Many, many people have asked me what I think of the government’s new PNG deal. Those who know me know how passionate I am about the issue. Accordingly, I am determined not to give a pat answer or toe a party line when it comes to refugees. I think this is an issue that has choked under emotive language and fuzzy concepts for a decade, while refugees in their millions have lingered in refugee camps, or lived in perpetual limbo under the radar in transit countries. Our national response must transcend party politics; more than this it must transcend ideological posturing from all sides – and yes, that means from the left as well as the right. After a great deal of thought I’ve decided to cautiously throw my support behind this deal. The increase in refugees arriving by boat in the past 18 months is alarming – it has quadrupled. Last calendar year just over 17,000 people made the journey to our shores via boat. In and of itself, an increase in the number of people seeking help is not a problem – personally I believe it’s an opportunity to be more generous. Yet the reality of our system at present is that we have 20,000 humanitarian visas to grant on a yearly basis. Each visa we grant to someone who has come here by boat means we make one less visa available for the person who has been waiting patiently in a UN refugee camp for years. This is why what we have now is an untenable – and unprecedented – situation. If the number of boat arrivals continues to rise, we face a future where Australia no longer takes a single person from the UN refugee resettlement program. To me, it is unacceptable for the system to become one in which a people smuggler can get you into Australia, while the United Nations cannot. What will happen once it becomes known in UN refugee camps that there is now zero chance of ever getting resettled in Australia, that the “queue” is now lined up behind a permanently closed door? The long-term consequences of this scenario are frightening, and I believe would destabilise not just Australia’s humanitarian programs, but the vital work of the UN itself. So I accept the premise that the responsible course of action involves discouraging boat journeys as the means by which people seek asylum in our country. Seeking asylum is a human right, but this new status quo impinges on these rights more than the PNG deal will. Letting more and more people drown is not compassionate. Obstructing those who’ve waited so long is not fair. Hindering those who have no means to pay a people smuggler is not acceptable. One of the things I like about the PNG deal is that it departs from the model in which we seek to punish refugees for attempting to come to Australia. Turning boats around returns asylum seekers into the permanent limbo of a transit country (if it doesn’t kill them). Detaining them indefinitely adds misery and mental illness to a person’s trauma, but can never be cruel enough to prevent them from fleeing their home in the first place. Rerouting boats to Papua New Guinea uses an entirely different mechanism: simple logic. Why go the long-way around to end up in PNG when it is easier to take a direct route? There are many ways to get to Australia, but boat is no longer one of them. In contrast to the punitive models of the past, the asylum seeker on the boat actually gets what they were seeking: permanent settlement in a new country. This deal is not sentimental about the tragic reality that those in need drastically outnumber our capacity to accommodate. On one hand it is a fact that anyone who needs asylum deserves to be granted it, yet on the other, there is a system in place (the UN refugee program) which attempts to deal with human catastrophe in as orderly and safe way as possible, and this must not be undermined. This transition away from the punitive model is significant. I believe it offers a platform upon which we can build a better system – one that is more robust and compassionate than what we presently have. Here’s what I believe we must do next: - We must raise our refugee intake until it sits at the maximum we can afford. We are the luckiest country, let us be known forevermore as the most generous. I believe we must immediately charge the Productivity Commission to examine how high we can feasibly raise our refugee intake, and then base our intake on its findings (I suspect we can afford to be considerably more generous than we currently are). - All hard-line messaging directed at voters (not refugees) must stop immediately, because it feeds the punitive, fear-based rhetoric that got us here in the first place. - We must create pathways into our humanitarian intake within Indonesia and Malaysia, and assist these countries to establish their own refugee intakes. - Deterrence no longer needs to be our strategy. Aside from the centres in PNG, all offshore and onshore detention centres are now no longer essential, and should be closed down as they empty. With the money we save, we must invest in a regional framework for resettling refugees, in building peace and stability in neighbouring countries, and helping them to commence their own intake of refugees. These are the priorities I urge my party to pursue. This deal is in many ways a circuit breaker to the failed strategies of deterrence, but the clear air it buys us must be filled with new policies based on regional cooperation and an intention to maximise our capacity to be generous. For some, the PNG deal will seem too arbitrary, too harsh. It is a fact that many who attempt the boat journey have not got the option of joining the “proper” queue. In the short term, it will add to the hardship felt by many people (others, it will greatly help). But the people who have accused the Rudd government of taking a meaner stance than the Liberals on this issue are simply wrong. The Liberal party’s stance is to immediately reduce our intake to 13,000; the Labor stance seeks to raise our intake to 27,000 within a few years. In the eyes of some, both programs are too callous, but this doesn’t change the reality that one plan resettles twice the number of refugees as the other. The Liberal party’s stance continues to punish boat people as if they were criminals, while Labor’s new strategy instead grants them – with no limit on numbers – asylum in a more peaceful country than the one they are fleeing. There are criticisms to be made, but these two policies are by no means equal.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 12:30:19 +0000
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