Julia Gillard's failed refugee policy revealed by High Court

The hollow nature of the incompetent Gillard government’s failed refugee policy was revealed by the High Court. In rejecting the latest of Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s immigration dodges, the Court dealt a death blow to the government’s plan to operate a swap-and-release refugee plan with Malaysia and probably scuppered its Manus Island plan as well. The decision hinged on the Migration Act’s guarantees of protection for refugees. The three key points of that section require that any country to which refugees are sent must be legally bound by international law or its own domestic law to: provide access for asylum seekers to effective procedures for assessing their need for protection; provide protection for asylum seekers pending determination of their refugee status; and provide protection for persons given refugee status pending their voluntary return to their country of origin or their resettlement in another country. In addition, the Act requires that the country meet certain human rights standards. Despite all the promises made by Gillard and Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, Malaysia was never going to meet those requirements. This was obvious to The Daily Telegraph’s Geoff Chambers in June when he investigated conditions in the racially and religiously divided nation and found it ill-equipped to deal with refugees. Brutal canings of refugees are not uncommon, sexual harassment and abuse of refugee women is a daily occurrence in the squalid refugee camps. Protections as required under the Migration Act simply didn’t exist. Under the Gillard government’s hastily cobbled together deal, Malaysia was promised an open cheque to take 800 people smuggler clients who reached Australia, while Australia would take 4,000 accredited refugees from Malaysia and resettle them into the community. Three hundred and thirty refugees have already reached Australia under the agreement that never was. Never fully acknowledged was the ongoing commitment Australia was to make to be responsible for the health, education and welfare of those refugees it returned to Malaysia leaving the probability that it would underwrite housing, hospital facilities and schools for a growing refugee population for the foreseeable future. It was the lack of protections that the High Court recognised yesterday when the full Bench rejected the Malaysian solution. It is now three years since the Rudd-Gillard government weakened Australia’s border security and, as admitted by Immigration Department officials, gave the green light to people smugglers eager to resume the trade that had been halted by a suite of measures implemented by the Howard government. Those measures included sending people smugglers’ clients to Nauru for processing and issuing temporary protection visas instead of full resident permits. More than 12,000 asylum seekers have now paid people smugglers to ferry them to Australia, and hundreds of them have died shocking deaths, lured by the weaker migration laws. Last July, just two weeks into her first term as leader of the Labor-Green-independent minority government, Gillard unveiled her plan to set up a refugee processing centre in East Timor. Like so many other announced policies of this dysfunctional government, the plan was dead on arrival. It was not a thought-out, researched and negotiated plan it was a shoot-from-the-lip headline grabber that was never going anywhere.