Australia’s immigration policies failed Michael Howard

When faced with criticism of Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers from local and international sources, Australian Government ministers responded by saying how envious Europe is of our policies and that the British Government was thinking of adopting them as their own.

It’s part of a deep denial of reality, which sees the Howard Government portraying its policies as the "best practice" model for dealing with refugees and trying to give their policy credibility by marketing it into another country.

Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor successfully marketed the “we will decide” election slogan for the 2001 Australian federal election, while their British Conservative party’s “are you thinking what we’re thinking" had all the hallmarks of a focus group response and too much spin. However this template failed in Michael Howard’s campaign.

Of course, since the days of Robert Menzies, there has been a strong tradition among Australian conservative politicians to seek approval from the home country. But you know there is something upside down when Conservatives in Britain talk about copying Australia.

The Conservative Manifesto seems to owe a lot to Lynton Crosby, renowned in Australia for a campaign beating up on those fleeing from the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, for domestic political advantage. We make sure that we check the beasts coming into our country for foot and mouth disease, but British quarantine let a bad case of head and heart disease through.

Putting aside the needless misery Australia’s immigration policy has caused to a bunch of Afghanis and Iraqis since 1999, let’s look at the Australian model, which was on offer to Britain in the Conservative Manifesto.

First, the Australian model confuses migration and asylum. We claim to have taken in 650,000 refugees since World War II, however all of these refugees, excluding around 25,000, were actually migrants picked from resettlement camps. The other nearly 25,000 were the only ones that came to Australia and claimed asylum. So we haven’t had much relevant experience over the last 60 years in dealing with asylum claims.

In the most recent “wave” of boat arrivals, coming from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, around 10,000 people arrived in a 4 year period by boat. After a hostile reception and being locked up in remote detention camps in the Australian desert, over 90 per cent were given refugee status. They are the visible asylum seekers. The overcrowded boats, with sad and desperate looking people, made for graphic media images. The Government responded to the deep-seated fears of invasion from the teeming millions of Asians by taking strong and decisive populist action.

Detention in desert camps didn’t deter these boat people. The only strategy that worked was intervention by the Australian navy, who towed boats to a detention camp, first on the desert island of Nauru and then to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Since 2001, only two small boats have made it through this blockade. But others have set out and then been pushed back to Indonesia, where the Australian Government continues to pay hotel accommodation for Afghan refugees, to make it appear that Australian borders are closed.

The Conservative Manifesto did not seem to get the same response from British voters as the Australian Government’s immigration policy did here. There are a few reasons for this: the British public have a long history of dealing more fairly with refugees, most notably through post WWII migration of Jewish refugees and refugees from varied European conflict, for example the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, so the refugee experience was better understood and attempts to confuse refugees as representatives of the totalitarian regimes they were actually fleeing from, were not so easy.

In Britain, the incumbent administration hasn’t sought to use asylum seekers as scapegoats like the Australian Government did with the “children overboard” scam, and by stopping media interviews or even photographs of asylum seekers “to respect their privacy” and labelling them "illegal".

The Blair Government’s manifesto committed itself to improving the immigration processes by separating genuine claims of asylum from those of would-be migrants. The Blair Government’s occasional, highly publicised mistakes are in the context of tens of thousands of claims each year. The challenge of returning failed asylum seekers swiftly, safely and without violating their other human rights is still there. But the British experience is a lesson to other countries.

Just as with the “War on Poverty” to which he has signed up, Blair (or later Brown) should be pushed in the third term to formulate and advocate more humane and effective international refugee policies: policies that differentiate between dictatorships and those who flee them; policies that protect the fundamental right to asylum at a time of fluid global labour markets.

Populist policies founded on de facto racism only play into the hands of extremists and fundamentalists. The Australian model is one of unnecessary individual suffering caused by bad policy.

To our credit, we continue to resettle people processed in other countries’ refugee camps, taking about 10,000 refugees a year through the UNHCR’s programs. The Conservative Manifesto would have had Britain both withdrawing from the Geneva Convention which mandates the UNHCR and confining its refugee work to resettlement of those processed by UNHCR, which is even a lazier refugee policy than Australia’s.

But what’s not so well known is that asylum seekers continue to arrive in Australia. Last year 6,299 asylum seekers arrived, 8,296 the year before. These were years when only 788 and 899 refugee visas were granted respectively - largely to people who arrive by air, on a tourist or education visa, and who make a claim for asylum when they get here.

They don’t get the publicity, rarely get detained, are generally entitled to a range of benefits over the months and years their claims are processed and have around a one in ten success rate in their asylum claims. The “boat people” - 90 per cent of whom, even under hostile processing, are found to be refugees - arrive in smaller numbers overall, but get the harshest treatment.

Many Australians are convinced the problem is solved if boat arrivals are blocked. Australia still doesn’t have a fair, fast processing system and we still have no effective way of dealing with any future large-scale (in our terms) boat arrivals in the future.

We have made no real contribution to world efforts to develop a system that provides protection for those who desperately need it at a time of increased economic migration, and we still have the victims of our immigration policies in detention. In May 2005, we still have over 150 “boat people”, who arrived in 2001 and earlier, in detention and who have been refused asylum. They have committed no crime but are kept in detention because they won’t return to their country of origin, or are stateless. The absence of any effective judicial review of this system allows an unaccountable bureaucracy to extend the same treatment to people who are entitled to reside here.

The essential feature of the Australian immigration model is the failure to deal with manageable issues, masked by public mistreatment of innocent victims for short-term political advantage, but with long term consequences.

Eventually, the Howard Government will need to do more than just pretend it has dealt with the worst features of it’s policies and we all will have to face up to what has been done and learn how to do it properly.

Immigration is still a live issue in Britain as a result of the election campaign. Let’s hope the British study the Australian immigration model and help us move beyond it.