To deter the boats, Australia must rule out permanent resettlement

120104 asylum seeker

THERE can be no solution to the problem of illegal immigrants/boatpeople -- neither to the humanitarian tragedy of people drowning trying to get here or the policy crisis of the government losing control of its borders and its immigration system -- until all prospect of permanent resettlement in Australia is removed for people who arrive illegally by boat.

To do this would not contradict the Refugee Convention, which people write about but never read. The only requirement in the convention is that people fleeing persecution not be sent back to the countries they are fleeing from.

In the meantime, the debate is spectacularly ill served by the false figures and false historical examples used mainly by those who favour the illegal immigrant industry.

In this paper last week, Bruce Hawker, an intelligent political analyst whose work I have learned from in the past, made the fantastic claim that "the (Malcolm) Fraser government accepted more than 150,000 refugees from these (Southeast Asian) camps". Last July, the well-known moral tribune Julian Burnside wrote in The Age: "It is easy to forget that the Fraser government received about 25,000 Indochinese boatpeople each year, without a murmur from the community."

Last Saturday, my esteemed colleague Mike Steketee wrote: "The Fraser government accepted almost 250,000 Vietnamese as refugees and migrants."

All these figures are spectacularly, stupendously wrong and their wrongness is one significant factor in why this debate has got so badly mangled.

What are the facts?

Malcolm Fraser, never one to underestimate his own contribution, states on page 421 of his memoirs that: "By the end of the Fraser government, almost 70,000 Indochinese refugees had settled in the country." There was only a tiny number of Vietnamese -- some hundreds, not more -- accepted during the Fraser government as immigrants outside the refugee program, so the Hawker, Burnside and Steketee figures simply have no basis in reality.

But let's not take Fraser's word alone on the subject of numbers.

Last year I got the Immigration Department to dig out its refugee records. From 1975 to the end of 1983 (Fraser was defeated at the beginning of 1983), refugees in all categories accepted into Australia totalled 78,000.

The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins says that from June 1975 to June 1985, a total of 79,000 people from Vietnam arrived in Australia under all programs.

In the National Archives of Australia, the figure for Vietnamese coming to Australia from 1976 to 1982 is 58,000. On the government website Australia and the Vietnam War, it says that in the 10 years from 1976, in total about 94,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos settled in Australia.

These facts are important for two reasons. One is that facts are always important. There is, or should be, no escaping the tyranny of facts. Australia is a disgracefully slack country about facts. Public figures routinely get central facts astoundingly wrong and are seldom pulled up about it and it never seems to hurt their credibility.

Participants in this debate should provide sources for their figures.

Secondly, the distortion of these facts is used to paint a dishonest and exaggerated contrast between the alleged goodness of Australians in the Fraser years and our alleged wickedness today. In any event, the Fraser government's response to Indochinese refugees holds no lessons today because the situations are so different and because Australia already implements the best and only useful lessons from the Indochinese episode.

Under Fraser, only about 2000 refugees arrived directly by boat in Australia. In opposition, Fraser had called only for a "small number" of Vietnamese to be accepted here. The Vietnamese, it goes without saying, have made wonderful citizens and it is a joy for Australia that they came here. Fraser was far less proactive in the resettlement policy than he claims. It was essentially an American operation designed to pay a war debt to our South Vietnamese allies. But apart from the 2000 direct boat arrivals, all the refugees Australia settled were screened and chosen in refugee camps, a long way from Australia, by Australian officials.

Australia has continued this practice ever since. We are one of very few countries to offer permanent resettlement places voluntarily. We accept 13,750 each year under this program. Under John Howard's prime ministership, we accepted far more refugees than we did under Fraser or indeed under Gough Whitlam. Hawker, Burnside or Steketee might have commented that under Howard we accepted more than 10,000 refugees a year without any community disquiet.

This is because Australians, now as under Fraser or under Howard, will generously support the orderly intake of people processed and selected by Australian officials under Australian laws. What they rightly don't like is people self selecting to immigrate to Australia by showing up in boats, having thrown away their documents, and refusing to go home under any circumstances.

The refugee situation after the Vietnam War bears no similarities to the situation today. The Vietnamese boatpeople were an authentic regional crisis, generated within our own region, and the US-led international effort to resettle them was supported by countries across the region. It was called the Comprehensive Plan of Action.

However, and this is critically important, it also led to its own bitter denouement. At first, in my view, all, or almost all, the Indochinese boatpeople were genuine refugees. But as the years wore on, the existence of the CPA set up its own perverse incentives. It became a good way to migrate from Vietnam to the US, Australia, Canada or France. Communist officials, the sons and daughters of communist officials, apolitical people who faced no particular persecution, all started jumping on boats, because the reward of life in the West was so great.

Far from being a sound permanent mechanism, the CPA had to be abolished amid great bitterness for those left in camps, many of whom had to be repatriated.

There is a similar complete popular misjudgment about the desperation of boatpeople. Many people in miserable countries are indeed desperate to live in rich countries. They will take great risks to achieve this. That does not mean they face persecution of a kind that would make them genuine refugees. As the American author Christopher Caldwell has argued, the vast majority of those who went to Europe from North Africa and the Middle East as asylum-seekers were not refugees in the normal meaning of the word. Nor were they traditional migrants who wanted to become Europeans. Rather, they wanted to maintain their Islamic lifestyle, with its distinctive norms and communal customs, but to do so at a European standard of living, courtesy of the European welfare state and financed by the European taxpayer.

With the collapse of offshore processing, boatpeople arriving at 1000 a month, the courts consistently wrecking government policy, and the breaking of the government's will by organised violence in the detention centres, Australia has now become an extremely soft touch for determined illegal immigration, with full welfare and citizenship rights guaranteed at the end of the process. It's a policy disaster we need to fix quickly.