Rhetoric won't help stem boat arrivals

Rhetoric won't help stem boat arrivals | The Australian

Lenore Taylor, National correspondent | April 18, 2009
Article from: The Australian

KEVIN Rudd says people smugglers are the vilest form of human life and should rot in hell. Which is all very well, but it doesn't answer the real question, which is how to stop them plying their evil trade in the first place.

To that question neither side of politics seems to have a real, as opposed to a rhetorical, answer.

Labor is using tough talk to disguise that its efforts plainly weren't enough to stop the traffickers whose cargo now lies in intensive care units across Western Australia.

But the Liberals are making the serious allegation that Labor's softer detention policies are in part responsible for the tragedy off the West Australian coast.

That is an argument for which there is limited evidence.

To start with, Labor's policy left many of the hard aspects of Australia's asylum laws firmly in place, including mandatory detention on arrival and, if the applicant is a security risk, the possible continued operation of the Christmas Island detention centre, naval patrols and the interdiction of boats and the excision of islands under the Immigration Act.

To the extent that the laws were softened - by allowing most applicants to live in the community, closing the detention centres in Nauru and Manus Island, and abolishing the temporary protection visas that denied rights to refugees who arrived by boat, including the ability to seek reunion with their families - there is no clear evidence that this caused an increase in desperate asylum-seekers putting their lives in the hands of people smugglers.

Much of the increase can be explained by global factors, with a recent report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees showing a big jump in worldwide asylum applications during the past year.

Although asylum applications in Australia have increased by 19 per cent, less than 4 per cent of the applicants made the perilous journey in people smugglers' boats. The vast majority arrived by plane.

And if people smugglers are marketing their services on the back of misrepresenting the changes that Labor made, and if their customers, who are risking everything, are not checking whether the smugglers' claims of an easy ride are true, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is the detention policies that need to be changed.

But by defining the problem in terms of Australia's supposedly softer policy, the Liberal Party is clearly suggesting that a move back towards the old, harder policies of the Pacific Solution is a viable option.

"You can't slash funds, you can't take your eye off the ball, you can't announce a softer policy and then not expect people to lose their lives through people smuggling efforts," Opposition immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone said within minutes of the first reports of the tragedy.

Last December she was a member of a parliamentary committee report that welcomed Labor's detention policy changes, saying they would usher in a "fairer and more humane system for asylum-seekers and others who are detained in immigration custody". She tried to define her message this week around the claim that Labor had bungled its communication of the detention changes, allowing them to be portrayed by people smugglers as a signal that the path to Australia was easy now or, as she put it, that the Australian Government was in fact saying: "Come on down."

On the extent to which the Liberals would advocate a return to tougher detention policies she was far less clear, although yesterday she did sound supportive of a return to temporary protection visas.

"When we had temporary protection visas it meant illegal arrivals did not enjoy the same rights for family reunion as those refugees who came in legally and that severely curtailed the ability of people smugglers to sell their product," she said. "Labor should have looked a lot harder at the consequences of abolishing the TPVs."

There were, of course, other serious consequences of TPVs for those living on them in limbo for three years until a reassessment, including an uncertain existence in which they had no guarantees of staying in Australia and no right to travel to their home, and a ban on being reunited with their families. And some say that ban encouraged desperate families to resort topeople smugglers.

The Liberals are refusing to say whether they would reinstate TPVs or other hard detention policies, whether they would reopen Nauru or reinstate full-blown mandatory detention.

Theirs is also a rhetorical message.

I think they would be ill-advised to return to the Pacific Solution: it cost a bomb, breached international law and didn't stop the boats arriving anyway. Even if the people smugglers are "trying it on" under our new laws, as a civilised nation we have to find a better way to stop them.

In the past the only enduring solutions to boat arrivals have been diplomatic ones, such as the "safe third country" legislation passed when Nick Bolkus was immigration minister, which stopped almost immediately the flow of Sino-Vietnamese asylum-seekers.

This Government and the previous government have been in constant negotiation with Indonesia, the third country from which the present wave of boats has originated, to date with limited success.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, Immigration Minister Chris Evans and Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus were negotiating these issues at a Bali conference this week, but afterwards said only that they were hopeful Indonesia would change some of itslaws.

In the meantime we have legal and humanitarian obligations to the fearful, desperate and in some cases now desperately ill people risking their lives to get here, no matter how much we despise the people who bring them.

And we have to manage a political debate, where fear is once again rising in line with the leaky boats' arrival, with Labor suddenly emphasising its toughness rather than its compassion and the Coalition inching back to the inflammatory debate of 2001.

We owe it to ourselves to avoid scare-mongering over this issue even though it touches a raw political nerve.

The facts show that in reality it is far less of a problem for us than it is for the asylum-seekers we are receiving.

For their sakes we need to work for a real, not a rhetorical, solution.