ONCE again Australia's offshore (Nauru and Manus Island) and onshore processing centres are swamped and we are confronted with images of distressed asylum-seekers self-harming, lip-sewing and hunger-striking. Such images are jarring and confusing in a country of migration where new arrivals are supposed to be welcomed as equals.
Australia's border protection efforts and their appalling effects do not reflect a country that has turned its back on migrants and refugees; they reflect an asylum system that is crumbling under its own outrageous costs and contradictions. The problem with the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees is that it legitimises unregulated entry. And unregulated inflows of economic migrants and asylum-seekers are anathema to managed migration and refugee resettlement.
Australia may be approaching a tipping point in its always uneasy relationship with the refugee convention. The Howard-era border protection policies, reinstated by the Labor government in desperation after it had abolished them, are not working. Nor are measures recommended by the hastily convened expert panel to which the Prime Minister, in even greater desperation, abrogated responsibility. Indeed, the expansion of the humanitarian program to 20,000 places is encouraging more asylum-seekers.
Last year, more than 17,000 asylum-seekers arrived. More than 30,000 are projected for this year. Our offshore humanitarian migration program has been overwhelmed. This is not good for the 70,000 to 90,000 refugees the UN High Commissioner for Refugees identifies each year as most in need of third-country resettlement. As former immigration minister Chris Bowen pointed out, Australia, the US and Canada are the only significant resettlement countries.Without us, there is no hope. At least 1000 people have drowned at sea.
This is not the legacy Labor intended when it came to office in 2007. It wanted to cement a reputation as more compassionate than the Howard government. When it unwound deterrence measures built up across 20 years, it never intended to welcome larger numbers of asylum-seekers. The boats had stopped coming and, hoping to keep things that way, Labor increased expenditure on border protection to record levels. It miscalculated.
Using the refugee convention to score political points was ill-advised. The domestic politics of asylum are toxic and divisive. Advocates think voters need to be better educated about signatory states' obligations. A growing number of voters think the refugee convention is past its use-by date. Australians see how European countries struggle to integrate large, unplanned inflows of economic migrants and refugees. Familiar with managed humanitarian migration, they see how the refugee convention advantages people on the basis of their capacity to pay, and to play the system, over refugees in greater need.
Australian voters also see the commonwealth budget has blown out by billions of dollars, trying to keep boatpeople out, rescuing, detaining and processing those who manage to get in. They think better things could be done with this money: improved disability services for Australian residents, perhaps, as well as helping more needy refugees.
The credibility of the Labor government is destroyed, and a clear majority favour the Coalition on this issue. The opposition, however, offers only a return to measures that seem less likely to succeed the second time around and with larger numbers. It offers the depressing prospect of a lengthy, gruelling period of escalating toughness. Temporary protection visas are a weak deterrent. Not all boats will be turned around. And even if offshore processing does slow boat arrivals, transporting asylum-seekers to impoverished islands and caring for them at immense cost before, in all probability, issuing them with resident visas is ridiculous.
The legacy of the Rudd and Gillard policy failures could be that it is no longer possible to return to the halfway solutions that worked in the past. The costs of pretending to uphold obligations under the refugee convention, at least in the way they presently are interpreted, have become too high.
As a country of migration, Australia needs its refugee policy to be sensible, morally defensible and well regulated.
We may have reached the point where the country's legal obligations need to be brought into line with public expectations that the government will control the borders and that migration will be managed. It is time to rethink dubious international obligations and to argue Australia's case. Australia should require asylum-seekers wanting to settle in this country to apply for a refugee or humanitarian visa offshore, through our overseas posts or the UNHCR.
