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.
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