Refugee lobby’s 10 commandments

The tough border security rhetoric of the Rudd Government has been exposed as mere macho grandstanding. Suddenly the PM is talking about "illegal immigrants" and standing up to evil people smugglers. It's spin.

The Government's sanctimonious hubris was encapsulated by the federal Labor MP Michael Danby, who, after a tour of the 800-bed, $400 million detention centre on Christmas Island last July likened the facility, a legacy of the Howard government, to a "stalag", a "German prisoner-of-war camp" and an "enormous white elephant".

That would now make Danby party to a policy of cruel military detention, because the Christmas Island detention centre is overflowing. For more than a year, the Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, maintained the pretence that softening policies on asylum seekers would have little material effect. To support this fiction, boat people were transferred to Christmas Island but housed in a construction camp, private accommodation and an obsolete detention facility at Phosphate Hill. Anywhere but the detention centre.

Reality eventually prevailed, so much so that the Government is shipping 200 bunk beds to Christmas Island. It is readying another 500-bed detention centre in Darwin. It is funding another detention centre in Sumatra on behalf of the Indonesian Government. It will send demountable homes, meant for Aborigines, from Alice Springs to Christmas Island to increase the detention centre's capacity.

The Government has been exposed in other ways. On April 16, after a boat exploded off Ashmore Reef, killing five and injuring many, the West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, said the explosion had been caused by sabotage. The then minister for home affairs, Bob Debus, came down hard: ''I am not going to allow this particular incident to be politicised as some incidents have been politicised in the past, often to our national shame.''

But the Premier quoted from a report from emergency personnel also given to the Federal Government. After six months of silence from the Rudd Government, the police confirmed the obvious: sabotage. This did not prevent the granting of asylum status to the remaining 42 Afghan asylum seekers who had been on the boat, before the coronial inquiry.

This sent a terrible message, Barnett said. Those responsible for the five deaths had never been identified which meant some of those complicit could have been granted asylum status. He linked this signal last week to this week's threats of violence and self-harm from among 260 Sri Lankans on board a cargo ship intercepted by the Indonesian Navy.

The conduct of the Government reflects the internal pressure it feels from the Labor Left, which accepts the 10 commandments of the refugee lobby. In a nutshell:

1. Australia is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which confers rights and obligations about the treatment of asylum seekers.

2. Australia is a signatory of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which requires that asylum seekers be treated humanely, not as law-breakers.

3. Indonesia is not a signatory to the convention and therefore not an option for asylum seekers.

4. There are thus no queue-jumpers because there is no queue to jump.

5. The number arriving by boat is relatively tiny.

6. Most would risk grave danger if they were returned to their country or origin.

7. Australia, a wealthy nation, is morally obliged to help the desperate poor.

8. Detention of boat people is racially discriminatory.

9. Criticism of humane asylum policies reflects xenophobia.

10. Criticism also encourages or reflects Islamophobia.

The problem with these 10 commandments is most are based on mere opinion, and none are relevant. The debate about boat arrivals is not about ethnicity, numbers, poverty or methods of arrival. It is about principle. There is no such country as the United Nations. No one lives there. UN charters do not override authority. Australian laws are sovereign. Australia has no obligation to accept a single non-citizen not in danger of persecution.

This principle is the bedrock of Australian law and politics. Non-citizens are not entitled to self-select as residents before their bona fides have been established. A government that cannot or will not maintain this principle will eventually fall, because the overwhelming majority of Australians, shown in survey after survey, accepts this bedrock principle.

If there were a viable federal opposition in Canberra, the Rudd Government would be embarrassed. But as there is a distracted opposition, the Government can bluster at will.