Australia and the Non-Acceptance of Refugees

David Lee, all is going to introduce our speaker today. The main thing that I
want to do is to welcome back Dr. Woolcock.
And we understand that Walter Wetzel’s is now doing OK as well. David. All
right. Thank you. Well, as the grandson of a coal miner, I am very happy to introduce
the daughter of the coal miner, Rhonda Evans, although from a different part of the world, originally from Ohio.
Rhonda is the director of the Edward A Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies,
also a senior lecturer in the Department of Government. She was previously a tenured professor
in the Department of Political Science at East Carolina University before receiving
her p._h._d from Utah’s Department of Government. She received a law degree from Pittsburgh
and was a practicing attorney for two years in Ohio. Her most
recent publication is a book with Oxford University Press, coauthored with Terry Gibbons
and called Legislating Equality The Politics of Anti-Discrimination Policy in Europe.
And she’s also published articles in journals such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, the Australian
Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Democracy.
Her most recent projects are two book manuscripts, one of which is the Australian Human Rights Commission
Bringing International Human Rights Home, and also an edited volume with Jock Collins, Contemporary
Australian and US Immigration Unsettling Transformations.
Her classes include Introduction to Australia, Australian Society
and politics and human rights and world politics. And she is also the recipient
of several teaching awards. So without further ado, Rhonda, thank you
for speaking with.
Well, thank you, David, for that lovely introduction. Thanks to Roger for the invitation to be here today
and thank you all for giving up some of your Friday afternoon for this talk. I’m grateful
for this opportunity because this is a project that’s actually been sitting on my desk for a little while. So I was able
to pick it up and dusted off and see what you think of these ideas that I’ve been chewing
on with regard to Australia’s non-acceptance of refugees. And I’ve got a PowerPoints
set of slides here, so. This quote
is from currently Prime Minister Scott Morrison, at least he
was the last time I checked the newsfeed. He’s been prime minister
since August 24th. He made these comments when he was treasurer, but privvy
previous to that role, he had been minister for immigration and border control. And so he made these
comments on a radio program operated by shock jock Ray Hadley
in Sydney. Since essentially saying that Australia is the envy of the
world and other countries would love to have Australia’s refugee policies, so the suite
of policies to which he’s referring are known internationally as the Australian model.
And I’ll just elaborate the three key elements, then I’ll unpack those a little bit more as we go along.
So the Australian model consists of boat turn backs. Sorry,
I don’t. I need better glasses here. I can’t see you when these are up and I can’t read without them on.
But I’ll do my best. Boat turn backs offshore detention and processing on
islands such as Nauru and on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Although that has since
come to an end. But there are still asylum seekers on Manus Island there just no longer detained
in an Australian detention center. So boat turn backs, offshore detention and processing
and a refusal to ever settle in Australia. Anyone who has tried to reach Australia
by boat, even if that person has been deemed to be a refugee according
to Australia’s own determination, process and standards. So
stopping the boats became a mantra of Australian politics in the last dozen years or so.
As you might imagine, this model has its critics. They contend that the
policy is neither stable nor viable, not nor a viable long term policy,
and that it’s bound to encounter some legitimacy crisis at some point in time.
And so just to go through the boat, turn backs, they use the military to actually turn
back the refugee boats that are encountered on the water. In
some instances, they actually put people into non submersible
crafts like this in order to get them back to safety. There have been a lot of issues as
to whether Australia has been into Indonesian waters or not, and on some occasions they have been.
This is just to give you an orientation geographically of where these
detention centers are located with respect to Australia. Essentially, Australia legislated to remove
the continent from its own migration zone. So you can’t actually claim asylum
in Australia and you are processed offshore in these detention centers prior to this. Detention centers
were generally located in very remote places in Western Australia or in South Australia,
although there were some around Sydney and Melbourne, but the main ones were in more remote areas.
And then this last. And this is an actual newspaper that was published
as part of the Rudd Labor government’s effort to indicate that you will not be
allowed to settle in Australia. And so these are really the three main components of the Australian
model. We could also talk about its approach to temporary protection visas, which is quite
stingy and comes under criticism. But when we talk about the Australian model, we’re generally talking about these
main policy areas. So as you might imagine, the policy has its critics
and Human Rights Watch is probably foremost among that. And so
it’s been said that the model is fiscally irresponsible, morally bankrupt and increasingly
politically unsustainable. So it’s certainly expensive.
And I’ve just got a few slides here with some information that shows you the cost of processing
asylum seekers offshore relative to processing people onshore in
Australia. And this is one of many reports that have been done not simply
by advocates and their organisations, but also by entities within the Australian
government. It’s quite an expensive process. You can also
note that the process has been quite distorted. So there have been several reports that have
talked about problems in the contract tendering process. These detention centers are operated
by private companies. Often the tendering process isn’t that transparent
and their potential conflicts of interest in the Australian National Audit Office in January 2017
released a report that documented that fact. Commentators such as Michelle Grattan,
a renowned journalist in Australia, have commented a lot on all
of the lack of transparency in this entire policy area,
especially the boat turnbacks where the government’s able to invoke the idea of military operations on the.
As a way of trying to prevent sharing information about what’s happening out there
now, there are also a lot of reports that document
the human suffering that happens in the offshore detention centers. And so
I’ve just got a few copies here of reports that have been published. And this is just the tip
of the iceberg. Australia’s own Human Rights Commission held an inquiry. Human Rights
Watch has done work. Amnesty International, The Guardian, actually obtained
a lot of files that were secret files, classified files, and released those that showed the
problems with the conditions on these detention centers. And then
recently, there was a documentary called Chasing Asylum. The director said that was her goal with
this film to actually try to shame Australia into changing its policies. And of course, shaming
countries is an important tactic for human rights advocates. Now,
these miserable conditions have actually driven some detainees to end their indefinite detentions
in these centers through suicide, as did a 23 year old Iranian man who self-immolated
in 2016. And more recently, in June of this year, another young Iranian man
took his own life on Nauru. He’d been there since 2013 and had repeatedly
asked for assistance with his deteriorating mental health conditions.
Right now, one hundred and eighty nine people still languish in the processing center on Nauru.
So these are just facts that it’s a very expensive policy, that there are a lot of distortions in how
the policy is implemented and funded and that there’s a lot of human suffering that’s inflicted.
And so we might agree with Human Rights Watch that the policy would seem to be politically unsustainable
or headed for a legitimacy crisis, as other critics have have argued, however,
rather than arguing rather than concluding that it’s politically sustainable. I
reach the contrary conclusion that it’s actually politically self-sustaining.
And I do that for three main reasons that I’ll go through here today. One
is that the policy actually actually serves the political interests
of Australia’s major parties. There’s a certain political logic in place that just
seems to make it very difficult to get them to change course. And if they don’t change course,
the policy will remain. Second, as I’ll show you here today, Australia
effectively conducted a real world policy experiment with the Australian model. And
if you look at the numbers, there is a case to be made that it worked.
It’s hard to argue against that against that case. You can, but you’ve got to get people to listen to that argument.
And that’s hard to do. And last, I think that the politics of the situation makes
it largely impervious to a lot of the tactics that human rights advocates have been using
and try to use to prod the government to make changes. And so I reached the conclusion
that this policy is going to be around for quite some time does not mean I endorse
it, but I just think it’s politically self-sustaining.
So I want to talk a little bit about the political origins and development of the model for those
of you who aren’t that familiar with it. Well, then talk about the real world policy
experience, the political dynamics that sustain it. And the reasons why see advocacy
efforts is largely futile. So we all know that the problem in the world is we have about 65
million displaced people who want to go somewhere else. And the countries that the most that are the most appealing destinations
don’t necessarily want these people. What what are we to do in this situation?
Australia is fairly lucky country geographically because it’s able to assert real control
over its borders by virtue of where it’s located and that it’s surrounded by open ocean.
In the late 1970s, early 1980s, Australia encountered its first of
experience with people arriving by boat. They were fleeing the conflicts of Southeast Asia.
I think roughly two thousand people arrived. It was perceived as a crisis. The then coalition
government, the coalition, as a conservative government of Malcolm Fraser,
responded by largely accepting these people, working to resettle them and trying
to work for a regional solution to deal with the flows that were coming
to Australia. It was quite controversial. People were worried about how it would go, and it’s generally regarded
as a real policy success for Australia. And indeed, Malcolm Fraser, until his
death, was a vociferous critic of the governments and their policies
towards asylum seekers in the last couple of decades. So what happens is that
you get a lull in the boats from the early 1980s until the early 1990s, which point you have
a Labor government in power. The Labor government decides to take a hard line and institutes
a policy of mandatory detention whereby people who arrive by boat and claim asylum
are detained until their asylum application is either accepted or if rejected,
they can be deported. That was a real problem for people who could not be deported because they were essentially stateless
persons. In nineteen ninety six, Australians went to the polls and that’s an important
election because Labor lost power to the conservative coalition led
by John Howard. It’s also important because Pauline Hanson,
who’s a populist politician in Australia, she was a fish and chip shop owner in
Queensland, and she was able to win a seat in parliament. And
she pursued rhetoric that the major parties did not engage in, largely focusing
on indigenous people and race. She said what a lot of people were thinking, but what a lot of people weren’t
saying and gave voice to that. And I don’t think in today’s world we have to imagine
too much what that sounds like. That was important because she started
to draw. She posed a threat to the major parties, to the coalition parties,
mainly at that time today, equally arguably to Labor
and the coalition parties drawing their supporters for her being a voice against
globalisation and a voice against immigration and indigenous people.
In 2001, John Howard was up for. His government was up for reelection,
was lagging. He was lagging in the polls. And a Norwegian freighter, the M.B. Tampa,
rescued about 430 some asylum seekers from a sinking boat
wants to deposit them in Australia, as would have been standard practice. And Howard uses that as an opportunity
to say we will decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come. And he’s able to win the 2001
election, throwing Labor a real curveball as to how to respond on this issue.
Howard essentially defined the issue in terms of one of border control and border
protection. The boats
eventually came to pretty much a stop and this allowed
labor when it came to power. John Howard is the second
longest serving prime minister in Australia. No prime minister served a full term since
he lost power in 2007, so he was there from 96 to 2007.
And the issue had sort of faded from Australian politics and created some space
for labor to say, look, we’ll pursue a less draconian policy. And so
labor rolls back. What had been the policy of the Howard government, which was offshore
processing, some boat turn backs and they begin to
pretty quickly see boats start arriving again in quite large numbers to
Australia carrying asylum seekers. And the coalition parties make the case that
this is exactly what we said would follow if you lifted the policies that we’d had in place and that had
really kept the boats in check. This throws Labor
into a real quandary because the boats keep increasing in number
and there are a number of stopgap measures trying to put an end to this.
The coalition as the opposition is not willing to help with that because they’re getting political
mileage out of labor floundering with this issue. The 2010 election
is run in large part on the issue of asylum seekers with Tony Abbott, the leader of
the Coalition, making stopping the boats, his policy
or one of his main policies. And the result winds
up with a hung parliament. Julia Gillard, who by then is leader of the Labor
Party, is able to forge a minority government and is able to govern
fairly effectively. But the boats continue to come in the lead up to the 2013
election. Kevin Rudd, who she had deposed in a party room spill,
resurrects himself and returns the favor to her, arguing that he
can lead Labor to reelection at 2013 or at least save the furniture
and the party goes with that. So Rudd is now up against Abbott, who wants to stop
the boats. Rudd decides he must do one better. And that is where we get that third
pillar of the Australian model, which is if you try to come to Australia by boat
and claim asylum, you will never be allowed to settle here. So we have Rudd
to thank for that. Course, Abbott actually wins that election, wins a 17 seat
majority and implements what’s called Operation Sovereign
Borders, which is essentially a beefed up boat turn back operation
that further militarizes the policy and maintains the offshore processing
and boats fairly quickly come to a stop.
And so this is what drives the politics of it, is
this effort. This idea that Australians don’t like the visual image of
boats arriving without invitation and provokes this visceral response
from voters in this idea that you have to appeal to that and come out
even tougher on border control leads us to this Australian model
now. It also gives us a pretty neat policy experience.
And so here you can see numbers of boat arrivals.
Got it by financial year in calendar year. You can see the
Fraser government’s small numbers that they were dealing with in the late 70s, early
under the Labor government that institutes mandatory detention. And then you can see the ratcheting up
around this period of time dealing with the Tampa. And during this time, Pauline Hanson, our populist
voice, was there arguing, well, we ought to turn back people at sea
before she articulated that or initially when she articulated that
other voices in mainstream politics were saying, that’s absurd, we can’t actually do that. Later, that will become part
of Australia’s policy. She actually proposed several ideas that were initially said
by others that they were beyond the pale but would become adopted. We can see
that boats virtually come to an end here. Boat arrivals after the Pacific Solution is instituted
by Howard in the wake of the M.B. Tampa affair. And then with the lifting of
the Pacific Solution, we see the numbers go up and then come back down.
And so essentially, this begets a conventional wisdom
that this suite of policies actually works. And I should add that during that time period, there were
several instances where boats carrying refugees, asylum seekers
that weren’t seaworthy, crashed onto the shores. And where there’s footage of children drowning,
people drowning. And this provoked a very strong reaction among the Australian people.
Now, quite paradoxically, it led them to to support these policies
even more as a way of preventing that sorts of the lesser of two evils. These policies prevent
that sort of suffering that they had witnessed through video footage. So just
to give you an idea of the change in attitude that occurs during this time, I’ve got two quotes
from The Australian newspaper. This one is around the 2001
election. And the Australian newspaper is not a left
leaning rag. As many of you may know, it’s a paper owned by NewsCorp.
And so there was a real reaction against the Pacific Solution. But by 2016,
the paper had changed its tune and it reflects a larger shift in public thinking.
And I have a little more elaborate quote here. The paper opined that dismantling
the Pacific Solution, Labor’s action was arguably the greatest public policy
failure in the nation’s history. It was a hard reality. The paper concluded
that any weakening in the policy would lead to a resumption of the boats.
Even some refugee advocates have have admitted that they think
that the policy actually stopped the boats and that there is some good to come from that if it prevents
boats from going down at sea.
So. These. That
creates a willingness to believe that the policy is the better of two evils.
But there are other dynamics that I think reinforce Australia’s commitment to this policy.
One is simply the imperative for reelection that governments face. Governments
in Australia have a three year term. That’s not a lot of time to get things done. Asylum
seekers are not really a pocketbook issue for Australians. When they’re confronted
with the issue, they’ll think about it. But it’s not something that governments that seek reelection
are going to lead with. It’s not something they want to devote their scarce time, resources
and political capital to. And it’s not an easy problem to describe.
And there aren’t a lot of policy solutions just sitting around there shovel ready to
use. So it’s a tricky issue. There’s an incentive for partisan power,
partisan government to try to keep this issue off of the agenda.
A second issue is that there’s been a lot of leadership instability in Australia since 2007.
We go from Rudd to Guillard to Rudd to Abbott to Turnbull
now to Morrison. And this creates risk and uncertainty in
Australian politics. And so the idea that you would put a bet on
confronting this really difficult issue seems to me quite unlikely
in the current Australian political context. Now, if we
especially when you’ve got a policy that seems to be working and that many people, not all but many
people seem to be satisfied with. So there are also reasons why the coalition
has no incentive to get rid of this policy. One is that Pauline
Hanson and minor parties and independents on the right
of the conservative Liberal Party and National Party that comprise the coalition,
those parties to their right are a threat for draining their votes. And in fact,
the number of primary votes that Labor and the Liberals and Nationals
get from voters is continually going down, which essentially means that Australian voters are increasingly
willing to give their first preference on their ballots to minor parties and independents.
And so the coalition has an interest in trying to retain those voters
who they might lose to parties on the right. In particular, to Pauline Hanson and
her party, One Nation. So to show you the importance of this issue to One Nation voters,
those voters that the coalition wants to retain. I can cite some evidence from
the 2016 Australian Electoral Survey in that survey
for those who respondents who identified with the One Nation
Party. Eighty three percent of them regarded immigration as extremely important
when deciding how to vote. By contrast, immigration was only extremely
important for 32 percent of the national voters. They’re part of the coalition.
Twenty four percent of Liberal Party voters also part of that conservative coalition,
and only twenty one percent of Labor voters. In addition,
boat turnbacks for the Liberal and National Parties. That figure was 63
percent. Are the conservative parties. For labor, it was fifty five percent. So these
voters that the coalition is trying to retain clearly have strong views
on immigration. It’s an important issue for them and they like the policy as
it is. A second reason
is that the issue is a great wedge issue for labor,
because labor is a little more divided on the issue of what to do with asylum seekers.
And so the Coalition is able to use that issue against
Labor. So within Labor, there are some pragmatists who say, look, we
just need to win power so we can implement our larger agenda and we’ll deal with the
asylum seeker issue later, if at all. There are some within Labor,
a smaller camp, to be sure, who want the party to take the moral high ground
on the issue and to confront the issue of asylum seeker policy and to change the policy.
And periodically when there’s an election and candidates make comments. These get aired in the public
and the leaders of the coalition are all over it. When that
happens, and the thing that they say is, see, you can’t trust labor
because there are people in labor who want to go back to the bad years when all of these people
arrived. And we you can trust us. We don’t give any ground.
You can’t trust labor. And you can’t trust Bill Shorten, because guess what? In this revolving
door of party leadership, maybe he won’t be party leader or prime minister. It could be
someone else who has more sympathy on this policy area. And so it’s
a great wedge issue for for the Coalition, for Labor. They’ve got to try
to maintain that unity. And for Labor, they’re also losing votes to
their left, to parties like the Green Party for people,
for voters who for whom this asylum seeker policy policy is an important issue and that
they want to see it change. So Labor is trying to talk out of both sides of its mouth.
It wants to retain anyone that it might lose to the right, because there
are some conservatives within the Labor Party historically. But it also needs to try
to retain these voters that it might lose to the left. And this is becoming an increasingly important
dynamic and will be very interesting at the next election as urban
electorates come under threat, which urban electorates that had been previously safe.
Labor seats begin to be threatened by voters who are willing
to vote for a party that aligns with their interests, not only on asylum seekers. You could also see climate
change and other issues being important to them. But asylum seekers are certainly an issue.
So it’s a wedge issue for the Coalition. It helps them retain those voters for whom this is an important
issue. And the strangest dynamic that I have seen is that all news
is good news for the coalition. Now, I began this talk by
naming or by identifying a few people who had actually killed themselves in these detention centers
at the cost overruns, at the evidence of some sort of if
not corruption, incompetence in the administration of tendering contracts. And
yet every time Peter Dutton, who is the minister for Home Affairs,
or Scott Morrison when he was minister for immigration and border control, whenever they have to front up to
the media and address these issues, they have a standard script.
And that is well, the reason we have these problems is because of Labor’s failed
policies. The people who are in detention, the people who are suffering, the people who are self-immolating
are doing that. They are there because of labor. We will never go back to
that to what the Labor, Green, Labor and Greens brought you. They always
fold the Greens in with labor as if to play it. Another seed of distrust
among those. And it’s just amazing how they’re able to just pivot from no matter how bad
the the story is. It is good news for the coalition because
they are there to protect and protect the country. So that’s
how it works for the Coalition for Labor. It’s a little different. I mean, Labor
feels burned by its experiment that it undertook when it got back into power in two thousand
in seven. And so I think there is little appetite for reforming
these policies aside from at the margins. So if you listen to Bill Shorten talk about
how their asylum policies differ from those of the coalition, they will say things about,
well, we’ll take a more humanitarian approach or we’ll be more transparent. And I always
think being transparent is the worst thing you could do, because being opaque is what allows the government
to do a lot of the things that it’s doing. It’s not getting the sort of scrutiny that it might. So to me, if they’re serious about
being transparent, they want to stay in power. I would say quit saying that that’s not a good idea. Come up with something
else, but they’ll tinker around the margins. That’s essentially what they promise.
At the same time, try to tamp down on those within the party that do want to push for
some sort of policy reform. It’s hard for me to imagine a first term Labor
government doing anything meaningful on asylum seeker policy, especially since boats
have not been reaching and have not been intercepted by Australian
ships and have been able to be turned back effectively. I can’t see why they would want to
add more people into immigration detention at all.
So this brings me to the last point. Then what about the refugee advocates?
And what are the prospects for success here? And I think it depends
on the policy target that they’re choosing. If
they’re choosing the suite of policies that form this Australian model, then I I think it’s tough.
It’ll be tough for them because there is this belief that the policy works and
it prevents a greater evil of people dying at sea. There is
an argument to be made that boat turnbacks are not what created that dramatic
drop in the number of boat arrivals. There is an argument that is pretty well documented
that it was actually Kevin Rudd’s vow that if you come here by boat and seek asylum, you’ll never
be permitted to settle in Australia. That that is what actually stopped
boat arrivals. So there is a little room to perhaps give on boat on on
boat turnbacks to convince a government possibly to give that up. I don’t think a government would be for turning
on that policy at all. But there’s an argument that that might work. In fact, one
of the people making this argument is a former secretary of the Immigration Department,
and he was very of one of his articles, blog posts. He’s very upset that the Canberra press gallery
totally ignored this report that showed that it was not the
boat turnbacks, but rather the fact that you could never settle here that was effective,
which for him created room to stop the boat turnbacks. Instead, the Canberra press gallery was too
consumed with polls and the leadership horse race in these sorts of things, which I think
makes the point that these sorts of arguments are just too detailed
and sophisticated too to leverage politically if you are one of the governing
parties that wants to pursue change. How do you get people to tune in enough to understand these things
about this issue, particularly when there are so many other important issues like the royal commission
into banks, like stagnating wages, so many other higher
order issues? I think that the the
bigger problem that the advocates face is I’ve got a list
here of the political tactics that human rights advocates can use. They can try
to redefine a problem. They can use information to try to get
a government to change a policy or engage in symbolic politics, accountability, politics,
leverage politics. When I teach my human rights class, we talk about all of these tactics.
The advocates can use. The problem that I see is whenever they try to redefine the
problem, they always talk about the millions of people who are displaced in the world and who
need somewhere to go. And I think that immediately tells people who are worried about that,
people coming to Australia that, well, my goodness, we don’t want people coming here. This is an insoluble
problem. Maybe we should just leave the status quo policy in
place. They want to shift it in that way. And I think that that undermines
what they’re what they’re trying to do. There’s also this idea of of evidence based
policy, advocacy and information. But there have literally been dozens
of reports documenting the problems in the human suffering. And none of those
gets enough traction to bust through this major party consensus. And
so I don’t see that working. And in a sense, there’s a bit of empathy fatigue. I think
when these stories come to light, I just heard on a podcast yesterday of,
well, we need to send a delegation to Nauru to document the problem. And I thought, well, we are the problems and very
well documented. It’s sort of the next step that can’t seem to get traction.
The symbolic politics, you know, there have been moments where particular children have
been singled out as suffering. And even those moments where we might think that you could humanize
the people who are suffering here and garner some sort of momentum, just
don’t don’t seem to last more than a single news cycle, which is about an hour, I
guess, in today’s media landscape, accountability, politics, holding a government
account for its policies, in particular as they relate to international human rights law.
Australia’s been dragged before the Human Rights Council and commission and treaty bodies at the UN
numerous times and criticised and some governments like that of John Howard
where that as a badge of honor, you’re not going to lose any votes on the right by saying
that you don’t care what they think in Geneva or in New York about your policies
for border defense. So I think in terms of the the problem definition, the
government is it is in the driver’s seat in terms of defining the problem as one of.
Border control, border protection. If you read newspaper articles about asylum
seekers, the government’s representatives are always quoted. Advocates are often quoted,
if at all, later in the piece, they are setting the framework and the
alternative ways of defining the problem in terms of human suffering or this larger global
problem don’t seem to make any traction in terms of leverage. There doesn’t
really seem to be any leverage against the Australian government to get it to change its policies.
Usually for leverage you need an international institution like the UN to exercise moral
leverage or a benefactor. While the US is not going to call Australia
out on its policies, particularly under the current US administration, I mean this is a problem
that Western countries around the world are grappling with. And so
essentially we have a really difficult setting in which
to advocate for this reason. There is some division among human rights advocates
in Australia as to what is the proper approach. Some have said, look, we need to stop targeting the Australian
model as a whole and instead try to deal with the people
who are remaining on Manus Island and who are remaining in the immigration detention center
at Nauru. How can we deal with them? New Zealand has offered
to take many of these people. However, the government of Turnbull
and now Morrison refused to send and Abbott refused to send
these folks to New Zealand because they worry that these people will simply cross
the Tasman through the open migration channel that exists between New Zealand and
Australia. And this idea that they will never be allowed to settle in Australia
is seen as you can’t even make a concession on that.
It used to be in the Howard era, there were a few moderates in the Liberal Party that would sort of push Howard a
little bit to lighten up the policy’s implementation. But those moderates are largely gone
and those that remain don’t speak up very much. The parties largely moved to the right
and also by keeping these people in offshore detention. You sort of isolate them
in the Howard era and the mid 2000s. Some of those people who arrived were actually resettled
in agricultural areas. Asylum seekers were resettled there and began working and became part of the community.
And so you actually had some rural constituencies, members of parliament, advocating on their behalf
because their communities had gotten to know these people and understood the issues. But
the offshore processing largely removes that because these people are very far away. They’re not in
the Australian community.
It’s interesting if you look back at the Fraser era in the late 70s when they were
first confronted with the issue of boat arrivals. There’s a wonderful book I’d recommend to you if you’re interested
in this issue area by Claire Higgins. It’s a 2017 book and she
looks at how the Fraser government responded to that. And what’s so compelling about her
book is that she finds that all of the issues that are on
part of the Australian model today were given to the government, the Fraser government,
and said here are policy. They were among the policy options presented to the government.
And the Fraser government said, well, we can’t do that or we won’t do that, will
we’ll do something else. And actually saw its its approach to receiving
these people as a badge of honor on the international stage.
And I think that speaks volumes about the change in Australian political
culture. And really what we’re seeing around the world is that there is this
view that societies won’t wear that anymore. This hyper competitiveness between the parties
or this tribalism, all of these political dynamics that seem to reinforce
these more commitment to these more draconian policies and a fear of the risk of
having to explain policy choices to people that maybe we should try something
else. And I really can’t fault politicians who seek to stay in power for charting a more
conservative course on that front. So to wrap
up, you were looking for an optimistic feel good talk. This certainly wasn’t it, to kick
off your weekend. But, you know, you’re one of the things that I often think about is that I read a
lot in the news about these these particular policy issues is it seems there’s so much to
work with here to try to get a government to change the policies. And yet it
doesn’t seem to change. And so what I’ve tried to do in this paper is to unpack the
dynamics that are reinforcing this status quo and I think
are impediments to to the sort of change that many people in Australia and particularly
human rights advocates would like to see. And with that, I’ll I’ll wrap up. So there’s
plenty of time for questions.