James Campbell: Will Labor’s plans for asylum seekers work – or will the boats start again?

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles will shortly unveil plans to abolish temporary protection and safe haven enterprise visas, but will they work, asks James Campbell?

Fifteen years ago last week, the last 21 asylum seekers detained in Nauru landed in Brisbane.

Their arrival marked the official end of the Pacific Solution created by John Howard in the wake of the Tampa crisis of 2001.

At the time, the newly elected Rudd Government was keen to celebrate the end of off-shore processing.

“The Pacific solution was a cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise introduced on the eve of a federal election by the Howard government,” the then Immigration Minister Chris Evans said.

Cynical and costly it may have been but, sadly, it was not unsuccessful, certainly compared with what came after it.

An asylum seeker boat found northwest of Cape Van Dieman in 2014.

As we all know, by the time Labor left office it had executed a complete reverse ferret – and then some – with a promise by Kevin Rudd that people arriving would never ever settle in Australia.

But not before 51,000, including more than 8400 children, had arrived by boat and more than a thousand people were dead.

It was an absolute catastrophe which is seared into the memories of the veterans of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years.

Fast forward to this year and Labor is again in office and again looking to dismantle part of the immigration regime it has inherited.

There are differences of course.

Following a battle at its National Conference in 2015, Labor has accepted the policy of turning boats back introduced early in the life of the Abbott Government.

A Royal Australian Navy boat escorts a vessel the boat containing 40-50 asylum seekers.

In the intervening year, Labor-folk liked to say there was no difference between its boat policy and the Coalition.

But that was not really true because while Labor had been prepared to swallow the camels of off-shore processing and turn-backs, it was still straining at the gnat of temporary protection visas, which it remained committed to abolishing.

Coalition ministers liked to describe TPVs as being the third leg of border protection policy – remove it and the whole thing threatens to fall over.

Though they weren’t keen on talking about it at all, Labor frontbencher’ position was that while cruel – because they keep people in limbo for years – TPVs were also unnecessary, arguing it was turn-backs and Nauru that really made difference.

The exciting thing for those of us who have wondered over the years which view might be correct is we will soon have an answer.

The Nauru detention camp in 2018. Picture: Nathan Edwards

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles will shortly be unveiling plans to give effect to Labor’s pre-election commitment to abolish temporary protection and safe haven enterprise visas, giving roughly 30,000 people a route to permanent residency.

Ahead of that, Giles announced on Friday he was reversing an edict from the previous government that applications for family reunions and spouse visas from people who arrived here as refugees on boats should go to the back of the line, meaning they will be processed, basically never.

This policy had impacted around 6000 people who will now have a realistic prospect of bringing their loved ones here, where previously they had none.

As I said, we will see soon enough whether these changes have any effect on the number of people trying to get here on the open sea.

Unsurprisingly, boats have dropped off the political agenda in recent years as the result of the success of Operation Sovereign Borders but it won’t take much to change that if they start arriving again in serious numbers.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Another area where the immigration minister, who in 2015 led the opposition against accepting turn-backs, is running a risk is in how we treat criminal Kiwis.

Under the previous government’s ‘501’ rule, the default position for any New Zealander sentenced to 12 months in prison was a simple one: “Home you go Bro!”

In the past two years alone, the policy has led to more than 1000 criminals being returned to sender, including more than 300 while the borders were closed, which you would have to say was pretty keen going.

The Kiwis have whined about it incessantly about it because they say we’ve sent some of them home for trivial reasons.

At the same time they’ve complained we’ve sent home too many serious criminals, which strikes me as rather the point.

No doubt there’s something to these complaints but they would have more merit if, during the same period, New Zealand hadn’t deported hundreds of criminals to Pacific Island countries, fuelling gang culture in places where previously there was none.

In recent weeks Giles has announced the end of the previous government’s mandatory deportation policy with one that uses ‘common sense’ as the ruling criteria in whether they should be allowed to stay.

This strikes me as strange because, whatever else it might be, ‘common sense’ is not a legal principle.

If the Giles had changed the operating principle to a requirement for one-two-three-or-whatever decades of residence to avoid being given the boot, or imposed a blanket rule on the deportation of people who arrived here as minors that would still have been politically dangerous, given you can bet sooner of later on them is going to commit more crimes.

But to give riding instructions to the bureaucracy best described as the exercise of the Dennis Denuto principle that “it’s the vibe of the thing” strikes me as basically insane.

Toss in his life-science experiment he’s about to conduct with TPVs and Andrew Giles just became one of 2023’s men to watch!