Let’s stop demonising asylum seekers and find a better way
Let’s stop demonising asylum seekers and find a better way
So here we are again. Our treatment of asylum seekers filling news bulletins and leading the political agenda.
This farcical-if-it-wasn’t-so-tragic situation has again thrust us on the international stage, just as the Tampa crisis did under John Howard in August 2001.
Almost 13 years have passed since that again tragic, again farcical showdown, when the Tampa’s captain was denied entry into Australian waters after rescuing 433 Afghan asylum seekers from the sea.
International pressure forced a back down from the Australian Government then, with the Afghan men, women and children eventually being taken to detention centres.
This marked the start of the so-called ‘Pacific Solution’, with asylum seekers arriving by boat sent to Australian-funded detention camps in Pacific Island states, rather than being allowed to claim asylum on the Australian mainland.
Let’s reflect on our nation’s asylum seeker policy since that time.
We’ve seen the ‘Pacific Solution’, in various guises, ramped down, then ramped back up.
We’ve seen Governments of every persuasion chip away at the foundations of our fair and reasonable refugee determination process in an attempt to seem tougher than the last lot.
Numerous High Court actions have been run to consider the legal twists and turns of this cruel game of political brinkmanship.
We’ve grieved the drowning deaths of hundreds of asylum seekers — men, women and children.
Daily, we’ve heard stories of the asylum seekers held indefinitely in terrible conditions in off-shore facilities suffering serious mental and physical conditions. Babies have been separated from their mothers. Children in detention have been robbed of their childhood.
We’ve allowed a young man to die and many more to suffer lifelong injuries at the hands of Australian Government-sanctioned security forces who are yet to be brought to trial.
We’ve handed back 41 Tamil and Sinhalese asylum seekers to the Sri Lankan Government, which is under investigation for serious human rights absuses, to potentially face ‘rigorous imprisonment’.
If you prefer, we can forget the human cost and just focus on the economics.
Billions upon billions of Australian taxpayers money have been poured into holding a few thousand asylum seekers in prison-like conditions and in using our navy as political pawns in a very ugly game of human chess.
So the question I have for the Australian Government is this: How’s your asylum seeker policy working for you??
The reality is this: a three-word slogan, no matter how firmly or harshly applied, was ever going to resolve the complex circumstances that result in asylum seekers — albeit a very small number of them — giving everything they have to get on rickety boats to escape torture and persecution in their home country.
The cracks are well and truly starting to appear in the government’s simplistic, politically cynical solution to what is a serious humanitarian situation.
Australians have every right to hold this policy up to the light and deem it a failure.
But ultimately that shouldn’t be our focus.
What we really need to do now is to accept our mutual responsibility for the current situation — and for the years of poor policy that came before it — and start a more meaningful dialogue about how we treat the men, women and children who seek asylum on our shores.
Surely, we can come together with our regional neighbours to find a more humane, safer, fairer framework for processing refugee claims?
Surely Australians don’t want to see people continuing to suffer needlessly?
Surely, four questions put to asylum seekers at sea, via Skype, isn’t a fair or genuine way to assess an application for asylum?
Surely we don’t want to continue spending billions of dollars each year to lock up a few thousand people in poorly run, poorly resourced off-shore camps?
Surely we’re better than this.
Let’s kill the politics and come together as a nation and as a region to find a humane, sustainable solution to this pressing issue.
Kon Karapanagiotidis
CEO Asylum Seeker Resource Centre
www.asrc.org.au
