Howard in war refugee snub: Fraser

MALCOLM Fraser has reopened his long-running feud with John Howard, accusing Mr Howard of opposing Australia's large intake of refugees after the Vietnam War.

MALCOLM Fraser has reopened his long-running feud with John Howard, accusing Mr Howard of opposing Australia's large intake of refugees after the Vietnam War.

Mr Fraser claims Mr Howard approached him in a corridor following a cabinet meeting in May 1977 and said: "We don't want too many of these people. We're doing this just for show, aren't we?"

The claim, made by Mr Fraser in an interview to mark the release of the 1977 cabinet papers, opens a new front in the continuing battle between the two former prime ministers on immigration policy and race issues.

Mr Fraser, who was prime minister at the time, told The Australian that he had rebuffed his junior minister, telling Mr Howard: "You could have spoken in the cabinet room. You didn't, and what you say to me I didn't hear."

Mr Howard denied through a spokesman having made the comment, and said he did not recall any conversation with Mr Fraser on the issue.

After checking with The Australian on the date of the cabinet decision on refugees - May 23 - the spokesman added that Mr Howard was minister for business and consumer affairs at the time and was not a member of the cabinet.

"He would only have been called into cabinet usually on economic matters," he said.

But Mr Fraser said Mr Howard could easily have been in cabinet that day dealing with another matter. "I didn't ask people to leave the room (when issues outside their portfolio were discussed)," he said. He recalled having the conversation with Mr Howard in the corridor.

The clash between Mr Fraser and Mr Howard is part of a long-standing dispute between the two former Liberal leaders on refugee and race issues.

The stance on Vietnamese refugees, detailed in the 1977 cabinet records released today by the National Archives, was one of the social policy highlights of the second year of the Fraser government.

In the same year, the government decided to take forceful action against the apartheid regime in South Africa and to set up SBS as the nation's multicultural broadcaster.

But the economy remained the dominant issue during the year, with Treasury urging the government to take an uncompromising stand against inflation, even at the cost of higher unemployment in the short term. Inflation was 9.5 per cent in 1977-78, and short-term interest rates went as high as 11 per cent.

Although behind at times in the opinion polls during the year, Mr Fraser felt confident enough to call an early election at the end of 1977, recording a second consecutive landslide win - a result that saw Gough Whitlam replaced as Labor Party leader by Bill Hayden.

Stung by criticism that it was making an inadequate response to the flood of refugees following the Vietnam War, the Fraser government set up a program that became the most generous in the world. By 1979, it had accepted 48,000 Vietnamese refugees, including those who arrived by boat on the Australian mainland.

This was more on a per capita basis than the US, and contrasts with the harsher policy of the Howard government towards refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan, including sending them to Nauru and Manus Island and trying to send them to other countries.

It is an approach Mr Fraser has strongly criticised, as he did Mr Howard's remark as Opposition leader in 1988 that there could be a case for slowing the rate of Asian immigration.

Mr Howard's comments, made during a radio interview on August 1, 1988, divided his own party and dogged him until he disowned them completely shortly before he again became Opposition leader in 1995.

Of his own attitude to refugees in 1977, Mr Fraser told The Australian: "I strongly felt that we had been fighting alongside a lot of these people, that the Americans in particular had given them assurances and we had an obligation to them, rather than just leaving them behind, which had been the original decision of the Whitlam government.

"But when we made the contrary decision, Gough did not oppose it."

While Mr Whitlam's government was responsible for formally ending the White Australia policy, completing the process that was started under Harold Holt's Coalition government, the Labor prime minister was strongly against accepting refugees from Vietnam. Even as Saigon fell to communist forces in April 1975, bureaucratic delays by the Whitlam government prevented about 55 Vietnamese staffers at Australia's embassy in Saigon from gaining sanctuary in Australia.

Asked if he was concerned about racial tensions as a result of a large influx of refugees from Asia, Mr Fraser said: "I was so convinced it was the correct decision, I thought it would demonstrate ultimately that the White Australia policy really had been buried."

In the years following the communist takeover of Vietnam, more than a million fled abroad but only about 2000 reached Australia by boat. The first craft, a 17m fishing boat carrying five asylum-seekers, sailed into Darwin on April 26, 1976. Overall, 111 boatpeople arrived in 1976, 868 in 1977, 746 in 1978 and 304 in 1979.

The vast majority of the 90,000 Vietnamese immigrants and refugees who settled in Australia in the 1970s and 80s arrived by aircraft, after being processed in camps in Southeast Asia.

The cabinet documents show that the government in 1977 adopted a formal policy recognising "a humanitarian commitment to admit refugees for resettlement". It also decided to send officials to Thailand to help process refugees in camps.

Then immigration minister Michael MacKellar told cabinet that although Australia had received large numbers of displaced persons and refugees over the previous 30 years, "we are presently criticised for what some perceive as inadequate, ad hoc responses to the Indo-Chinese refugees at present in Thailand and Malaysia and those on small boats in nearby waters".

The government should take the initiative, he argued.

He suggested a mechanism to allow a quick response to refugee situations, including a group of ministers to deal with "political sensitivity" - an apparent reference to concern that large numbers of Vietnamese could trigger racial tension.

"Although account must be taken of the availability of community and family support, it is of prime importance while current levels of unemployment remain that the refugees be located in areas where there are the best prospects of semi-skilled and unskilled employment, since it must be expected that many of these people will have no recognised skills," the submission said.