AUSTRALIA IMMIGRATION SUCCESSFUL IN STOPPING ASYLUM SEEKERS THROUGH BOATS BUT IT HAS FAILED TO STOP BOATS WHICH ARE REACHING TO INDONESIA AS IN 2014 MORE THAN 54000 BOARDED BOATS LOOKING TO MOVE The boats have not stopped. They have stopped reaching Australia but people are still drowning in seas in our region and across the world. More than 350,000 asylum seekers boarded boats in 2014, the UN has found, leaving their homeland to seek protection somewhere else. Of those, 54,000 people boarded a boat in south-east Asia – Australia’s “neighbourhood”, in the words of the foreign minister. At least 540 people died on boat journeys in that neighbourhood – starved, dehydrated or beaten to a death by a crew member and thrown overboard – or drowned when their unseaworthy vessel sank. The great majority of those travelling in Australia’s region were Rohingya, a persecuted ethnic minority from Burma, who are brutalised by their own government, denied any rights to citizenship, to education, banned from having more than two children and from work in certain industries. Regularly, Rohingya villages are torched and their occupants forced into remote tarpaulin camps, where malnutrition and disease are rife. Australia has signed an agreement with Burma with the aim of “boosting Myanmar’s immigration and border control” – essentially to prevent Rohingya from leaving. In 2014 Australia stopped 441 asylum seekers in 10 vessels, the UN says, forcing them back to the countries they last departed. The government regards these figures as evidence its policies are working. Thanks to boat turnbacks, offshore processing and regional resettlement, the argument goes, boats are no longer able to reach Australia. The people smugglers no longer have a product to sell: the “sugar is off the table”. But that view fails to look over the horizon. It ignores – because Australia knows they are there – all the unseaworthy boats, and their desperate passengers, still looking for a safe port to land or dying in the seas to our north. Even allowing (almost certainly over-generously) that several times that figure of 441 were deterred from trying to come to Australia, this country’s boat arrivals remain a tiny fraction of the world’s figure. The number of people in our region still boarding boats bound for somewhere else is demonstration of the irrelevancy of the “stopping the boats” shibboleth. It is not a statement of policy, it is a tool of political rhetoric. “Have the boats stopped reaching Australia?” is the wrong question to ask. A better question by which to judge the success of Australia’s asylum policies is this: are more people safer? Or fewer? Has the sum of protection for people who need it – against sectarian violence, against ethnic discrimination or political oppression, against arbitrary detention in a transit or destination country – increased as a result of Australian policies? The answer is no. There is less protection in the world for people who need it as a result of Australia’s policies. Australia voluntarily ratified (in fact helped draft) the UN refugee convention. It willingly accepted the treaty’s obligation to offer protection to those who need it. But Australia’s policies now consistently place it in breach of that convention. In announcing the Burma partnership, the then immigration minister, Scott Morrison, proclaimed: “Assisting our regional partners in building stronger, more effective borders is a priority of the Coalition government.” But Australia is neglecting this obligation. Australia’s regional neighbours, its “partners” in addressing the asylum issue, are more overwhelmed than ever. Malaysia has 41,000 registered “persons of concern” and thousands more unknown. Australia and Indonesia are locked in a long-running spat over boat towbacks and Australia has announced it will not resettle any more refugees from Indonesia. It is, instead, looking to move refugees with claims for protection in Australia to third countries: Papua New Guinea, Nauru and Cambodia. Australia’s concern, it seems, ends at the edge of its territorial waters. Two year-end speeches have highlighted the growing divergence between Australia and the rest of the world on the issue of asylum.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 03:39:22 +0000
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