If we want to beat the people smugglers, we need cojones more than we need neighbours.
By Gary Scarrabelotti*
The Houston-Aristotle‑L’Estrange report to the Gillard government on how to deal with Australia’s self-inflicted refugee crisis combines the bitter herbs of policy realism and national interest with the heavy syrups of optimistic regionalism and internationalist do-goodism.
In order to re-open the Howard-era Pacific archipelago of internment camps, the Houston report has had to offer the chimera of regional co-operation in controlling refugee flows and the feel-good promise of increasing our refugee intake.
This apothecary’s mixture of opposites is politically necessary. It makes the Houston report somewhat digestible for the Prime Minister, for the ALP in general and for its Left wing in particular — and, indeed, for the good number of trendy urbanistas who populate the ranks of the Liberal Party.
There is no doubt about it. When it comes to formulating policy, Houston et. al. have put the Gillard government to shame. But it’s not this that I want to talk about. Others will do that ad infinitum.
What has grabbed my attention for the present is something else: the observation to have emerged from Houston et. al. that it might be possible to cut an acceptable deal with Malaysia, over the handling of refugee flows, without it signing up to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees.
Here are my thoughts.
However far off and improbable a regional approach to handling the movement of refugees might be, one thing is certain: no such agreement can possibly be made unless Australia accepts that our neighbours are neither going to sign up belatedly to a dog of a UN Convention nor accede to its principles in disguised form.
Naïve regionalism
Any notion, moreover, that Malaysia or Indonesia, either severally or together, might pluck our chestnuts from the fire, should Pacific Solution Mk 2 fail of its deterrent purpose, is shocking in its naivety. We — not they — are the magnet which draws the flow of illegal refugees through their countries. And when it comes to setting the problem to rights, it is not their house that is in disorder so much as ours. It is our political leadership — not theirs – whose hubris created the problem in the first place — by destroying Pacific Solution Mk 1 — and whose subsequent gormless responses to the unfolding crisis have compounded the evils of the original decision.
Consequently, were our neighbours to help in cleaning up our mess, they would certainly want to profit by it. And, indeed, Malaysia already has shown how it expects to do so. It suckered Australia into agreeing to take 4,000 of its “legal” refugees in return for their taking only 800 of our “illegals”!
Contrary to Houston et. al., this deal contains not even the beginnings of a regional strategy. Rather, it’s a way of taking Australia to the cleaners. At the same time, it sends a faltering signal to would-be refugees that those who make it into the region can hope, despite some intra-regional churning of their number, to be caste up, eventually, on Australia’s happy shores.
Combine Malaysian solutions with a promise to increase our refugee intake — an honourable national objective in itself – and what you do is to reinforce the aura of Australia’s attraction across the whole of South East Asia.
This brings me to the UN Convention on Refugees.
Non-serious nation
Australia has been played for a mug by our neighbours partly because of the posture of moral superiority over them, and indifference to their interests, adopted by Rudd-Gillard Labor when it dismantled Howard’s off-shore processing régime.
Abbott and Morrison have played a similar game, always banging on about how they would never do deals on off-shore processing with countries that are not signatories to the UN Convention. It might be just politics for domestic consumption, but it is insulting to our neighbours.
Add to this the deep sense of insecurity, widespread among our leadership class, about the legitimacy of our country and its place in the world — a chronic false conscience which activates our annoying eagerness to play the “global good citizen” — and we set ourselves up for failure in some of our most important foreign relationships.
Australia has acquired an esoteric morality of global citizenship at the same time as it has given up the exercise of basic survival skills.
Let’s be frank. If Australia is going to be successful at stopping the invasion of our shores by country-shopping refugees, then we are going to have to develop the cojones to stem the tide without the aid of our neighbours.
In the absence of decisive, up-front success in making Australia an ugly destination for illegal migrants, our neighbours will not lift a finger to help us. We have first to beat the boats. Then — and only then — will our neighbours say, “We’re prepared to deal: Australia is a serious country.”
But right now, we’re not.
unConventional wisdom
You see, it speaks well of Malaysia and Indonesia – and of other refugee source and transit nations like Sri Lanka and Pakistan – that they are not signatories to the UN Convention on Refugees.
In declining to sign up to it, they have made perfectly legitimate judgments about what is, and what is not, in the best interests of their countries and peoples.
They have concluded, furthermore, that the UN’s 1951 refugee convention was not made to help them. And they’re right about this.
The convention was made by the European peoples for Europeans displaced in an inter-European war; and they did so by opening wider to their displaced kith and kin already well-trodden pathways of migration from old Europe into the extended world of European culture, principally into North America, but also into farther flung Australia which, until then, had not experienced large-scale migration from The Continent.
The circumstances and motives which led to the Convention bear little relationship to the refugee problems we face today. Our neighbours know it; but the penny has yet to drop for us. A post-war inter-European agreement for a managed “internal” migration of refugees is not a pattern for dealing with extra-European people movements, all the more so in a world where they have become globalised, opportunistic, criminalised, and driven by economic aspirations more than by fears of persecution.
So, given the sceptical, hardnosed dispositions of those with whom we have to deal on the refugee issue, Australia, like it or not, is going to have to get a lot tougher than it was under Howard.
The real deal
A genuinely realist policy would look something like this:
- Australia would decide, according to principles of its own formulation, who it should accept as a refugee.
- Australia would exclude from making refugee claims at least all undocumented persons who arrive illegally on our shores.
- Australian officials would process refugee claims, according to Australian principles, in any country other than our own with whom we could negotiate an agreement to do so.
- Australia would not insist that the refugee polices of other nations — especially those on whose soil we conducted off-shore processing — would conform with our own.
- It might be a good thing for Australia to increase its refugee intake, but not until we have mastered the present crisis.
Can Australia steel itself for this?
The fact that a Federal ministry outsourced government to a committee of experts, to deal with the failure of the constitutional authority to exercise border control, indicates something deeper at work than a crisis in governance. We are looking at a crisis in Australian society itself.
We are here – are we not? – because, as a society, we’ve acquired an esoteric morality of global citizenship at the same time as we’ve given up the exercise of basic survival skills.