Softer border protection laws caused disaster

REFUGEE advocates have been shrill and vocal in their claim that it's too simplistic to blame people smugglers for the disaster that occurred off Western Australia's Ashmore Reef on Thursday.

They're correct. Those who agitated for a softer line, those who worked so hard to politicise the issue before the 2007 election, and those who danced with delight when their aims were achieved and the Rudd government wound back the Howard government's successful border-security measures, are as much to blame for the five deaths and scores of injured as the people-smugglers. Those who influenced the Rudd government, and those members of the Rudd government who revelled in the support they received, must be held accountable for the present lethal policy. It doesn't matter that the bulk of those seeking asylum - outside the normal channels maintained by the UNHCR and various NGOs - arrive in Australia by aircraft. That is an irrelevancy. What matters is that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Immigration Minister Chris Evans thoughtlessly gave the green light to people-smugglers when the Government abolished the system of mandatory detention, and the issuing of temporary protection visas, last year without stressing that barriers to the traffic in human cargo still existed. Perhaps they wanted their supporters to think the problem would evaporate if it was ignored. If so, they were wrong. Dead wrong. But in failing to emphasise that people-smugglers still faced penalties of up to 20 years in jail and fines of up to $200,000, Rudd and Evans sent the wrong message ricocheting around the world. The ABC - along with the Fairfax press, the principal media driver for change on immigration - has been in overdrive since Thursday finding refugees who say the change in laws has not affected the traffic. The numbers alone show that ploy is a just spin. Whether the ABC and Fairfax liked it or not, the Howard government's Pacific Solution - under which people-smugglers' clients were detained for processing on Nauru and Christmas Island - worked. In 2000-2001, 54 boats carrying 4137 people were picked up. After the Pacific Solution was implemented, the numbers plummeted. In 2001-2002, there were just six boats and 1212 arrivals. The following year, 2002-2003, not a boat, not an arrival. In 2003-2004, there was one boat with 53 people, and another vessel reached an ``excised'' area offshore with 29 others. In 2004-2005, not a boat, not an arrival. In 2005-2006, there were four boats and 56 people; in 2006-2007, there were five boats and 135 arrivals (including 43 Papuans). In 2007-2008, there were three boats and 25 arrivals, and in the current year there have been 13 boats and 453 people. On April 1, 50 asylum-seekers who had been left high and dry for four days when their boat struck Warrior Reef, in Torres Strait, were picked up. A week later, an Indonesian fishing boat with 39 people aboard managed to pass a Customs boat undetected and tie up at Christmas Island's principal wharf. The soft policy that won Kevin Rudd the support of the refugee lobby has now backfired with deadly force. Despite the Government's claims of transparency, the Australian people have still not been told why the navy issued a ``high threat'' warning minutes before the fatal blast last week. If it is shown, as has been alleged, that someone aboard the people-smugglers' vessel attempted to disable it by tossing petrol about and igniting it, no one should be surprised. This tactic is straight out of the people-smugglers' manual. It's a ploy to ensure newly arrived vessels are not turned around and sent back to their home ports. If, as has also been alleged, navy personnel did not tell the new arrivals they would be taken to Christmas Island for processing before the fatal explosion, the failure to pass on that information may well have created panicky conditions prior to the explosion - and officers from our over-stretched services may find themselves culpable to a degree. The refugee lobby has shown itself to be far more interested in using the lives of truly desperate human beings as political weapons than it has in applying solutions that might have some effect "upstream'' of the problem, where it should really be addressed, rather than "downstream'' at Ashmore Reef and in remote parts of the Indian Ocean. But the stream of politically loaded vituperation that spews forth from the lobbyists and their media accomplices indicates this is not on their agenda. It's the petty, the domestic, that appeals, not the greater international problem. Australia is in a unique geographical situation. We are quarantined from many of the issues that beset other nations and we can - and have - dealt handsomely with political refugees for scores of years, taking in numbers out of all proportion to our population. It's miserable of the Government to now claim the deaths last week were the result of a global refugee ``push'' when it's obvious they were due to Labor's own refugee-policy "pull''.