The huddled masses have never been in greater need. What we will do about it?

Friday, July 1, 2016

No matter how Australia votes this weekend, there is an issue that must be resolved; the fate of the 1300 plus souls we have chosen to warehouse on Nauru and Manus Island, places that have become outposts of detention and despair.

Consigned to a kind of refugee phantom zone on these islands, they have been given Kafkaesque choices that are not choices at all: stay where you are, go back where you came from, or try your luck in Cambodia – the most unlikely and expensive debacle of all the impoverished solutions that have been served up to date.

It is not good enough for Malcolm Turnbull as he did on Four Corners this week, to try to wash his hands of these living, breathing human beings, and say while ‘harsh’ that what happens to them is entirely the responsibility of the Governments of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Let’s be clear: they are there because we put them there and what happens to them next will be by our design. It is mendacious to suggest otherwise.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has moved further than Turnbull, leaving open the option of discussing regional resettlement with New Zealand, as well as holding talks with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Turnbull’s response has been opaque, saying it would be easier to find “alternative places” after the election, although his Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop said resettlement in New Zealand would encourage people smugglers.

This is now a 15-year debate in Australia, since 2001 when the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa rescued 438 asylum-seekers who were stranded in a wooden fishing boat in international waters off Christmas Island. It gave John Howard the battle cry that would win him that year’s federal election: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

It struck an ancient tribal chord: the right to exclude - the same chord that has been struck now in England with Brexit and which is there in Donald Trump’s threat to build a great wall of Mexico.

Whatever has else fuelled Brexit, including a widening gap between rich and poor, it is clear that immigration played a big part. Brexit was a win for UKIP leader Nigel Farage who used an image of Syrian refugees flowing into Europe to promote his case, under the headline “Breaking point – the EU has failed us all. We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.”

In Britain, echoing debates in Australia, supporters of the EU were portrayed as a social and political elite, out of touch with the concerns of working people.

Last September, as the Syrian refugee crisis spilled towards Germany, and the image of the drowned three-year-old refugee child Alan Kurdi flashed around the world, Boris Johnson, who now contends to be the British Prime Minister, said it was possible to admire German chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Christian compassion”, but also to think “that by posing as a Teutonic version of the Statue of Liberty, and by holding out her arms to the huddled masses of the Middle East, she has exacerbated a very serious financial, logistical and political problem for everyone.”

It was a scoffing dismissal of America’s great refugee narrative, Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus, in which the Statue of Liberty is a Mother of Exiles crying out, "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Those huddled masses have never been in greater need. Over the past five years, the war in Syria has killed at least 270,000 people and turned almost 5 million into refugees, including 2 million children. Australia has pledged to accept a “special intake” of 12,000 Syrian refugees, but has so far resettled only about 1000, according to Julie Bishop, in the time that Canada has resettled 27,000.

As the refugee debate has unravelled in Europe and Britain, there has been some admiration for
“the Australian model”, begun in 2001 by John Howard as the “Pacific Solution”, which was considered so harsh that it was dismantled in 2007 by Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd only to be re-assembled following the arrival of 50,000 asylum seekers by boat, and the drowning of more than 1000 men, women and children at sea. It ushered in an even harsher incarnation: Tony Abbott’s Operation Sovereign Borders, under which asylum-seeker boats would be turned back at sea; and asylum seekers coming by boat would “never” be re-settled in Australia.

What has been forgotten about  Howard’s Pacific Solution, is that out of the 1153 people sent to Manus and Nauru all of those assessed as refugees were resettled;  61 per cent of them in Australia and the rest to first world countries including New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Denmark and Norway.

After 15 years, we know that we can stop the boats by denying hope of resettlement in Australia, by turning the boats back. But there has been no resolution to the legacy issue, those people who have been left in terrible limbo on Manus and Nauru. They have been the price Australians have been prepared to pay – while turning away from allegations of human rights abuses and the catastrophic human consequences for people who are denied all hope.

These people who have fled from persecution are out of sight and out of mind, until they come crashing into our conscience, as they did in April and May when a young Somali woman, Hodan Yasin, 21, set fire to herself, a week after a young Iranian man, Omid Masoumali, 23, burned himself to death in protest.

Questioned about these incidents Malcolm Turnbull replied, “I was horrified, naturally. You would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by that. Whenever somebody is moved to … destroy themselves, to kill themselves … that's a terrible abandonment of hope.”

The question is: what are we going to do about it?

Shorten is already on the record saying he wants to end the policy of indefinite detention. Malcolm Turnbull could do worse than look back to Howard’s more humane approach to the issue. Whoever leads the next Government of Australia has a moral obligation to bring this dark chapter in Australia’s history to an end. To do that they will need to find a workable solution for the resettlement of those now trapped on Manus and Nauru.  

Tim Costello is the Chief Executive

First published in The Guardian 

Opinion Pieces, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Middle East, Eastern Europe & Central Asia, Human Rights, Kevin Rudd, Refugee Crisis, Tim Costello

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