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The problem with Australia’s refugee problem

by Gwynne Dyer

LONDON – The Australian boat people are getting to be a problem. The first few million just got off the boats from Britain, pushed the Aborigines off the good land, and declared themselves the real Australians. This latest lot of boat people, though, don’t even stay in Australia. They’re being settled in Papua New Guinea.

It’s not exactly their own idea, to be fair. The descendants of the earlier boat people, now numbering some 20-odd million, have decided that Australia is full up, so any more boat people have to be sent elsewhere. But where? Well, how about somewhere poor and violent, to deter them from trying to get into Australia in the first place? Besides, if it’s a really poor country, then it can be bribed to accept them. Right, then. PNG it is.

The Australians have convinced themselves that they are drowning in refugees, but they aren’t. Just go to the OECD’s 2011 online statistics, and check out the top four lines for “Inflows of Asylum Seekers.”

First by alphabetical order is Australia (population 23 million), which got 11,505 asylum seekers. Then comes Austria (pop. 8 million), which got 14,406. Then Belgium (pop. 10 million), which took in a whopping 26,003 refugees. And finally Canada (pop. 35 million), which received 24,985. If the Australians are drowning, they are drowning in very shallow water.

Moreover, 70 percent of the boat people seeking asylum in Australia are Sri Lankans, Afghans and Iranians, most of whom we may assume are genuine refugees. So why did Australian governments start detaining asylum seekers, including children, as long ago as 1992, even though that is illegal under the 1951 Refugee Convention of which Australia is a signatory?

At that time refugee flows were high everywhere, though that’s hardly an excuse. No other country did that, and at no time have asylum seekers amounted to even 10 percent of Australian immigration.

Keeping them in prison in Australia while sorting out their claims eventually got too embarrassing, so in 2001 the government signed a deal with Papua New Guinea to send them to mosquito-infested Manus Island, 300 km off PNG’s northern coast, for “processing.” But their claims for asylum were still treated seriously, and the genuine claimants were eventually settled in Australia.

Asylum seekers to Australia were at a peak of almost 13,000 in 2001, but over the next few years they dropped steeply. By 2004 they were down to 3,200, so Australia closed the Manus camp.

Labour Prime Minister Julia Gillard reopened the Manus Island prison last year, presumably because the number of asylum seekers had gone back up to 11,500. (Why? The defeat of the Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka, a possible Taliban take-over in Afghanistan, and the crushing of the Green protests in Iran). But horrible though it was, the Manus camp was still a “processing” center, and (some) genuine refugees got resettled in Australia in the end.

Then Kevin Rudd took over the Labour Party leadership last June in an inner-party coup, and almost his first act as prime minister was to declare that no person arriving by boat would ever be allowed to settle in Australia. They would be settled in Papua New Guinea instead.

He was facing an imminent election that Labour seemed bound to lose, so he needed to rouse the rabble. It worked: Labour’s poll numbers have already improved considerably.

Papua New Guinea is an utterly impoverished country with one of the highest crime rates in the world. 85 percent of its 7 million people survive by subsistence agriculture, and the cities largely consist of gang-ridden slums swept by tribal violence. It is a completely unacceptable place to “resettle” refugees, but Rudd has persuaded the PNG government to take them in return for a very large (but secret) amount of money.

Why does Australia behave like this? Racism, obviously. Compared to any other English-speaking people, Australians (or a great many of them) are openly, astoundingly racist. You’d have to go somewhere like Russia or China to find people expressing their racial prejudices in such an unselfconscious, almost naive way. And here’s a clue: New Zealanders, similar to Australians in so many other ways, don’t talk like that at all.

Racism is mostly about fear, and the Australians are very afraid of something. You may mock, but I have a theory about that. Every time Australians look at a map, they see the entire continent of Asia looming above their country like an avalanche waiting to happen. I suspect they are afraid that one day it will fall on them and crush them

But that’s only because conventional maps are drawn with north at the top. You can already get joke world maps in Australia that put south at the top, so that Australia floats serenely above that huge Asian mess below. Just make those maps standard in Australian schools and on Australian TV news, and in a few months you’ll see the change.

Then, if the occasional boat-load of refugees bubbles up from below, who cares? Australia’s above it all, and we can deal with it.

Problem solved. My bill is in the mail.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

  • Simon Ashby

    If you actually look at the OPEC numbers stated by this article, as a function of population, you will see that Australia had the twelfth highest (out of the 34 OPEC nations) asylum seeker ingest per thousand population.

    Just for comparison, Japan, where this newspaper is from, was ranked number 33 out of 34.

    Sure, Australia may have a fair way to go compared to the countries with the highest rate, but we are still accepting more asylum seekers than the majority of OPEC countries.

  • Christopher Pokarier

    Since my initial reaction to this there have been several subsequent replies that have addressed some of my concerns with the article (but ‘seven tech’ seemed to mistake me as the original author!). Firstly, for the record, I personally have long been very critical of the ugly politics of asylum seekers in Australia. It is not true that – as the author blithely asserts – that arrivals by boat are refugees, as understood under international law, just by virtue of being from Sri Lanka, Iran or Afghanistan. The issues entailed are complex, widely-reported and debated and beyond detailing here. Gwynne’s report also gives the false impression that the Rudd Govt’s recent PNG policy would resettle asylum-seekers there permanently. It does not do that; it is another attempt at ‘offshore processing’ – hardly very nice discourse I know – that houses claimants abroad until claims are processed. The objective of mandatory detention (now abroad), in many ways awful though it is, is to discourage asylum-seekers from paying large sums of money to people-smuggling outfits. Many lives have been lost through sinking vessels this year alone. We should recall that those travelling to Australia by boat have previously flown to Indonesia and entered the country legally with valid travel documents, and then attempt the hazardous sea journey to Australian territory. The issues, and any possible solution, are difficult, and certain regional. The domestic politics has indeed been unpleasant but there are striking parallels in Europe. What dismayed me most about the article though was the crude anecdotalism when the author wrote (not the sub-editor) that “compared to any other English-speaking people Australians (or a great many of them) are openly astoundingly racist”. There is a wealth of comparative empirical data on attitudes to immigration, other nations and cultures that gives no support for such assertions. Some of the toughest attitudes to boat arrivals are to be found amongst other recent migrant groups. Of course pockets of racism and other intolerance exist, in Australian and elsewhere. Yet the very seriousness of a charge of racism in contemporary Australia speaks to the fact that it is anathema to very many people these days. Such sweeping negative generalizations about a diverse national population are neither in keeping with good journalistic nor academic norms of fact-checking and attribution; standards that are also antipathetical to racism. I suspect the author has been saving up a metaphorical gag about Australians, at the bottom of the world, fearing being crushed by people from above and worked back from that. He left us wondering where non-racist Kiwis fit into his theory then.

  • JTCommentor

    This author clearly has no idea about how politics works, and is seeing only the superficial level.

    As one simple example – in suggesting that the “boat people” issue arose because of Australia’s racism, and that the new “you will not be settled in Australia” policy is the pinnacle of that racism, he is, by extension, casting Kevin Rudd as the #1 racist in Australia. Kevin Rudd, extensively educated on foreign policy, widely published in foreign policy press with thought provoking and excellent articles on the Asian region, former diplomat in Beijing, fluent in Mandarin, father-in-law of a Chinese-Australian and grand father of a half ethnic Chinese – this guy is the #1 racist in Australia?

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