Desperate measures

Some of the men had already set out by boat three or four times during 2006 but the vessels had either broken down or become lost and been forced to return to Indonesia. It was only by chance that they did not reach Australia any earlier than February 2007 and again, by chance, that their final attempt resulted in them actually making it into Australian waters.

Over the past few years as countries including Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Pakistan, have fallen more deeply into bloody conflicts, the people smuggling trade in our region appears to have slowly expanded again to compete for the growing numbers of victims searching for safety. It is indeed an ugly form of exploitation and many innocent people lose everything or become indebted to agents who make false promises and demands that never seem to end. Even more tragically, they sometimes lose their lives.

Every person I speak to who has travelled on a boat to Australia can still recount their journey in detail and cannot forget the fear they experienced on the ocean. Those who were on a boat that caught fire in 2001 are still traumatised by the subsequent drowning of two women when they all jumped into the water to escape the fire. People travelling on other boats were lucky not to go under when engines failed in the middle of high seas, but all these years later the terrifying experiences have not left their thoughts.

As long as resettlement options remain closed to most of the world’s refugees, boat journeys, although dangerous, will continue as an extreme option for those without other choices. This does not mean that Australian people and politicians should accept the exploitation of human lives and the deceptions engaged in by smuggling operators, but it does mean that we must be better than the people smugglers. If we cannot understand and empathise with the fear and desperation driving vulnerable human beings, if we continue to use these people as targets in our political debates, our imagination and capacity for empathy as human beings can be no better than the agents who view asylum seekers as cargo to be moved and exploited.

Australia’s major political parties must find a way to deal with the subject of boat arrivals within a mature and humane bipartisan dialogue and both parties must maintain a responsibility to ensure that this is achieved into the future. Any effort to manage the people smuggling trade needs to be carried out with great diplomacy in neighbouring countries where agents operate their businesses and must avoid politicising those who have resorted to desperate measures to find safety.

Australia has numerous problems to deal with as we “slide” into a recession and as global conflicts around the world remain responsible for the deaths and maiming of hundreds of people each day. We would all be better served by a more public focus on the real problems we face and less on the politics of a tiny but desperate trickle of vulnerable people who manage to make it here on a boat.