BY SARAH STEPHEN
Since the Coalition's election win on November 10 the backlash against the government's attack on asylum seekers, a policy that was wholeheartedly supported by the federal Labor opposition, has continued to grow.
Former Liberal leader John Hewson wrote in the November 16 Australian Financial Review that Prime Minister John Howard's "manipulation of the fear of the Tampa rivalled, indeed if it did not top, Menzies' manipulation of the fear of reds under the bed". Hewson argued that a top priority during the third term of the Howard government must be to drive a "sensible regional and national resolution of the refugee problem in the context of an expanded immigration program".
Hewson referred with discomfort to a scathing editorial in London's Financial Times which stated that Howard "owes his victory to a cynical exploitation of Australia's traditional insecurity and insularity. His hardline stance has done grave damage to Australia's international image."
He also mentioned a page three article in the New York Times which summarised the electoral contest between the Coalition and the ALP as being "the difference between Omo and Rinso. Both are running on the promise that they will keep Australia whiter."
Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser has continued to speak out on the issue. He told the ABC's Lateline on November 14: "I never thought I'd see the day when discrimination and race would play such a large part in an election program and I never thought I'd have a situation where both major parties have the same policy."
'Everyone should be released'
Conservative intellectual Robert Manne, speaking at a Sydney Politics in the Pub on November 16, commented: "Repelling refugees militarily is a most sinister development. It comes on top of two years of shocking abuse of asylum seekers. Ruddock has demonised them, incarcerated them and regarded the riots, suicide attempts and hunger strikes as a typical attempt to blackmail us."
The most appalling thing, Manne noted, is that there was "no resistance from the ALP or the media". He said in his frank opinion, "we've treated them like shit".
Manne said that the Fraser government's response to Vietnamese refugees arriving by boat is a useful starting point for an alternative policy. Key to Australia's response was an increase in the quota of Indochinese refugees, most of whom were selected from refugee camps in Malaysia.
Manne commented that "people were less worried about up to 10,000 people being selected by immigration officials to come here than they were about 2000 people arriving by boat. Australians seem have some phobia about spontaneous action."
Manne emphasised that the detention system and the issuing of temporary visas is "humanly atrocious". He used the example of Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers whose claims are rejected, and who face indefinite detention as a result. One man, an Iraqi doctor Aamer Sultan, has been in Villawood detention centre for two-and-a-half years and with no prospect of release. Manne described him as the "Weary Dunlop of Villawood".
"There's no deterrent reason any more", Manne argued. Once they're in the country, all these punitive measures serve to do is make them suffer intolerably. He concluded that "everyone should be immediately released".
Labor dissent
Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating told Lateline on November 12: "The election was won on an appeal to racism...[as] full page advertisements in all the major broadsheets and tabloids showed. That is, a picture of Mr Howard saying 'We will decide who comes into this country'. In other words, the message is we'll keep the riff-raff out." However, Keating did not criticise Labor's policy.
Sections of the ALP are angry, not only because its strategy of shadowing the Coalition on every proposal was cowardly, but because it cost them the election. Everyone in the ALP kept their mouths shut before the election, but now that it is out of the way, many are trying to distance themselves from Labor's anti-refugee policies.
A letter to Kim Beazley from former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, sent on September 4, was leaked to the November 12 Sydney Morning Herald. Whitlam accused Beazley of having "utterly failed" to live up to the party's 2000 platform on the question of asylum seekers, which states: "Labor will ensure that Australia's international obligations towards asylum seekers and refugees are met, and Labor will positively promote the rights of refugees and asylum seekers."
Many Labor members are unhappy with the way the election campaign was run, but few are proposing an alternative policy. Labor Senator Jim McKiernan merely called for a review of post-Tampa legislation on asylum seekers.
Labor front-bencher Duncan Kerr told the ABC's 7.30 Report on November 12 that "there were quite a number of disaffected voters, who felt deeply disquieted. They've made it plain. I've received messages from them, facsimiles, telephone calls, direct communication in the street by people who say: 'Look I normally vote Labor, but on this issue I do feel ashamed'."
Doug Cameron, national secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and a Labor Party member, referred to refugee policy in his opening address to the International Metalworkers Federation congress in Sydney on November 11. He stated: "This insecurity and fear is a product of the divisive economic, industrial and welfare policies of the Howard government. The appeal to the 'dark side' of society, the playing of the race card by the prime minister, goes down as one of the saddest, most opportunistic developments in Australian contemporary politics."
At a union rally against free trade on November 13, Cameron told Green Left Weekly: "I've called for an inquiry within the Labor Party, and at the end of that inquiry, for a special national conference. The national conference should be debating issues [such as] what should be the core principles of a social democratic party? ... It's quite clear that the Labor Party has moved a long way from what its original intent was, and that was to be a representative of working people in this country."
Cameron argued that workers need to be "clear and unambiguous when they cast their vote for the Labor Party that they're casting a vote for equity and justice".
"I'll be advocating a humane position as distinct from the inhumane treatment that these dispossessed people have experienced in Australia. I think the message that has been sent out to the rest of the world is that this country is discriminatory and its people are racist and xenophobic. This is a bad message", Cameron told Green Left Weekly. "For those arguing that we should have free trade, the worst thing that can happen to the trade position of this country is that those who look to invest in this country, to buy Australian goods, consider this country a racist country."
Let them land
Pressed as to what changes to refugee policy he would advocate, Cameron explained: "I think in general terms, detention is not the proper thing for Australia. I think [Australia's] position should be what has been adopted in European countries, where people are allowed to come into the community and have their claims determined in a very quick and efficient manner. If they're entitled to refugee status they stay, if they're not, they're deported. I think detention camps are absolutely terrible. Even before the Tampa, it was a terrible situation in those camps. I don't support locking innocent people up. I don't support locking up children and I think that is going to be a key debate within the Labor Party, because we have to be a humane party, not a party that is behaving in the worst aspects of racism."
Cameron supported a specific humanitarian response to refugees fleeing Afghanistan. "You can't have an Australian government saying on the one hand we're going to intervene militarily in another country, and [on the other hand that] the innocent people who are the victims of that action are denied access and refuge in Australia... You can't argue on the one hand for free trade when it comes to services and profits, yet when it comes to humanitarian issues, put the barricades up."
Few public figures or political commentators have yet taken on the burning issue of the moment: Howard's determination to repel all boats trying to reach Australian shores, even if it means turning Christmas Island into an overcrowded prison camp and constructing detention centres in small islands countries throughout the Pacific region.
It is unlikely that any other refugee-receiving country will agree to resettle more than a handful of those found to be refugees, given that it is seen as problem that Australia has created. The Howard government will be forced to convince impoverished islands such as Nauru and Fiji to allow the refugees to remain, or resettle them in Australia. This underlines the ridiculousness of Howard's "Pacific solution".
There is increasing disquiet within the navy's ranks, with the November 11 Sun-Herald reporting the rumour of a lieutenant commander on HMAS Tobruk being stood down after telling the captain he could not be involved in the handling of refugees in the fashion they were required to.
There is an urgent need for those appalled at the humanitarian consequences of the hostile deterrence of asylum boats to call for those boats to be allowed to land and that all asylum seekers be able to make their claims to Australia for refugee status.
From Green Left Weekly, November 21, 2001.
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