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Article Excerpt
The long public controversy about the detention of asylum seekers is gradually giving way to debates on other topics--and especially On the prospect of wars which may well produce new waves of refugees. The numbers in detention have declined, although there were still nearly five hundred--mainly Afghans--on Nauru, eighteen months after the Tampa incident. Numbers at Woomera are below one hundred and these will probably be transferred to Baxter, and Woomera closed, within a short period. Many remaining in Villawood are not asylum seekers but others in breach of their visas awaiting deportation. No boats have arrived since November 2001 and asylum seekers arriving by air with non-humanitarian visas are still released on bridging visas as before. The objective of ending unauthorised arrival seems almost within grasp, for the short term. The intractable problem of those who cannot or will not return home remains, and sustains a residue who have often been in detention for many years. Negotiations are proceeding to release women and children into Port Augusta town, but the alternative detention housing will probably not be available for another twelve months. The contract for a large detention centre at Christmas Island has been cancelled and a new proposal floated for only eight hundred to be housed there. The Pacific Solution may well be abandoned for a local 'Indian Ocean' solution, on Australian soil but outside the migration zone. A new private prison company will take over from Australasian Correctional Management.
All this looks like a neat ending to what was a very messy and unsatisfactory two years. But it should be remembered that there were periods of several years in the past when no boats arrived, and that Australia has not experienced anything like the waves of asylum seekers still encroaching on the European Union--to which two-thirds of the world's asylum seekers normally turn. The cooperative security arrangements discussed at Bali in March 2002 have improved the efficacy of Indonesian border control but not yet led to the outlawing of people smuggling there. No long-term border control program can work for Australia without effective support from Indonesia. Improving overall relations with that country must be a priority if this is to happen. Australia's current stance on Middle Eastern war is unlikely to achieve this.
Refugee policy before the 1990s
New policy directions were adopted from 1999 and made more stringent from 2002. They achieved Howard's stated objective of 'deciding who would come to Australia and under what circumstances'. Australia did not achieve this only by mandatory and irrevocable detention. That system has been in operation since 1991 for unauthorised arrivals, discouraged 'boat people' for several years, but eventually lost its deterrent power by 1999 (McMaster 2001; Mares 2002). A series of events--the arrest of the Tampa, the sinking of SIEV X, the 'children overboard' scandal and the greater cooperation with Indonesia after the Bali bombing in October 2002, all served to discourage many from risking the sea passage. The detention on Manus and Nauru of over 1000 asylum seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan was a further disincentive. From a purely pragmatic viewpoint asylum seekers were effectively discouraged. It appears to be a long-term objective of Australia that no unauthorised asylum seekers should reach the Australian mainland. This would rescue Australia from one of its obligations under the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and distinguish it still further from the situation in other signatory states, except possibly Japan and New Zealand. Refugees would then be chosen off-shore in cooperation with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or from the relatively small numbers arriving by air and seeking to change their visa status. The number of unauthorised air arrivals usually exceeds the number of boat arrivals each year and there is a large number who seek asylum onshore having arrived on another form of visa. Within our long-established quota of 12 000 humanitarian entrants each year there would be almost complete predictability, selection and control. Four thousand Convention refugees would be admitted each year from the many millions 'of concern' to the UNHCR.
The central problem of refugee policy is that it is based on humanitarian and not pragmatic considerations. It is also affected by warfare, revolution and the rise and fall of authoritarian regimes. This introduces uncertainty into processes which successive Australian governments have tried to make predictable. The original refugee model enshrined in the UN Convention of 1951 (signed by Australia in 1954) and the Protocol of 1967 (signed in 1973) was based on individual or family escape from totalitarian regimes, originally fascist but later communist. Such regimes were assumed to be uniformly oppressive and thus to threaten anyone who did not conform--whether politically, religiously or racially. Refugees were to be outside their country of origin, members of a recognisable social group and unwilling to seek to return out of a well-founded fear of persecution. At the height of the Cold War, communist regimes were seen as self-evidently likely to persecute anyone who had escaped from their clutches. It was unacceptable to return asylum seekers to that fate. As a general rule the United States--the largest recipient of refugees under these definitions, though not a Convention signatory--only accepted refugees from communism. Australia largely did so as well between 1947 and 1970.
In Europe this system developed by clearing the camps into which millions had settled, mainly in Austria and Germany through cooperation between states wanting immigrants and organisations such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organisation for Migration. Australia, with Canada and the United States, was one of the most active recipient nations. The principle was thus established that Australia would select refugees from managed camps. This remains the preferred option, allowing Australia to decide who to take on the grounds of health, employability, assimilability and need. Until 1970, of course, this left Australia free to exclude non-Europeans (Jupp 2002). Refugees coming out of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980 passed through reception centres from which they were processed as 'offshore'. Similarly, refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s and 1980s were selected from camps in other South-East Asian states (Adelmnan et al. 1994; Rivett 2001).
The central features of this system were selection and 'orderly departure'. It worked especially well because many communist states energetically prevented their citizens from escaping. In a very important sense the continuation of the communist systems was essential to controlling the flow of those seeking asylum from such systems--an irony of history. Some communist states, including China, Cuba, Yugoslavia and Vietnam, were prepared to allow emigration eventually. But this, too, was controlled by Australia through its visa system which became increasingly universal, leaving only the New Zealanders free of the need to seek approval 'off-shore' for arriving in Australia for any purpose, however short-term. Australia built an effective system of control and selection which was the envy Of many societies without our advantages of isolation and being 'girt by sea'. Ironically enough it contracted agreements with Vietnam and China, the two most important remaining communist states, to expedite the return of failed refugee applicants. Under the 'refoulement' provisions of the Convention, this involved an undertaking that they would not be persecuted.
The end of an orderly system
The international refugee system had been relatively orderly until the 1990s. Even the massive departures from Indochina after 1975 were regulated by agreements to which Australia was a party. Problems arose with asylum seekers entering the United States from non-communist dictatorships such as El Salvador and Guatemala and increasingly from Africa and the Middle East. These had a limited impact on Australia, although special visa arrangements were made for Lebanese in the 1970s and some Salvadorans and Chileans were accepted as refugees by the Hawke Government. None of these were escaping from communism. A particular problem arose in Europe because of the ending of guest-worker schemes in many countries. Family reunion or refugee status then became almost the only avenues for legal immigration into what had become the largest economy in the world and one with easier access than either North America or Australasia. These new flows were compounded by the growth of organised people smuggling, especially from south China.
Rather than refugee flows abating and the world becoming more settled and democratic, the opposite accompanied the collapse of communism in the 1990s. The equal, if different, collapse of many African regimes added to the numbers. Some, like Ethiopia and Somalia, had been semi-communist, but most were incompetent military dictatorships. The spread of the Palestinian crisis into Lebanon, the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran, the Iran-Iraq war and the ten-year-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan brought crisis conditions nearer to Australia. Even within the Indo-Pacific region coups in Fiji and civil war in Sri Lanka affected societies which had long and close links with Australia. The most sudden impact on Australia came as a by-product of the policy of recruiting overseas students who entered Australia on visas which limited...
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