How far we've come: the unending dilemma of boats

Hi,

I've been away for a while contesting an election to edit the Sydney Uni newspaper Honi Soit. I'm thrilled that all our hard work paid off, and I'll be one of the paper's editors in 2012.

I also edited this week's Queer Honi, which you can pick up on campus or read online at honisoit.com - including my thoughts on laws which allow schools to expel gay students. More regular updates will follow.

:) Michael

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This is a piece which was published in the August 31 edition of Honi Soit and includes my interviews with Fairfax journalist David Marr and former immigration minister Philip Ruddock:

On the 24th of August 2001, a small, wooden fishing boat carrying 438 asylum seekers – the Palapa – became stranded in international waters approximately 140 kilometres north of Christmas Island. Australia’s response marked the beginning of an ongoing battle against a perceived threat, creating a debate that has been oftentimes loud, and always ugly.

Exactly ten years on, journalist and author David Marr does not wish to let that moment in our history escape the national consciousness.  “Australia left that boat out for 24 hours, knowing that it needed rescue, knowing that it was dead in the water, knowing that there were people jumping up on the deck desperately trying to attract the attention of a coastguard plane that twice flew over the boat.”

“Australia did not do what it should have done, which is to call for any ship in the vicinity to come and help these people - because a decision had been taken in Canberra that these people, on that boat, would not be allowed in to Australia.”

Perhaps better than anyone, Marr is able to articulate with great sensibility the realities faced by a battered old fishing boat manned by an ill-equipped crew in the middle of the Indian Ocean. “That night there was a huge storm. They survived it by a miracle. The following morning somebody on the boat painted ‘SOS’ on some white scarves using engine oil: they put them on the roof, and when the coastguard plane came back the next morning, there was now an indisputable legal obligation on Australia to order the rescue of that boat.”

The vessel which would come to the rescue was a Norwegian cargo ship, the MV Tampa. Its captain, Arne Rinnan, was then barred from entering Australian territorial waters to deposit those whose lives he had saved. The Australian government attempted to organise for Indonesia or even Norway to take them. “When we asked for food and medicine for the refugees,” said Captain Rinnan, “the Australians sent commando troops on board.” They were armed, and they were tasked with preventing the boat reaching Christmas Island. A full eight days later, having refused to back down, the Government arranged for a navy vessel to collect the asylum seekers and take them to Nauru. It was the dawn of the Pacific Solution.

One of the architects of that policy was the then immigration minister, Philip Ruddock. He tells a different story of that final week of August 2001.  “I have absolutely no idea whether we even knew that [the Palapa] had floundered. It was in Indonesian waters, it wasn’t in Australian waters.” He says he would be ‘very surprised’ if an Australian aircraft had flown over the stricken ship. Once on board the Tampa, Rinnan’s logical move would be to continue to the Indonesian port of Merak to which he was already en route.

“The reason this became an issue is because those people who were rescued said ‘we don’t want you to go to Indonesia, we want you to go to Australia’,” says Ruddock. “And the captain succumbed to duress.” But when Australian officials denied permission for the ship to dock at Christmas Island, our neighbour changed its tune. “The Indonesians came to the view that if it was good enough for Australia to say they wouldn’t have them, [Indonesia] wouldn’t have them either.”

Marr has set out the events in his 2003 book, Dark Victory, with multiple sources - including rescue officials and the official CMI report - evidencing that Australia knew the Palapa was stricken. “Why else would we be knocking on Indonesia’s door trying to get them to co-ordinate the rescue?”

Perhaps it seems petty to dwell upon a series of maritime unfoldings more than a decade past. But those months before the federal election are crammed with significant details now oft blended in to history, such as the communication failures which gave rise to the ‘children overboard’ affair. It demonstrates that while governments push and pull the levers with an eye on the latest Newspoll, out at the coalface those decisions have very real, often very harsh consequences for passengers, crew and our maritime forces.

“From the moment of the stopping of the Tampa, the new policy was put in place of attempting to force boats to return to Indonesia,” says Marr. “That’s a tremendously dangerous operation. The Navy hates those operations, because the Navy knows what happens: people sabotage their boats to compel rescue. That’s what happens. That’s why all those people were in the water, that’s why people drowned, that’s why Australian military personnel were put at risk.”

A strong narrative history has developed over the last decade positing that Howard’s policy stopped the boats; and that when it was lessened under Kevin Rudd, the onslaught resumed. There is a valid principle here: that the toughness or softness of Australia’s position does alter the number of arrivals. For a while, many sought to deny this simple logic.

But the picture is also infinitely more complex. Marr notes that it was not chiefly the threat of being parked on Nauru which reduced the boats: rather, it was the practice of turning boats back to Indonesia, and sending their hopeful, desperate human cargo back to where they came from.

“The Pacific Solution wasn’t irrelevant, but it wasn’t really what killed the trade. [It] was just an extremely expensive way of warehousing the people who did get through the blockade. It cost about $600,000 a head for the Pacific Solution. You’ve got to understand that money is no object in this area, when it comes to blocking and punishing refugees who come here by boat.”

The Gillard government hopes that its latest plan, which allows us to send 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia, will replicate this effect. It in fact hopes that it will not have to send anywhere near 800; that the boats will stop on account of people smugglers being unable to promise entry to Australia. To that end, the Government is prepared to sacrifice some – the families who will be tossed back in to limbo in Malaysia – to bring about a politically expedient outcome.

The concern for Gillard must be that 800 is a fairly small quota to fill before she is back to the drawing board. People smugglers are more than happy to lie to a few prospective customers. There appears to be a new option on the table: reopening Manus Island on Papua New Guinea. But it is seriously unlikely – and by precedent unthinkable – that anybody processed on Manus Island would not end up in Australia eventually. So what is the point of it all?

For the Labor Party, the goal might just be to take the issue off page one. Labor loses when boats arrive. It would be a truly impressive vanishing act for it to be off the agenda at the 2013 election. “A determined and resourceful opposition will make sure that is not the case,” replies Marr. “Whipping up race fears over boat people is a principle mechanism by which the Opposition intends to undermine the Government. They are playing race politics at a very brutal domestic level, and they know it.”

Polling has indicated that a steady 30-35% of Australians do not want to accept any asylum seekers who arrive by boat. If you work at it, says Marr, you can whip it up to almost double, as was the case during the height of the Tampa panic. And the question is constantly posed, in intellectual forums and over dining room tables: would boat people be equally demonised if they were white?

“There’s a chorus of commentators in the press who cry that it’s completely, outrageously wrong to suggest that this is about race. But it is about race. There’s very good polling material to show that the group in Australia who is most troubled by boats is the group who remains troubled by immigrants coming to this country from the Middle East and Asia. In other words, it’s the old white Australia sentiment in the modern day.”

“It cost about $600,000 a head for the Pacific Solution. You’ve got to understand that money is no object in this area, when it comes to blocking and punishing refugees who come here by boat.”

Ruddock doesn’t particularly want to countenance the darker forces behind Australia’s fears. He is a relentless yet admirable pragmatist, who speaks the language of orderly process and border protection, and practises the art of the possible.

“The opinion polling makes it very clear,” he says. “Multiculturalism and immigration decline in terms of broad public acceptability when borders are being administered laxly. One of the things that occurred under me was that the immigration program grew with very strong public support, and that happened between 1997 and 2007.” He suggests that the recent ‘big Australia’ debate may have unearthed a very different sentiment were Australians not unhappy about the integrity of their borders.

“That does produce a degree of anxiety within the Australian community which is quite negative to social cohesion”.  It’s quite a simple compromise: be tough on boat people and win the tolerance of multiculturalism and migration. But is that a necessary sacrifice? Not according to Marr.  “There is also a very decent Australia,” he says optimistically. “When you ask people, ‘what do you want to do with boat people?’, you find about 45 percent of people say ‘let them in and let’s assess their claim’, versus 30-35 per cent who say send ‘them out to sea and we don’t care if they drown’. So the politicians in this country are choosing which constituents to play to.”

Indeed, The Sydney Morning Herald produced an extensive survey only two weeks ago revealing that 53 percent of Australians want all asylum seekers arriving by boat to be processed in Australia. 28 percent want them to be housed in another country, while 15 percent think the boats should be sent back out to sea.

There has been, and continues to be, a severe mismatch between the sentiment outlined in polling, and the decisions taken in Canberra. Kevin Rudd was perhaps our best - and only - chance at shifting the paradigm. Marr, despite certain misgivings and a now very personal rift, gives credit where it is due.

“Rudd was more compassionate. Even the night before he was shoved out the window, he was still saying he would be forced to the extreme right-wing position on refugees. He put in place while he was Prime Minister a much more decent policy - and the opposition signed off on it. It was, at least briefly, a bi-partisan policy before new leadership of the opposition saw new political opportunities.”

But when a small increase of boat arrivals in early 2010 threatened to destabilise an increasingly fragile government, Rudd reacted defensively and announced a processing suspension for Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum applicants. The spectre of another 2001 election loomed, and that prospect frightens the ALP more than any Australian fears dark faces on leaky boats.

“I interpreted what he said as saying that he could not face down the worst instincts of Australia on this issue - he couldn’t do it. And my view of Julia Gillard is that she shares many of those worst instincts of Australia. She has no sympathy for these people. She believes Australia has the right to take this exceptional position. She is not going to spend any political capital whatsoever in trying to calm this situation down.”

The situation is not dissimilar to the panic which engulfed Australia during the Tampa period. I ask Ruddock whether his government shoulders responsibility for creating such a prolonged, disproportionate and touchy issue.

“It only became divisive and contentious because of the way in which the Labor Party flip-flopped in relation to supporting the measures that the government took,” he says. “There wouldn’t have been a political issue if these people [aboard the Tampa] hadn’t...attempted to put the captain under duress. The idea that this was in some way fabricated by the Howard Government...is fanficul. These were legitimate responses to circumstances that the Government found faced them.”

Those circumstances were essentially the opening of the floodgates.

“The numbers in the pipeline which we were being advised would come by boat through Indonesia and Malaysia, or places like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, was in excess of 10,000.” He adds that to expect those numbers not to increase to European levels would have been naive.

“I know that there are something like 20 million people who had been found to be refugees in the world. Australia is not able to take 20 million people for resettlement. In essence, Australia has to make choices. I believe the way in which we should deal with these matters is to focus upon those who need help most, rather than those who have the money to pay somebody else to put them at the front of the queue.”

The very notion of a queue is of course hotly contested. While there is some semblance of order in the United Nations refugee camps dotted across the Earth, one does not have to be at a camp to be a refugee. And Australia is obliged to take them. “The conventions allow refugees to travel by land, by sea and by air – always,” says Marr. “The notion that it is irregular or unjust for refugees to come to Australia by sea is a very strange judgment. It’s a judgment that is being reinforced by 20 or 30 years of politics.”

“Would that the refugee system was orderly – it’s not, it’s disorderly. Would that it were fair – it’s not, it’s unfair. It would be great if there was a queue in the refugee world - there is no queue, it is confusion out there. But the other day, some pollsters asked people, ‘do you think they’re queue jumpers?’ And the reply of 88% of the respondents was yes they are, they’re queue jumpers.”

There is a hint of sadness from Marr in those words. He can still be shocked, he says, by the callousness and the ignorance. Asked to nominate a single memory which still prompts dismay, he recalls a statement given by John Howard in that spring of 2001.

“He said it was time to stop Australia’s humanitarian instincts being taken advantage of - as he left a boatload of shipwreck survivors to bake in the tropical sun, on a cargo boat, off Christmas Island. Just left them there to bake until he could occupy the ship with a commando army.”

How far we’ve come.

The Malaysian Solution - how it happened and why it matters

This was supposed to be the Eureka moment for the
Government. After a year of policy contortion - including
ill-fated flirtation with East Timor and Papua New Guinea -
finally an entente, a deal, a solution.

Whatever your perspective on the refugee situation, it can
hardly be denied that a ‘solution’ is needed. Because in
politics, the perception is the reality. And as John Howard
recently observed in a rare interview, Australians perceive
that their borders are under siege.

To that end, the Government has signed an agreement to
send up to 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia, where they
will remain until their refugee status is determined and
subsequent resettlement arranged. As Julia Gillard has
stressed, their claims will not be prioritised – they will be
at the back of the “queue”.

Malaysia is strategically significant because the majority
of boat arrivals pass through there before continuing to
Australia. Almost 100,000 linger under the table awaiting
resettlement, unable to work legally and living in squalor.

The reasons to seek another way out are manifold. Fear
of being arrested and detained, and possibly subjected to
abuse including caning, motivates some. Others simply tire
of the arduous, interminable wait, which can be decades.

It should be noted that the asylum seekers Australia
sends to Malaysia will have it better than the rest, at
least according to the plan. They will be allowed to work,
will have basic living expenses paid for by the Australian
government, and will not be caned as per Malaysian law.
Whether that eventuates is anyone’s guess.

The intent of the policy is to dissuade, not punish.
Logic dictates that nobody will board a boat bound for
Australia when they will only end up back in Malaysia. The
Government hopes that it will not end up responsible for
the welfare of 800 asylum seekers on the streets of Kuala
Lumpur, but that the trickle will dry up immediately.

The disincentive is borrowed from the Pacific Solution
– deny the prospect of entry in to Australia, and the
boats will stop. But already there are factors poised to
derail that outcome.

The Government is tentatively committed to not sending
unaccompanied minors to Malaysia, although that resolve
is now being tested. Aboard the first boat to arrive under
the terms of this agreement were, at the time of writing,
18 people claiming to be under 18 years of age. What’s the
immigration minister, Chris Bowen, to do?

The initial answer appears to be: bluster. The Government
is busy reiterating the importance of not having a blanket
exemption for minors, because people smugglers would
then clog the boats with children. Meanwhile, there will
be continuing “assessment” of the claimants’ age.

The reciprocal part of the deal will see Australia take 4000
refugees currently awaiting resettlement in Malaysia.
This has given rise to the popular characterisation of the
policy as a “people swap”, and Opposition immigration
spokesman Scott Morrison’s claims that we are getting a raw
deal. But it’s also the part of the agreement that has satiated
many on the Left, including within the ALP.

We may never send anywhere near 800 back to Malaysia,
which would be a good thing. If cameras could permeate
the walls of the Phosphate Hill detention centre, they would
capture a new level of desperation. They would help us
understand how it feels to spend $55,000 securing an escape
for your family, only to be told you will be shunted back to
where you came from.

The Malaysia policy matters because it is likely to work. The
news will quickly spread amongst the refugee communities
and people smugglers of the region, as it did last time when
arrivals were taken to Nauru. Already rumours suggest
other countries such as New Zealand are being favoured
as potential destinations for asylum seekers willing to
take the risk.

But it matters more broadly because of how it works and
what that says about us, because the Malaysia Solution
creates sacrificial lambs – these initial boatloads who will be
mercilessly turned away in order to establish a deterrent. It
is to these confused and crying families that Australia points
and says ‘don’t try it’.

If that message is successful, it will have two important
implications for the Australian policy. Firstly, it will entrench
the practice of sending boat arrivals elsewhere as the only
way to deal with the problem. Other countries may be used
instead, if a regional structure ever manifests, but it will be a
long time before an Australian government puts its hand up
to process people onshore.

Secondly, it will reinforce within the Labor Party the theory
that being tough on asylum seekers is their only plausible
political option. The Left faction has largely shut up about
the Malaysia Solution because at least, if it works, it will
take the issue off the six o’clock news and off the talkback
stations – and that is an imperative all of Labor is agreed
upon. When boats are an issue, Labor loses.

The international community will don the same raised
eyebrows it has in the past, wondering what all the fuss
is about. The deal was originally announced in May
but concluded in late July, the delay mostly due to the
Government’s desire to get the UNHCR’s approval.

In a media release, the agency reminded us of its preference
to have all arrivals processed on the Australian mainland. But it also noted that discouraging dangerous sea journeys
was a positive humanitarian outcome. It will monitor
the implementation of the agreement closely, no doubt
confused as to why such a rich, peaceful country would feel
the need to act in this way.

If it all feels like history repeating, that’s not a surprise. The
leaky boat is our ultimate political saga, one that refuses
to go away. Even if you think there’s no problem, even if
you don’t care, even if you just don’t want to talk about it
anymore – you will have to.

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Originally published in Honi Soit, 10 August 2011

Some thoughts on addiction

It's all there in the reportage. Drugs and alcohol. Was there ever a more commonplace tautology? You'll find it amongst the exhortations of doctors, scientists, commentators and politicians. But that nonsensical couplet says more about our collective relationship with the bottle than any properly formulated sentence, any government advertisement, any academic preachment.

It is, of course, more than just a drug. It is the drug of choice for humankind, one so ubiquitous and entwined in the social fabric that it is considered abnormal - even suspicious - to reject it. It is a drug which we advertise, flaunt, encourage, eulogize, celebrate, worship. 


We pour another glass for each other. Go on - finish it off. We tell stories with that special line - I was so drunk - always said with a naughty, knowing smile. As young people we dial it up to eleven, empyting bottles and lumpy bags in to friends' mouths, performing tricks with straws and funnels and hosepipes, all to a chorus of slurry, singsong encouragement.

We're all enablers, really, until the point where it would be unthinkable to enable any more.

At the end of this cruel week a 27-year-old singer and a 40-year-old writer are dead. Both were flooded with talent before they were flooded with booze. Both progressed assuredly and inevitably to the harder stuff, the stuff of jittery injections and burning nostrils.

Amy Winehouse and Sean Hoare continued a dismaying tradition of the premature destruction of musicians and writers - lost to the achilles heel of the creative class. 

And both, tragically, were nudged and egged toward this end by circumstances masquerading as opportunities. The cold edge of fame exacerbated, not initiated, Winehouse's afflictions as much as her hopeless and intractable love for Blake Fiedler-Civil. The already sizeable ranks of the "27 Club" tell us all we need to know about the commonality of this sad parable among creative geniuses.

Dispatched to the clubs of London and Ibiza to ingratiate himself with such types was Hoare, entertainment reporter for News of the World and before that The Sun. It was the company paycheque which secured the mountains of cocaine and the rivers of liquor, far too much and too frequent for the human body to withstand. But it was the only way - or at least the easiest way - to get the scoop. 


This tribute at The Guardian gives great insight in to the sloshy reality between the lines. The Winehouse eulogies are everywhere, perhaps none more poignantly put than Russell Brand's.


It's the sort of speech I hope I'll never have to give, thoughts I hope I'll never have to entertain. But I have the great pleasure of knowing some brilliant, complicated, troubled people who show all the haunting signs of addiction waiting in the wings. And it's a bottle that's certainly not out of my reach either.

Whitney Houston once declared herself too rich to do crack, perhaps true in the abstract but not in reality. There is no such thing as too rich for addiction, nor too smart, too grounded, too promising. Indeed it may feast upon those very attributes.

Hating Rupert Murdoch

Time, I think, for a confession. One that is both scandalous and obscene. 

And perched on a bar stool in Pyrmont, on this stormy, ominous, pensive night, perhaps it is the perfect time to finally admit it – I don't hate Rupert Murdoch.

Oh, how I've tried. I've pictured him maniacally running over kittens in a silver Range Rover. I've imagined him drinking children's blood, bathing in money, bellowing directives to the president from an underground lair.

And it's certainly not a result of my media degree, which has spent the last three-and-a-half years trying to convince me that Murdoch is – if not Satan himself – then at least the nearest thing to evil incarnate we'll ever know.

In the UK, News of the World has been naughty, incorrigible, distasteful and yes, illegal. Those directly involved have already paid a high price: their newspaper no longer exists. At News International, heads are already rolling and will continue to do so. It's all quite macabre, quite fascinating, inviting sizeable schadenfreude for journalists from other newsrooms.

And of course the whole affair has galvanised the perpetually-underlying anger and fear aimed at News Corporation: that it owns too much, that it influences too much, that it may have infected the US or Australia with similarly unscrupulous practices.

The latter remains to be seen, but has little to do with why most people hate Murdoch. In Australia, it seems to be more about our obsessive degradation of anyone deemed too successful – a tall poppy. It's not just the rich: we don't hate Ian Thorpe or Hugh Jackman. Nor do we hate Gina Reinhart or Andrew Forrest, for the most part.

It hasn't helped that he "left" us to become an American. Australians don't seem to mind exporting talent to the big smoke as long as they pay their dues and return every so often, lavishing us with platitudes about never forgetting where they came from, still calling Australia home. Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman can be as ostentatiously wealthy and permanently absent as they like and still be adored.

But Murdoch is not just rich – he's also deemed to be powerful. And that, in Australian society, has always been a debilitating combination. We can accept riches accumulated through feat or spectacle, but not through proficiency and cunning - especially not when the entities at play are ones we actually interact with: not rocks in the ground but our newspapers and television.

Murdoch is afforded a lot more power in the imagination of the community than he actually has. He is not sitting there in his bunker deviously line-editing The Wall Street Journal or The Daily Telegraph. He is not on the phone to two-bit reporters for The Australian or The Sun dictating how to interpret the day's events.

News Corp presides over a conservative media empire, for the most part. It's not to my taste, but if we're OK with centre-left papers such as The Guardian (which did the lion's share of investigation in to News of the World) or The Age, then we have to tolerate the corollary.

A caveat: FOX News is an abomination. A truly tacky, vile affair. But it sits within the media marketplace and commands a significant, loyal audience. It would be a problem if tens of millions of Americans watched FOX and believed it was genuinely neutral, unbiased coverage: but that seems unlikely. People watch FOX for the same reason people read The Guardian.

And let us remember that Rupert Murdoch saved newspapers. In the 1980s he bought up papers which were struggling financially and turned them in to efficient, profitable, reputable enterprises. We probably would not have The Times (of London) or The Sunday Times today otherwise. Ditto the New York Post and the Chicago Sun-Times, or indeed the Village Voice and Boston Herald American.

He may yet save newspapers again. The Daily, his iPad only newspaper, is still in its infancy and although News Corp is coy about subscriber figures, it is actively tackling the challenge of making people pay for online content.

When News Corp put The Times behind a paywall a year ago, visitors dropped somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent. But according to a Guardian report in March, over 79,000 now pay their two pounds a week to subscribe to The Times online. That's in addition to the 100,000 or so who get free access courtesy of their print subscription.

The point is that times change, and someone will have to work out a way of changing consumers' general antipathy to paying for online content. News Corp has led the way, bravely, by backing the quality of its product offering, wagering that people will pay the low asking price.

It's too early to make a call on the outcome of that experiment, but the pioneering spirit seems clear. At 80, only Murdoch is committed to pushing hard in to the new era, to make news profitable again in the 21st century.

So yes, it's all about the money. But if we're going to sneer at Murdoch's success, and pray as we crassly, habitually do for the fall of the mighty, then we should recognise the full implications.

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Originally published in ABC's The Drum, 20 July 2011

This time, it's here to stay

This blog is intended to be a repository for my published writing, as well as some unpublished compulsions and whims. 

Hopefully this time around I'll actually pursue the full potential of the technology rather than forgetting about it next week.

MK.