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Australia's Refugee and Asylum Policies

Published 16 Nov 2016

At Glover Cottages on 15 November 2016, Arja Keski-Nummi outlined Australia’s refugee and asylum policies in an international context. Former head of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division of the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Arja has been a senior adviser to immigration ministers in both Hawke and Keating governments.

Arja observed that encouraged by fear and petty party politics, Australians currently have a very narrow and short-term view of refugee policy. It used to be much more humanitarian. In the face of a diaspora of refugees from Vietnam following the fall of Saigon in 1975, then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser recognised our obligations under the Refugee Convention and played a key role in establishing a humane Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese refugees. Mick Young, Ian McFee and other ministers went around explaining the policy in Australia, and thousands of Vietnamese were harmoniously re-settled in Australia. They are now a productive and well-disposed part of the broader community.

The situation has deteriorated since Vietnam. The last ten years have been marked by an accelerating increase in refugees from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Refugee movements by their nature are unpredictable, but they are exacerbated by civil strife, corruption, even climate change, and the tide is unlikely to ebb any time soon. Alarmed at the marked increase in refugee numbers, Australians have hardened their views. These have been deliberately fuelled by politicians in Canberra trying to score points with their electorates. One ploy used repeatedly by former prime minister Abbott and now part of the political narrative is to brand all refugees as ‘illegal’, when they are nothing of the sort, but at most ‘unauthorised’. One result has been the desperate and inhumane refugee gulags established on Manus and Nauru, an Australian policy increasingly emulated in Europe. Narrow state interests are increasingly supplanting collective action. The number of displaced refugees in round figures is now ten million, the largest number since the end of World War Two.

Arja said two developments, one regional the other international, elicit hope. The regional one is the Asian Dialogue on Forced Migration created in July 2014 with officials, civilians and academics from Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and New Zealand meeting in their private capacities. Its objective is to build a resilient and sustainable regional structure as a more effective and dignified way to address forced migration in the Asia-Pacific. It is a ‘second track’ mechanism, apart from government, although former government officials like ASIO head David Irvine are involved in giving experienced advice. The international development is the High Level Meeting on Migrants and Refugees recently set up by the United Nations in New York with very much the same objectives in view.

Meanwhile, despite growing popular reservations among their voters, Arja pointed out that Australia, Canada and the United States remain the world’s most generous countries in terms of refugee intakes. All have the motive to create greater predictability in migrant flows so that they may continue to enforce orderly processing free from pressures created by human chaos. Perhaps greater regional cooperation of the kind initiated in the regional Track2 Dialogue will provide hope for the future, with politicians less inclined to demonise refugees.

 

Report by Richard Broinowski