Labor is all at sea on asylum seeker policy

In other words the push factors were just as compelling as any ‘pull’ factors. When Rudd’s polls dropped and he was replaced with Gillard, the Government seemed to move further to the right on asylum seekers. This brought in the failed East Timor Solution and then the Malaysia Solution.

This all just shows Labor to be poll-driven on this issue. It suggests that Labor wants to be softer on asylum seekers but due to the attitudes of voters in key marginal electorates it needs to be seen as stronger.

Labor will of course defend its offshore policy on the grounds that the deterrent is needed to stop people making the risky boat journey into Australia’s territorial waters. There is some truth in this argument. Yet, just fleeing itself is quite risky.

Further, an asylum seeker sitting in Malaysia or Indonesia knows that their prospects there are limited. It makes sense then to seek asylum in a country that might accept them as a refugee and grant them citizenship. Moreover, if the Australian Government’s policies change every few months then they might as well take their chances. This is logical and rational. It is hard to begrudge that.

In this context, offshore processing, and detention itself, only makes sense if the cost of detaining asylum seekers here or overseas is outweighed by the deterrent effect. If the Malaysia Solution is not permanent then it is hard to see what deterrent effect it will have in the long run.

In reality people are fleeing because the refugee queue is a broken system. For example, an asylum seeker in Sri Lanka might not wish to make a refugee application from there because that Government has an interest in concealing its crimes and might carry out reprisals. Other intermediate destinations might not provide a long term home.

Spending many years as a recognised refugee before being resettled is obviously terrible. There is a strong argument that for every asylum seeker that we accept another refugee must wait in limbo in a third country before, if ever, being resettled. This is true. Yet, how can we blame people for trying to circumvent a failing system? It is not as if they chose to be born into war-torn countries. Nor is there a sound reason to ask them to accept a life that we ourselves would not accept.

Perhaps most crucially, people are fleeing because the people that they are fleeing from do not see any consequences for their actions.In that regard, a regional framework on war crimes might be just as useful as a regional framework for dealing with asylum seekers.

At the end of the day Labor is all at sea on asylum seekers. It seems naïve to the realities facing refugees and deeply unsure of how to communicate with a certain group of voters. Its messages to the entire electorate, and to the marginal electorates in particular, are very jumbled. The different policy fixes and turns are confusing. It is like trying to make sense of Gillard’s “moving forward” slogan, or Latham’s “ladder of opportunity” or Rudd’s “here to help”. In the end it doesn’t mean anything. And Gillard’s ‘win’ in getting Labor’s Caucus to support a revised Malaysia Solution might eventually come to nothing and so the cycle will continue.