago to Western Australia’s Curtin detention centre. They were to have been assessed by officials from India, which had agreed to take back any Indian residents and consider taking non-resident Tamils. Mr Morrison says the asylum-seekers involved in a High Court case met their lawyers on Tuesday last week before refusing to speak with the Indian officials. Refugee lawyer George Newhouse, who had advised members of the group, denied he or his colleagues had advised them not to meet Indian consular officials. Unfortunately, in not speaking to the Indian officials, the group faces months in detention in a backwater ranked No 193 on the list of global economies. They could have returned to India, a growing economy, where they had been living in Tamil Nadu, close to family, and where their children had been going to school.
Much of the media, legal and political commentary about the issue has been hysterical. Barrister Julian Burnside and others in the Twittersphere claimed yesterday that Mr Morrison and Tony Abbott were “psychopaths’’. Such personal abuse over a policy that is working is puerile. Potential asylum-seekers thinking of risking the voyage to Australia should not be given false hope that there is any momentum here for relaxing border protection.
