Tony Dewberry
It is one of the ironies of history that PM John Howard had to withdraw his Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals or DUA) Bill just before on the fifth anniversary of the Tampa fiasco.
The bill excised the entire Australian coastline from the migration zone, so all asylum seekers arriving by boat would be processed offshore. Children would have once again been detained, and asylum seekers would have been denied the protection of the Australian legal system. Even those granted refugee status could have faced indefinite detention until accepted by a third country. In 2001, in the so-called Tampa election, Howard won government on policies like these. In 2006, he couldn't win a majority in the Senate for them.
This setback for the Howard government comes in the wake of last year's "Georgiou reforms" — concessions made to dissident Liberals Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan which included releasing many long-term detainees, allowing children to live in the community while their cases were processed, giving some prospect of permanency to temporary protection visa holders, and making the cases of those incarcerated for more than two years subject to review by the Ombudsman.
Those Coalition and independent MPs and senators who stood firm against the bill deserve credit for their principled stand. But their vote would not have mattered if the Labor Party was still supporting Howard's every move against asylum seekers, as it did in the Tampa election.
Labor's changed position and the resolve of the dissidents are testimony to a shift in public opinion over the last five years. This was brought about by tireless campaigning against government policy by a broad social movement. And it is to this movement that the credit should go for Howard's backdown — his defeat is the movement's victory.
Australians have now had five years to witness the cruel unfolding of Howard's refugee agenda: children behind razor wire, the self-harm and suicide of desperate people, the brutal repression of a series of prison rebellions in detention centres, and asylum seekers deported to danger and death. They have seen all this and more, and many can no longer stomach it.
It is unfortunate that some of the opposition was couched in nationalist terms, blaming Indonesia for the legislation. We saw this when shadow immigration spokesperson Tony Bourke parodied a quote by Howard saying, "This Government has decided that Indonesia will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come" and when ALP leader Kim Beazley claimed that voting against the bill would
defend Australian sovereignty. It is self-defeating to defend the rights of asylum seekers by playing on fears of Indonesia. You cannot fight Howard's populist xenophobia with more populist xenophobia.
The resort to nationalist rhetoric allowed Labor to oppose the new bill without putting forward a radical rejection of the whole system of mandatory detention and temporary protection. Opposition to the bill should have stressed the defence of human rights and our common humanity with the asylum seekers.
The Indonesian government's anger at Canberra's granting of asylum to West Papuan independence activists merely explains the timing of the legislation: Howard grabbed the first convenient excuse to overturn the Georgiou reforms and return to the harsher policies he pioneered with the "Pacific solution".
Howard is not succumbing to international pressure: his government is an international trendsetter in showing other rich Western nations how to ignore the UN Convention on Refugees and keep out asylum seekers. Howard's approach goes right against the spirit and letter of the convention by keeping asylum seekers out of the country altogether. This externalising of the "refugee problem" abrogates any responsibility the rich West bear for the instability, violence and poverty in the poor nations that asylum
seekers are fleeing from.
The DUA bill was made in Australia, with no imported components. It is cut from the same cloth as Work Choices, welfare-to-work, the government's so-called anti-terror laws, and attacks on Native Title.
Since the Tampa election, it has been a long, hard five years for asylum seekers and everyone else involved in the fight for refugee rights. But ground has been won, as Howard's backdown shows. It is easy to forget that at the heart of the Tampa events was a violent act of force, when Australian troops stormed the Tampa to arrest more than 400 asylum seekers rescued from a sinking boat. These people were then transported under harsh conditions and dumped in makeshift prisons on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea, where many
languished for years.
There was a mood of despair in 2001 when Howard won an electoral mandate for these savage policies. But even in that dark moment, people took heart from the common decency shown by Captain Arne Rinnan and the Tampa crew. In rescuing the asylum seekers and carrying them, against government orders, to the nearest safe port they obeyed the law of the sea and
the dictates of a humane conscience. Our PM would do neither.
In the face of government intransigence, people did not give up; the detainees kept up the fight, while facing terrifying odds, and their supporters outside did all they could to support them. Howard may now be on the back foot, but his government has shown a deep commitment to its anti-refugee policies, and the struggle must continue.
[Tony Dewberry is a member of the Victorian Refugee Action Collective and the Victorian state executive of the Socialist Alliance.]