BY MARY CROCK
Australia has had a strange love-hate relationship with refugees for as long as anyone can remember. We have accepted more than 650,000 refugees as migrants since World War II, as part of the "planned" program pursued to build Australia as a nation.
During the last 10 years, however, we have spent more money than we would care to count to make sure that refugees coming without an invitation are kept out of the country. The "Tampa Affair" and its "Pacific Solution" aftermath are the most recent and striking examples of a quite deeply embedded culture of national defensiveness that turns us in on ourselves to the point of meanness.
We have justified the actions taken in August and September 2001 on so many grounds: the asylum seekers rescued by Captain Rinan and his crew were the responsibility of Norway, or of Indonesia — not Australia; the rescuees were "queue-jumpers" or at best "secondary movement" refugees who had protection somewhere else and were coming to Australia to seek a preferred immigration outcome; they could have been terrorists; they were an affront to Australia's sovereign right to determine which non-citizens should enter or remain in the country.
After two years, the discourse on refugees in Australia has become a little more sophisticated. More people seem to be aware of the legal frameworks governing both the identification of refugees and the protection to which these people are entitled as a matter of law.
However, while the community at large seems to be more evenly divided on the subject than was the case in August, 2001, most are still in favour of the government's harsh anti-asylum seeker measures.
As I passed the Tampa docked in Sydney last weekend, with its cavernous hold open and taking in fresh cargo loads, I could not but reflect on the real cost of the sorry affair for Australia.
I have never thought of Australians as people enamoured of queues. If the old myths hold any truth, our larrikin heritage would have us favour the struggling, bedraggled masses.
We have been a people faithful to family. Yet we accept without murmur policies that deny recognised refugees the right to bring their families into this country by regular means. Let's not forget that the only reason many of the 433 Tampa asylum seekers were on their leaky boat last August was because people smugglers offered the only hope of reunion with the fathers and sons already in Australia.
Even today there remain families split by this terrible policy — made worse by laws that deny women and children what is known as "derivative" refugee status. This means that separated families can end up with some members — typically the men — recognised as refugees, while the women and children are denied this protective status. Women and children so often lack the political profiles necessary to meet the restrictive terms of the international legal definition of refugee.
The second anniversary of the Tampa Affair will pass with no less than 89 children languishing in the soulless wasteland of the Nauru camps. Why does their plight not move us to action? How many Australians know or care about the women, children and men languishing in detention in Australia?
The financial cost of the Tampa Affair and Pacific Solution will exceed a billion dollars. In the era of the "war on terror", money seems to be no object even though this expenditure will do absolutely nothing to improve Australia's national security — or international standing.
The human cost of the affair is incalculable. If we are literally sending people mad, it seems we are also developing something of a national madness, to the extent that we are constructing all sorts of national fantasies to mask the facts and to hide the cruelties being perpetrated in our name.
Australia would not be the nation it is without the many thousands of refugees it has taken in and offered a new life. We need to acknowledge this fact with a refugee and asylum seeker policy that abandons the rhetoric of fear and xenophobia and provides dignity, justice and a real future for the dispossessed who seek our protection. We also need a policy to restore Australia's pride in itself as an humanitarian nation.
[Mary Crock is a lecturer in law at Sydney University, and has authored books on refugee law.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 27, 2003.
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