Oz Politics

Since Tampa ?

John Quiggin23 Comments

I’ve noticed numerous statements lately to the effect that the number of asylum-seekers dropped to zero after the Tampa incident, usually with the implication that the associated policies were tough but effective. Those who want to use this argument should be honest about their history. The Tampa was seized in August 2001. There were plenty of boats after that, including SIEV-4, which was at the centre of the “children overboard” incident. The event that brought the whole process to a halt was the sinking of SIEV-X in October 2001, with the loss of 353 lives.

Most of the Tampa asylum-seekers were eventually recognised as refugees, and many made it to Australia in the end. It wasn’t the use of Pacific islands as detention camps, but the willingness of the government to turn back unseaworthy boats, reaffirmed after the SIEV-X tragedy, that ended the flow of asylum seekers. This policy, reinforced by the lesson of SIEV-X, had the desired effect. That doesn’t make it any less shameful.

More on asylum-seekers from Andrew Bartlett, Tim Dunlop, Nicholas Gruen and Ken Parish

23 thoughts on “Since Tampa ?”

  1. Is that actually right, John? I’ve heard the view put that in fact the supply dried up – particularly from Afghanistan. In other words, if refugee movements as a whole were no longer significant, then the policy probably made no difference either way.

  2. The overthrow of the Taliban (Dec 2001) reduced both the flow of refugees and the likelihood of being granted asylum. I imagine that if this hadn’t happened, some new route would have probably opened up. But the flow of boats had stopped before this.

  3. This is largely a perception thing – the sample sizes before and after are so small as to render much analysis pure guesswork – the australian government’s rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. It is hardly something to be proud of in any event. It’s no great claim to fame the boast that those in need of asylum no longer considered Australia as a place of refuge.

    The removal of the Taliban, of course, also stopped a lot of the persecution of the Hazara who were the ethnic group fleeing. And as for Shia Iraqis who were the other group coming here, the USA invasion disrupted both the Baathist repression and the opportunity to flee as the airports and roads became more dangerous than staying put.

    I am guessing that Indonesia agreed to disrupt the boats at the embarkation points in Indonesia after suitable quid pro quo back in 2002.

    Post 911 all sorts of things have changed with regards to the free movement of people from that part of the world.

  4. Not convincing, JQ.

    SIEV X departed Indonesia and foundered during the same weekend that SIEV 6 was being taken under escort by the HMAS Arunta to Christmas Island. That was around 20 – 21 October 2001.

    On the 22nd, SIEV 7 (notable for the escalating use of violence by the passengers, and the fact that a child was, indeed, turfed overboard by an adult passenger) was intercepted in the vicinity of Ashmore Reef.

    SIEV 8 of 27 October was a Vietnamese effort, and is thus probably not relevant to this discussion.

    SIEV 9 of 31 October was intercepted off of Ashmore Reef. The passengers were transported to Christmas Island.

    SIEV 10 of 08 November 2001 was intercepted near Ashmore Reef, before sabotage by the passengers led to a fire and the loss of two lives.

    SIEV 11 of 01 Dec 2001 was intercepted off of Ashmore Reef, and successfully returned to Indonesia several days later.

    SIEV 12 of 16 Dec 2001 was also intercepted off of Ashmore Reef and returned to Indonesia.

    The role of SIEV X in your argument is unclear. I have seen many claims, but little evidence, proclaiming that this one event was critical in slowing the activities of the criminal syndicates recklessly dispatching their clients on leaky boats bound for Australia. As you later alluded to, it was the successful turnarounds of SIEVs 11 and 12 that really put paid to the callous smugglers specialising in the maritime endangerment of their clients. I fail to see how this supports the contention that the foundering of SIEV X in the vicinity of the Sunda Straits was the ‘event that brought the whole process to a halt’.

    There is an undertone of “When did you stop beating your wife?” to this post, JQ. The argument that SIEV X was so crucial to the government’s success in the battle against maritime people smuggling sounds at best like a sour grapes search for a cloud to the silver lining of shutting down the people smugglers. At worst, it lends comfort to those who have spread malicious scuttlebutt and vile innuendo about the good men and women who do the difficult and sometimes dangerous job of protecting our borders.

    As for you, WBB, look at this Immigration fact sheet:

    http://www.immi.gov.au/facts/74a_boatarrivals.htm

    It would suggest that the ‘sample sizes’ underlying maritime people smuggling were hardly ‘so small’ as to render any analysis ‘guesswork’.

  5. The Government is happy to take credit for both detention and the turning back of boats. Don’t forget it was the excision legislation that made the latter possible in several cases. Howard is very proud of that, and continues to taunt Labor for having initially opposed it.

  6. Al, I don’t see how any of the evidence you’ve presented supports your case. Your continuous reliance on overheated rhetoric suggests that you’re aware of this also.

  9. The supply tunnel for people smuggling is long and winding. I imagine that the delivery end is driven by perceptions that are months, if not years, old.

    News of the irksomeness of Howard’s interception, Pacific solution and excision policies probably took some time to run up the tunnel.

    If accurate knowledge of the dangers and inconveniences of illegal entry into Australia was a factor in slowing down movement, this state of affairs is in marked contrast to the sorry situation on the US-Mexican border. In this case, thousands flock there from all over Latin America seemingly almost entirely ignorant of the harsh conditions and dangers accompanying crossing into the US.

    WBB’s point about the consequences of the removal of the Taliban is also cogent.

  11. We’ve no way really of knowing what stopped the flow – deterrence, Indonesian co-operation or the overthrow of the Taliban are all candidates, and none are mutually exclusive.

    My own view is that the government in 2002 probably did what it should have done in the first place – that is, send someone with a suitcase full of dollars to the embarkation points in Indonesia. The local law enforcement agencies certainly seemed to have a marked increase in zeal about that time.

  12. Pr Q is using selective history to continue his Howard-hatred.

    It wasn’t the use of Pacific islands as detention camps, but the willingness of the government to turn back unseaworthy boats, reaffirmed after the SIEV-X tragedy, that ended the flow of asylum seekers. This policy, reinforced by the lesson of SIEV-X, had the desired effect. That doesn’t make it any less shameful.

    The Howard government did not “turn back” the SIEV-X, it never made it to our waters. This boat came on due to the decisions of people smugglers and rogue officers of the Indonesian government who were responsible for the disaster. This is the word of the survivors themselves:
    Refugees blame people smugglers in boat tragedy

    Most of them blamed the traffickers, who they claimed to have forced them at gun point to board the unseaworthy boat despite their protests over its obviously poor condition.

    Howard put a stop to this illegal and unsafe trade. He warned the organizers of such boats to not make the hazardous journey. Had his advice been taken, and his border protection laws been more generally observed, the tragedy would not have happened. But other parties – for a variety of financial, political and moral reasons – were happy to let the traffick continue regardless of consequence.

    During the nineties there were numerous unauthorised and unseaworthy vessels transiting Asia to Australia. Many of these sunk without trace, with the scores of drowned people eliciting little protest from Australia.

    Many were coming from Southern China where about 300 million people are in the process of emigration. Noone from the Left-Wets bothers to ask themeselves the question of what would happen if a large fraction of this demographic decided to set to sea.

    After Howard’s “repulsion” stragegy these boats stopped coming and hundreds of people who were going to make the trip were not drowned. Howard’s draconian policy therefore saved hundreds of lives. But you wont hear the Left-Wets giving him credit for that, nor for his vital role in liberating Timor or helping Afghanistan. This would be politically unsound.

    In any case, talking about alien settlement issues in the absence of the broader political and historical context is absurd and misleading. There is a global spread of this traffick which has to be dealt with in a rational and orderly manner, rather than adhoc screening and repulsion of people smugglers.

    Also, since the seventies and the collapse of the union movement, the Wet-Left has tried to make ethnic, rather than economic, issues the basis for domestic electoral support. The political organization of migrants and refugees into branch-stacking fodder and welfare clienteles are part of that strategy.

    This strategy, if not nipped in the bud, is a potential disaster of the first order – see the Holocaustic history of ethnic political conflict. Or look at the Dutch.

    The Australian political system must not be allowed to evolve from a class- to an clan-based party alignment. Australians do not want their government to wind up like the US, or ME, where ethnic groups battle for the control of the state spoils (ie “multiculturalism”). If our political culture takes more than a few steps down that path we are all doomed.

    In order to have a race-neutral multi-ethnic society we need a settlement program based on mono-cultural civic settlement.

  13. Andrew Norton’s suggestion (also made in the SMH article he links to) that the number of onshore asylum applications dropping dramatically is in part due to mandatory detention simply makes no sense. The vast majority of onshore asylum seekers are not subjected to detention, because they came on a valid visa (usually some form of visitor visa) and seek asylum after they get here. This type of onshore asylum seeker has never been subject to detention (mandatory or otherwise) – they reside in the community, often for years, while their claim is assessed. It is in fact another example of the total lack of any policy or logical consistency in the mandatory detention policy, as there is no reason why one group of asylum seekers should be locked up indefintely while another (who are statistically less likely to end being found to be refugees) is never locked up at all.

    The drop in this number is due to tighter criteria on who gets issued visas and who gets on to planes in other (esp S-E Asian) countries.

    The drop in asylum seekers world wide since 2001 is also considerable – see the voluminous stats at http://www.unhcr.ch for details. As one example, the proportion of asylum seekers in New Zealand has dropped just as much as it has in Australia over that time, with few of Australia’s extra restrictions (apart from better controls on who boards at foreign airports). I’m actually surprised that the Govt doesn’t use these stats more, as they provide at least one positive justification for the military attacks on Afghanistan (which I supported) and Iraq (which I didn’t), but I guess if they did that it would reinforce the fact that the drop in asylum seekers isn’t to do with mandatory detention.

  14. James Farrell hits the nail on the head, here. We had detention before, during and after the boats. Mandatory detention has nothing to do with anything. It is merely an inhumane system that is a blight on our “monocultural civic-settlement”.

  15. And Andrew Bartlett hits it too, despite ignoring the precedent of the Holocaust, although he does have evidence and numbers.

  17. wbb Says: June 4th, 2005 at 1:09 am

    Mandatory detention has nothing to do with anything. It is merely an inhumane system

    Man-Det is an inhumanse system, as is the Pacific Solution. But so is the people smuggling trade. What would the Left-Wets do about that? Nothing, it appears. I guess all the Howard-haters here are fine with Australian authorities passively accepting a high flow of unlawful and unseaworthy people smuggling boats, with all the hundreds of drownings that entails over the long term.

    This is a strange kind of humanitarianism. (We dont take this ideological attitude towards life-threatening risks when road carnage is the issue.)

    If the Left-Wet were serious about caring for legitimate asylum-seekers they would press the government to establish a more pro-active refugee processing system at points of departure rather than arrival. But I havent heard many constructive suggestins from them about this, which accounts for my cynicism about their (political-rather-than-moral) motives.

    Most Australians are fine with people of different races coming here to better themselves or to flee tyranny. But the process of inducting and settling aliens should be lawful and according to utilitarian (migrants) or humanitarian (refugee) principles. For too long this process was used to recruit more political fodder for moribund sections of the Left.

    Its time that the Left-Wets got the political message: the Australian people do not want their state to wind up like the EU, ME or US – with “multicultural” groups organised into rotten boroughs, stacked-branches and welfare clienteles by “cosmopolitan” elites. Howard, by fair means and foul, has put a stop to this rot, which is a major reason why the native populus keeps voting for him.

  18. Jack, re-read the post. I didn’t assert that the Howard government turned back SIEV-X, but that the SIEV-X tragedy did not lead the government to recoil from its policy of turning back boats regardless of the resulting risks.

  19. Jack

    There is actually a lot done and said about ways to reduce the need for people fleeing persecution to use smugglers (Refugee Council of Australia would be one group worth looking at). The trouble is that these solutions are all long-term, cooperative and can never work perfectly, so they can’t compete in political debate with the inhumane solutions that (falsely) promise quick and perfect fixes.

    The biggest beneficiary from alleviating the need for people smugglers are the asylum seekers, so I’m all for taking the preventative approach, or addressing the “push factors” in DIMIA jargon. But just putting up a barbed wire fence here doesn’t do that, it just pushes people elsewhere, which doesn’t help them at all (and can easily make it worse).

    The irony is that some of the things the Australian Government has done have been quite positive in this area, but they have been overshadowed and sometimes undermined by their ‘tow ’em back or lock ’em up’ policy.

    The funding by Australia of a UNHCR office in Indonesia to assess claims and assist with relocation is a very positive move which has undoubtedly had some effect. Our reluctance to resettle more of these refugees ourselves and thus leave some of them in insecure limbo in Indonesia for long periods undercuts this somewhat.

    Our country’s long history of taking a decent number of refugees through an organised resettlement program is something to be proud of and to be promoted around the world (although we shouldn’t kid ourselves this is the same as an orderly ‘queue’ or that the selection criteria is based solely on who is most in need). However, the fact is that other countries know this has always been a lot easier for us than most other places because we do not share land borders with other countries – for a country like ours with such a relatively small flow of asylum seekers to be pushing them back and treating them so appallingly severely undermines our efforts to encourage other countries to also adopt a refugee resttlement program when they have to cope with asylum seekers arriving in their countries in numbers far in excess of what Australia has ever experienced.

  20. Ender,

    I believe it is you that need to consult your APH websites a little more carefully. The link you point out states that “No children were thrown overboard from SIEV 4.” Trouble is that I never claimed that was the case. I said the child was thrown overboard off of SIEV 7.

    See, for example, http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/maritime_incident_ctte/report/f04.doc

    “1.38 SIEV 7 was notable as a child was dropped overboard by a woman aboard. Those on the vessel also seemed to be aware of the return of SIEV 5 to Indonesia, the first boat to be so returned.
    1.39 The boat had been intercepted by the HMAS Bunbury in the vicinity of Ashmore Island on the morning of 22 October. When a boarding party approached the vessel and attempted to give a ‘Notice to Master and Crew’ one man aboard the SIEV dived overboard. Another is reported to have held up a young girl and ‘threatened to throw this child over the side of the vessel’. The child appeared to be aged 4-5 years, and had a cast on one arm. She was noticeably distressed.
    1.40 The SIEV was escorted to anchor in Ashmore Lagoon, where eight irate passengers created a disturbance and demanded to know their destination, apparently aware of the return to Indonesia of SIEV 5. On 24 October a further incident occurred, with fifteen people jumping into the water.
    1.41 Two members of the boarding party have made sworn statements that a small child was held over the side by a woman passenger, then dropped into the water. The child was recovered by one of the male passengers already in the water, who bought the child back to the SIEV. All of those who entered the water were safely returned to the SIEV.”

    There are numerous references to this incident if you care to Google on it:

    http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22siev+7%22+child+overboard&meta=

    So, no retraction, but a bit of free advice to open your eyes a bit wider.

    And, JQ, perhaps I didn’t make my point clearly enough. The boats kept coming after SIEV X, and it was not until a couple of boatloads actually got turned back to Indonesia that the reality set in – that is, people smugglers really couldn’t deliver the ‘service’ they claimed.

    Anyway, according to UNHCR figures, something like 5000 asylum seekers have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Italy over the past decade or so. Still they come. So why would a single tragedy like SIEV X stem the tide in our region?

  21. Al
    I don’t think this is a crucial debate, except for the fact that some people seem determined to insist that a child was ‘thrown overboard’ as a way of somehow proving the fiendishness of the refugees, which of course was what John Howard’s original intent was.

    However, as the testimony you quote says, the child on SIEV 7 was “dropped”, not “thrown”. This is relevant in so far as it goes to intent – as in was the intent to harm or drown (as Mr Howard was clearly suggesting). It is fairly clear to me from the surrounding context that the people on board were trying to ensure that at least the child was rescued by the Navy and taken to safety, rather than be left on the unsafe boat and threatened with being returned to an unsafe situation.

    None of this suggests that all asylum seekers are saints. However, nor does it take much imagination to wonder what panic and hysteria might do with a heavily overcrowded, barely seaworthy boat, packed with women and children, in the middle of the ocean, filled with genuine refugees who have risked everything to escape serious persecution, faced with armed military officers boarding their boats and trying to turn them away from potential safety.

    The reason why “chidren overboard” has got such currency is not so much that is was demonstrably wrong (and as I’ve mentioned even the SIEV 7 example is equivocal), but firstly that the story was spread with such immediacy and ferocity in a deliberate attempt to falsely vilify, and secondly that the real truth was then consciously covered up.

    I’m sure SIEV X had some impact as a disincentive, but is far from the whole reason the boats stopped coming. However, the shadowy world of our disruption programs in Indonesia still deserve a proper open investigation (another cover-up of the Howard Government).

    There is one thing that is beyond reasonable dispute about the SIEV X though – the boat would never have had so many children (146 drowned) and women (142 dead) on board were it not for the introduction of temporary protection visas in 1999 (supported by the ALP) which was specifically and conciously aimed at keeping families separated – thus forcing the whole family to take the dangerous journey if they wanted to stay together.

  22. Andrew Bartlett is correct: mandatory detention is not directly linked to the reduction in on-shore applications, as these people remain in the community. The principal change affecting these people was the introduction of the temporary protection visa scheme, which made asylum a less appealing prospect if they got it, together with a general crackdown on bogus applications (which is more at the level of bureaucratic culture than legislative change, although the privative clause limiting judicial appeal certainly helped).

    Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that the combined policies of continued mandatory detention for illegal arrivals, offshore processing (the Pacific Solution) and enhanced border protection, temporary protection visas, reduced judicial review and cuts to asylum-seekers’ access to the welfare state have done a great deal to halt applications, both on-shore and off-shore.

    Australia is no longer seen as a “soft-touch” destination, which affects not only those arriving here illegally, but also those who would otherwise have tried to come here on bona fide visas and then seek asylum.

  23. This blog is a fine example of how otherwise intelligent people can get side tracked into arguing minutia while being blogged down in dogma.

    Boats were turned back, people’s lives were put at risk, Asutralia looks tough, the flow of asylum seakers has been stemmed.

    Shame on everyone who supports this, and shame on an immigration minister who lacks either the wit or creativity to deal with the issue in any other way.

    One question, Do you feel that labeling people with silly terms like “Howard Haters” will in some way add some moral weight to your argument ?

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