When the bodies of asylum seekers en route to Australia washed up on the shores of Christmas Island in 2010 everyone was in agreement that something needed to be done.
Five years later Australia has implemented one of the harshest border policies in the world. It is characterized by three core points: turning or towing back boats of asylum seekers at sea; forcing asylum seekers to live in detention centers across the Pacific in Nauru and Papua New Guinea; and guaranteeing they will never be resettled in Australia.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is now making a clarion call to Europe, where crisis meetings have taken place following the deaths of more than 800 migrants in the Mediterranean this week. The only way to stop deaths at sea, he told reporters this week, “is in fact, to stop the boats.”
Illustration: Lance Liu
The public debate around immigration in Australia is by no means the same as it is in Europe. However, it provides a useful roadmap for how outrage at deaths at sea, and fears of irregular migration can turn the question from “why are people fleeing?” to “how can we stop the boats?”
The road to asylum in Australia: No resettlement, no boats
Australia’s immigration debate began at a similar point to the current crisis facing Europe. Five years ago, boats were coming, mostly from Indonesia — a transit country to where asylum seekers traveled from as far away as Iraq or Afghanistan in an attempt to enter Australia — and more were coming than had ever come before.
Harrowing deaths at sea were also growing more frequent, as they are now growing in the Mediterranean, although the numbers of arrivals to Australia have never reached the levels attempting to get to Europe. Immigration detention centers inside Australia were full, and riots and serious self-harm incidents had taken place.
The previous Labor government was panicked. It was taking heavy hits from Australia’s conservative party, the Liberals, over what was seen as a failure to secure Australia’s borders. Then-Australian prime minister Julia Gillard formed an expert panel in 2012 to address how the nation should respond.
The panel recommended the creation of a vast regional framework to manage asylum seeker and migration flows in a comprehensive review of Australia’s policy.
It suggested the creation of an incentivized scheme in which asylum seekers would have a clear and structured path to get to Australia from regional hubs such as Malaysia, and suggested an increase in Australia’s overall humanitarian intake and more lenient family visa access.
However, to achieve the desired outcome the panel saw that deterrents needed to be in place to manage the flow of asylum-seeker vessels. It recommended the reopening of the Manus Island and Nauru detention centers. It also endorsed — in some circumstances when strict conditions were met — the practice of turning back asylum-seeker boats.
STEM THE FLOW
Although the panel may have been well intentioned, it was mostly the deterrent parts of the report that were implemented. The government reopened Manus Island and Nauru, which were fraught with problems. The idea of a truly regional solution, with a real process for asylum seekers to enter Australia without making the hazardous journey, fell largely to pieces with an ill-fated deal with Malaysia to turn the country into a regional settlement hub.
When Abbott’s government took power in September 2013 it pushed the tactics of deterrence even further — in fact, this was a central platform on which it sought to be elected. No asylum seeker who arrived by boat could ever be resettled in Australia. They would be taken straight to Manus Island and Nauru, where a series of reports have found serious health and safety issues. It turned back asylum-seeker boats at sea to Indonesia, and even purchased orange lifeboats to ferry back asylum seekers when their own boats were too damaged.
Refugee Council of Australia chief executive Paul Power has described it as a policy that is “actually all about forcing people back in the direction that they’ve come.”
“The Australian policy at no point has taken account of the need for protection of people who are attempting to come to Australia by boat. That’s never been a serious part of the discussion from politicians in Australia,” he said.
However, the policy did largely stem the flow of asylum-seeker vessels to Australia. Since the government came to power, only 16 boats have made the journey to Australia. Only one has been successful. No deaths have been reported.
However, information about asylum-seeker vessel movements is considered a matter of national security.
Australia’s approach to immigration has now drawn inevitable comparisons with the current problems faced in the Mediterranean. Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing UK Independence Party, has warned of “waves of millions of people” coming from north Africa to Europe.
However, there are many differences that make comparisons exceedingly difficult. Australia’s migration stream of vessels were also mostly from Indonesia, which is generally seen as a transit country via which asylum seekers from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and other countries travel en route to Australia.
The flow across the Mediterranean from Africa — and in particular Libya, which has become a hub for people-smuggling ventures — are in some circumstances from asylum seekers directly fleeing persecution.
Paul Barrett, a former secretary of Australia’s defense department, said turning back asylum-seeker vessels to Libya was far different from turning them back to Indonesia.
“One immediate difference is that when we turn back boats to Indonesia, objectionable as that policy is, we know the Indonesians aren’t going to shoot them when they come back,” he said.
“If they’ve fled Iraq or Afghanistan they’ve got no rights in Indonesia, so they need to move on to a country where they can retain the benefit of the Refugee Convention. Whereas if you turn around boats that are fleeing from Libya and send them straight back to Libya you’re injecting them straight back into the danger where they’ve fled,” Barrett said.
However, above all, the notion that Australia has in fact “stopped the boats” is seen as illusory by many working in Australia’s refugee sector. This is because, according to Power, it has not stopped the boats; it has merely displaced the flow to other nations.
“What Australia has done is just displace the issue away from the shores of Australia, by promoting an attitude of deterrence and harsh responses. They have almost without doubt made the situation worse for people who have tried to find safety in Europe,” Power said.
“If you look at the countries of origin of people who are on the seas in the Mediterranean, they do include people from Afghanistan and Iraq who are the groups of people we saw attempting to reach safety in Australia.”
RISING DEATH TOLL
Mary Anne-Kenny, the director of the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University in Australia and a member of a government advisory council on immigration detention, said any solution to the kind of migration flows currently occurring needed to involve the whole region.
“If we’re looking at regional ways at dealing with a problem then you could look at trying to set up some sort of way to deal with the issues in north and west Africa in a regional way.”
She says that across Europe — as in Australia — it has become more and more difficult to migrate or seek asylum from countries like Syria through regular means, which forces people to look to “irregular migration,” such as arriving by boat.
“You’ve got to look at the root cause of why people are moving, and then offer them safe ways of passage through some form of regional processing. A core question, though, is how can we provide people with the ability to apply for visas lawfully, and being able to do that lawfully without people having to wait in places for 10 years,” she said.
The comparisons to Australia’s immigration policies will no doubt continue as the numbers of boats — and the death toll — rises in Europe. However, the question, as Power sees it, should not be one about stopping the boats, as it was made in Australia. It is a broader conversation about why people will risk the dangerous journey in the first place.
“The answers lie in understanding why people are moving on and trying to come up with better responses to meet the overwhelming needs they face,” he said.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry