"Stop the Boats" has caught the imagination of the media and the Australia public as if it as something we can actually achieve.
Below is a full transcript of Greg Sheridan's opinion piece in The Australian today. The views expressed in it epitomize the very reason why I no longer buy the Australian and indeed resist all offers from the News Ltd stable via the internet. For me the ABC and the SBS media will give me what I can trust for news and balanced opinion.
I am reasonably confident that those wanting to stop the boats have reasons other than an altruistic concern for the welfare of those who would take the risks associated with that crazy short trip from Indonesia to Ashmore Reef. The claim of altruism is used to give validity to their proposals which have nothing to do with the welfare of people fleeing persecution in their home country.
The greatest single "Push Factor" as people like to call it is not the fact that people can no longer go home because of civil strife. The places where people gather as refugees, bush camps or city slums, are places that offer no hope. In Malaysia and Indonesia, refugees who try to leave the camps are arrested as illegal immigrants, but in the camps there is so little processing of refugee claims, if any, that there is no hope of resettlement. The only thing they can count on is spending 10s of years in that place.
Hope is the big push factor - hope that if they get away they might have a chance at resettlement somewhere, anywhere, and for those in Indonesia and Malaysia, the closest somewhere is Australia. None of the Asian countries where we think there would be a closer cultural and religious fit than here have any programs of humanitarian settlement of refugees. Thailand has made room for many many Burmese and Cambodian refugees but always in the hope that those people would sooner or later be able to go back home across their common borders. That is what Temporary Protection Visas so enthusiastically advocated by the Liberal Party are offering - safety until you can go back home. Once again, there is no hope in such offers and they will not diminish the push factor.
Given that we have a global refugee problem it stands to reason that we need a global solution. The fact that the UN offers definitions and conventions that govern people's international rights only goes part of the way. The sad fact is that when the number of places for resettlement each year is put alongside the number of people displaced from their homes because of their race or religious or political beliefs current levels of humanitarian resettlements in third countries is a drop in the ocean.
What is needed is a global mobilization of countries willing to offer humanitarian resettlement to the millions who need protection. At the moment very few countries offer resettlement - just 10 countries, and per capita Australia us pulling its weight alongside the others. But the reality is that the number of places we offer is minsicule compared to other migration places offered, and other forms of entry for work etc, not to mention the number of working or touring visitors who have overstayed and are now lost in the fabric of our society. I think Australia could cope with a whole lot more refugee settlements and I think it would do our economy far more good than harm, but that is a minor issue.
But what if a whole lot more western countries could be persuaded to open their doors to refugees? What if between us we could all offer say a million new refugee resettlements a year, or even two? That would begin to offer hope to people who wind up in refugee camps, not just in Asia, but in various parts of Africa. This is what will reduce the push factor and put the people smugglers out of business.
Yes, it makes me mad that the people who organised the latest tragedy walked away with $1.5m perhaps for outlays of very little on a decrepit boat that was a single-use investment and a few peasant crew members who probably knew very little about the risks they were taking. But that does not diminish my concern for the refugees and the need for the rest of the world to offer them resettlement. If they truly are refugees they cannot go home. Our experience is that 9 out of 10 who come are indeed refugees, and they often come from countries in which our military has been actively involved in the civil unrest from which they are fleeing.
Jesus once met a lady who asked him to help her. She was a foreigner from Phoenicia. Jesus at first refused, but she responded that even dogs were entitled to the crumbs from under the banquet tables. The current social and political response to refugees in Australia seems to me to be like that - we have so much that even the crumbs from under our banquet tables would make refugee people happy and passing them on would do us no harm - BUT WE REFUSE HOSPITALITY.
Everything the Immigration Minister and his opposition counterparts talk about and do is designed to score political points and it will make no difference to the push factor - in fact it will only increase the pressure.
You wait and see!!!!!
BY:GREG SHERIDAN, FOREIGN EDITOR
From:The Australian
December 24, 2011 12:00AM
A TITANIC battle of wills took place yesterday between the Gillard government and the Abbott opposition and, as far as we can see, the opposition is not going to remove its veto on the Malaysia Solution to the illegal arrival of boatpeople.
The only way that would change, one presumes, is if the nature of the Malaysia Solution changed: that is, the Malaysian government signs the refugee convention or institutes similar guarantees into domestic law, or at least gives them a much greater degree of formality than they have now.
If that happens the opposition will be able to claim it has greatly improved the quality of the Malaysia Solution.
The government has had some success in getting commentators to blame the opposition for the recent policy impasse. But really, the whole illegal immigration-boatpeople fiasco is the government's problem, the government's fault and the government's responsibility.
Yesterday's events in a way make the government's position even more incoherent. Yesterday, the government was publicly prepared to open an offshore processing centre on Nauru. If the opposition maintains its veto on Malaysia, what then is the government's position? How can it be that Nauru was OK yesterday but no good today?
The absolute failure of the Gillard government to show any conviction, consistency or policy coherence on the boatpeople matter is at the heart of its failure to manage the issue effectively.
No one, least of all the people-smugglers, believes, or takes at face value, or invests with any sense of consequence, a single word the government says on this matter, so all the serially contradictory and wildly varying policies it has adopted and then discarded end up achieving nothing.
There are many layers of complexity and contradiction all through this business.
In Wayne Swan's letter to Tony Abbott on Thursday, he spoke of "our No 1, shared, overriding objective: to stop men, women and children from risking their lives on leaky boats."
The tragedy of those people who drowned is indeed an appalling human tragedy. They were all human beings and they all have an absolute claim on human rights. In my view there is no one in Australia, at any point of any spectrum of this debate, who does not want to stop such deaths.
Surely all of us involved in this debate can afford each other this much goodwill: that there is no one who wants, or who is directly responsible for, these tragic deaths.
And it is absolutely correct that avoiding these deaths must be an extremely high priority of policy.
But if it is the only policy priority, then the Greens' policy is the logical one to follow. Indeed, if avoiding deaths at sea is the only consideration of policy, you could quite reasonably be a lot more radical than the Greens.
The Greens want us to take tens of thousands of people from Malaysia and Indonesia. If we did that it would certainly, in the short term at least, prevent deaths at sea.
Why would anyone get on a boat when they knew they would come to Australia in short order in perfect safety? It would also massively increase the numbers coming to Indonesia and Malaysia.
More than that, if avoiding deaths at sea is the only priority, if the people involved really are refugees and have a right to claim refuge in Australia, then we should send our navy out to meet the boats and help them as early on their journey as possible.
I am not being sarcastic or ironic here. This was the position I took on the Vietnamese boatpeople of the late 1970s and early 80s. I believed they were genuine refugees. I strongly supported Medecins du Monde, which sent out boats searching for Vietnamese in the South China Sea. I helped try to set up a branch of MDM in Sydney, wrote columns about it, held a meeting for it in my home and on several occasions was invited to join its expeditions in the South China Sea.
If you believe these people really are refugees, and really are entitled to resettlement in Australia, this is the only logical response.
I have 100 per cent changed my view since then because I believe that overwhelmingly we are dealing today with determined illegal immigration, not refugees. The bureaucratic process to decide who is really a refugee is completely unreliable, especially when people throw away their documents before landing on Australian soil so their stories cannot be verified.
Middle-class Iranians, Pakistanis pretending to be Afghans, Afghans who have only ever lived in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils who don't want to join the tens of millions of Tamils in India: all of these people may reasonably want to live in Australia. Overwhelmingly, they are not refugees.
So a serious object of policy also has to be to prevent people from confronting Australia with an unmanageable problem of illegal arrivals by boat.
This is a perfectly sensible objective, which the vast majority of Australians want upheld. But it is almost impossible to achieve while ever the ultimate prize of permanent residency in Australia is available.
That is why those who claim it is hysterical for us to get worried about relatively small numbers of illegal immigrants are misguided or disingenuous. Once the route to Australia is established, the numbers will increase inexorably.
In the first half of December we had the highest rate of arrivals for many years. We have had more than 14,000 boat arrivals since late 2008, when Labor changed the successful Pacific Solution policies John Howard had implemented. The arrival rate is accelerating and all these people will bring relatives under family reunion. This is an immigration outcome, pure and simple, and one that the government has completely lost control of.
Offshore processing by itself will not stop the boats and, therefore, will not stop the drownings.
Once people are detained at an Australian facility, be it on Nauru or Manus Island, there will be strong calls from within Australia that they be processed quickly. If they have got rid of their documents, and are determined to live in Australia, the government will find it very hard to send them back and ultimately most will be accepted into Australia.
The boats thus will keep coming. This again would be a failure of process and a defeat for Australian sovereignty and the will of the people of Australia and of their government.
Ultimately, solving this problem must include a determination that if you arrive illegally by boat, whatever your circumstances, you will not get permanent residency in Australia. This is why the opposition's approach of offshore processing combined with temporary protection visas, with no family reunion rights, is likelier to work than the government's approach.
The fact that the Abbott opposition, like Howard before it, looks as if it really would enforce these policies means it would have a better chance of staring down the people-smugglers and their clients.
Credibility, which on this issue Julia Gillard has entirely lacked across her whole prime ministership, is crucial.
