Rampant untruths kill asylum debate

REFUGEE advocacy groups have a right to argue we should be less harsh on boat arrivals. Equally, other commentators have the right to argue boatpeople are queue jumpers and government policy should stop the boats, not find ways to grant them entry.

What neither side should be doing is peddling untruths or skirting over facts that don't suit their argument. Yet that is what has happened year after year. The result is a polarising debate.

Refugee advocates try to claim the moral high ground but the deadly realities of the dangers of travelling on unseaworthy boats have seemingly stripped the Left of such moral superiority.

Equally, the Right needs to understand that calling boatpeople queue jumpers misses an obvious point. The phrasing might be true, but only because government policy subtracts boatpeople granted asylum from our overall refugee quota.

The idea of queue jumping glosses over some statistical realities. The average stay in a refugee camp worldwide is 17 years. When you factor in the life expectancy of many people in underdeveloped countries, that's a death sentence (for example, in Afghanistan, where many boatpeople come from, life expectancy is just 43). No wonder desperate people choose to avoid the squalor and insecurity of refugee camps (if they can even get to them) and chance their arm on the high seas.

Queue jumper implies something orderly about a process that is anything but.

Refugee advocates (such as the Asia-Pacific Refugee Rights Network) have condemned the so-called Malaysian solution on the flimsiest of evidence. Before the deal has been struck, before the conditions there are known, the government has been attacked for its new-found attempt to stop the political bleeding.

By all means Julia Gillard should be slammed for announcing a deal that hadn't been finalised, taking away the government's hand in negotiations. For a former industrial lawyer to get it so wrong is pathetic. But that is a political condemnation: early attacks about the specifics of what the 800 would face in Malaysia were premature, as the emerging details have shown. On Thursday it was revealed that those sent to Malaysia will receive immunity from harsh immigration laws that include human rights abuses.

The opposition continues to call for the reopening of the detention centre on Nauru, forgetting why that is unlikely to stop the boats a second time. John Howard pulled off a one-time trick with Nauru. He set it up and deported asylum-seekers there with no prospect of resettlement in Australia. That was the rhetoric and it worked. Few wanted to pay people smugglers large sums to rot on an island in the middle of nowhere. But once the deterrent stopped the boats, the overwhelming majority (more than 70 per cent) of the 1637 people sent to Nauru between 2001 and 2007 were granted asylum in Australia or abroad.

Because Nauru was and would again be under Australian control if reopened, whoever goes there remains our responsibility, and the one-time trick of conning boatpeople that it blocks entry to Australia won't work again, because it isn't true.

Temporary protection visas can be a deterrent, which Labor largely refuses to acknowledge. They stop arrivals from bringing out their families and they prevent them being certain that a life in Australia is guaranteed. But they are also harmful to the psyche of asylum-seekers, children in particular. And they can lead to the absurd situation where a young person who has only ever known life in Australia can one day be deported to a country where they don't speak the native tongue.

The dishonest debate from each side refuses to face up to the bad as well as the good in their logic for supporting or opposing TPVs.

Facts matter in political debates, but they are regularly discarded in this one, replaced with emotive language. Tony Abbott has spoken of "armadas" of boats "invading" Australia, language his shadow immigration minister (thankfully) refuses to emulate. It is misleading and deceptive when you consider the true number of arrivals. According to a February background briefing paper from the Parliamentary Library, in the 2 1/2 years from July 2008 to the end of last year since Labor changed the Coalition's policy, 9907 people arrived on 202 boats. That averages out at 86 people arriving on three boats each fortnight. And even Abbott admits that this year boat arrivals have fallen from the supposedly armada-like numbers of last year.

Equally, however, when Labor claims push, not pull, factors are behind the increase in boat arrivals on its watch, it is being disingenuous.

In 2008 the former immigration minister and still leader of the government in the Senate Chris Evans declared rolling back the Pacific solution and offshore processing "one of my greatest pleasures in politics". He said it was "ineffective and wasteful". Now that (a far more expensive brand of) offshore processing is Labor's solution, and noted opponents of the Pacific solution such as Julian Burnside say it is a lesser of evils compared with Labor's approach, Evans should be thoroughly embarrassed.

When right-wing commentators try to claim the Gillard government has blood on its hands because of the recent disaster off Christmas Island, they should broaden their thinking. If that were true, all politicians in this country have blood on their hands for the rapes, murders and disease-riddled lives of asylum-seekers stuck in camps across the world, because they won't increase the quota of refugees we allow into our country annually from 14,000. And that's just for starters. Consequential logic could take us much further in refuting that callow argument.

Boatpeople are queue jumpers, but if we didn't allow them to affect our refugee quota they wouldn't be disadvantaging anyone waiting for processing. Unless boat arrivals quadruple, the numbers are small compared with refugees seeking asylum in similar nations such as Canada (30,000) and Britain (34,000). When deaths at sea occur, that is of course tragic, but it is their risk to take with their lives, and I understand why they take it. Asylum-seekers who do settle in this country, have gone on to be contributing citizens, which is hardly surprising given the enterprise they showed in getting here.

Political leaders should reflect the mood and attitude of the public they serve, but from time to time they should also lead by example and try to shift public opinion. I believe this is just such an issue and just such a time. But I respect the will of the majority if it won't buckle from an alternative view, which is where we appear to have ended up in this debate.

It would be nice if the polarising attitudes on the Left and Right took a similar tolerance to differences of opinion in this debate. After all, if education (worldly or from books) teaches us anything, it is that absolute truths are hard to find. That makes being absolutely right on a polemical argument unlikely.

Peter van Onselen is a Winthrop professor at the University of Western Australia.