Australia's opposition is using the recent boat tragedy to urge a return to tough asylum policies, writes PADRAIG COLLINSin Sydney
CHRISTMAS STAMPS feature Christmas Island every year, showing Santa in a tropical paradise. But the brutal reality is that the island – 2,650km northwest of Western Australia’s capital Perth – is no paradise. It is home to overcrowded detention centres, holding twice as many people as those living freely.
The death toll from the recent sinking of an asylum-seeker boat on the island’s jagged cliffs has risen to 50. Among the survivors are three orphaned children. Two of the children are cousins and have extended family among the group of 42 survivors. The third boy has no relatives among the survivors and, under Australian law, immigration minister Chris Bowen is now his legal guardian.
A recent Amnesty International report was scathing of conditions on the island. “What was most confronting was the sheer number of individuals who had clearly been suffering both physically and psychologically from the conditions of prolonged detention. Many had been detained for over a year, and incidents of self-harm and suicide attempts were visibly on the rise,” the report said.
Julia Gillard, prime minister of Australia’s minority Labor government, cancelled her holiday in the wake of the tragedy. She invited “the opposition, the Greens and the Independent members of parliament to work with the government and the relevant agencies for managing the response to this incident”.
The opposition spurned her offer. Despite initially saying they would not politicise the issue, the Liberal Party was soon using the death of innocents to do just that.
Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott used the disaster to call for a return to the asylum-seeker policies used under John Howard in the last Liberal-National coalition government.
“We stopped the boats before, we can stop the boats again if we put the right policies in place,” said Abbott. “Obviously there’s far less capacity for tragedy if there are far fewer boats and far fewer people coming in them . . . In the last five years of the Howard government’s life, we had three boats a year, not three a week.”
While Abbott is correct in the basic figures of recent boat arrivals, he neglects to mention the 350 asylum seekers who died when the Siev X boat sank in 2001 when the Liberals were in power.
He also did not mention that there are 12 million displaced people around the world. The 90 or so people on the Christmas Island boat were Kurds.
Earlier on the same day as the disaster, the Sydney Morning Heraldnewspaper published a leaked US embassy cable which quoted a "key Liberal party strategist" gloating about the Labor government's difficulties over asylum seekers. "The more boats that come the better," the unnamed person said, adding it was "fantastic" for the Liberals.
The American embassy cable writer had a firm grasp of just how few refugees are coming to Australia, though. “In terms of overall migration, the surge in asylum seekers is a drop in the ocean,” the cable said.
Pamela Curr of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre agrees. "Because of our geography our problem is minuscule," she told The Irish Times.
“Half a million Sudanese poured across the Egyptian border this month, and 20-30,000 Burmese poured across the Thai border. Australia got around 5,000 [asylum seekers] this year, but this is an extraordinary year. Up until this year we had an average, since 1976 when the first Vietnamese boat arrived, of receiving 337 each year.”
The Australian people’s shock and horror at the desperate pictures from the Christmas Island disaster led to an outpouring of sympathy. But political opportunism and shrill commentary will probably see public opinion return to the default position of mistrusting those who arrive by boat.
“Some of us have thought it [mistrust of boat people] goes back to the time when we arrived,” said Curr. “We did not ask permission to land in this country. For over 100 years we denied that there was anybody here. We called this Terra Nullius (empty land). We denied that we’d taken it from anyone.
“You’ve also got to look at the fact that we are an island nation. The biggest island in the world, but still an island nation with no land borders. . . . We live in glorious isolation, so we will never experience people pouring across our borders in the way they do in Europe. But there is a hysteria about the boats and it is now toxic politically,” she said.