Sea Of Desperation

WAYNE CRAWFORD

“What is it about Australia that you think it appropriate to send a death threat to someone who’s doing something for nothing … and just trying to help a bunch of people who can’t help themselves? I will never understand what produced that response.”

Sea of Desparation

KEVIN RUDD needs to be much more circumspect in the extravagant language he uses, even when describing people smugglers.

It’s all very well for the Prime Minister to talk about them as “evil scum” who should “rot in jail and in my own view rot in hell.”

But if traffickers in human misery are, as he said, “the vilest form of human life,” what does that say about those who use people smugglers to try to find a country which will offer them refuge?

Surely it implies that the smuggled asylum-seekers are just as bad for engaging the services of the smugglers.

They aren’t, of course. It may be difficult to accept, but people smugglers _ much as they operate in a shady, ruthless trade _ are doing no more than meeting a demand which is created by a failure by Western countries such as Australia to provide legal avenues so asylum-seekers have access to speedy legal means of applying for sanctuary.

In fact they can wait for years in places like Indonesia just to get into the so-called queue, let alone be assessed. Many have seen family members die waiting. It’s hardly surprising they get so desperate they turn to traffickers.

As an Afghan refugee waiting in detention in Indonesia told ABC reporter Geoff Thompson last week as he waited for the chance to get a place on a boat to Australia, the boat people know their venture is 99 per cent risk, “but the one per cent hope is worth it,” such is the persecution and hardship they have left behind.

The Western Australian human rights group Project SafeCom made a telling point when it asked if Kevin Rudd’s “scum of the earth” definition applied to the priest who helped the von Trapp family across the Alps, the man who sold the donkey to Mary and Joseph so they could flee to Egypt with baby Jesus, and Oskar Schindler who helped smuggle Jews out of Nazi Germany.

Project SafeCom also suggests that a lot of the so-called people smugglers are not so much shady, ruthless traffickers in human misery, as impoverished Indonesian fishermen who have turned to using their boats as “people movers” to earn an income because of Australia’s hardline attitude in locking them out of their traditional fishing grounds around Ashmore Reef.

The Rudd Government has dumped the scandalously harsh policies the Howard Government adopted to capitalise on the Tampa incident which it used to great electoral advantage in 2001. Labor softened the mandatory detention policy, abandoned the so-called “Pacific Solution” used to hold refugees on offshore islands, and abolished the notoriously harsh Temporary Protection Visas (which made genuine refugees wait three years for certainty of residency). But both parties have been using the latest boat people tragedy _ in which an Indonesian fishing boat exploded killing five and leaving dozens with burns _ to show themselves as hairy-chested and tough on border protection, even if it means demonising the most helpless and disadvantaged people in the world. They have not been anywhere near as blatant about it as John Howard, but nonetheless the same resonant racist chord is struck with suggestions the borders are being breached by hoards of diseased and untrustworthy “illegals.” Just listen to talkback radio.

We need to get a sense of proportion. All this fuss about a “flood” of boat people, when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports that of the 4700 asylum claims received by Australia in 2008, just 179 were lodged by people who came by boat. The rest came by air with tourist or business visas, and applied for refugee status. But there’s something about “boat people” that somehow strikes xenophobic terror into the hearts of Australians.

The human rights and refugee advocate and barrister Julian Burnside QC, guest at the Mercury literary lunch during last year’s Tasmanian Living Writers Week, related how he received death threats when it became known he was acting pro bono for the 438 refugees picked up by the cargo ship Tampa from a disintegrating Indonesian fishing boat but then refused entry by the Howard Government.

Despite having previously done “some rather contentious matters” such as representing Alan Bond in fraud trials, Rose Porteous in numerous actions against Gina Rinehart, and the Maritime Union of Australia in the 1998 waterfront dispute against Patrick Stevedores, Burnside said the Tampa case was “the first case I’d ever done when I got death threats.”

“I started receiving death threats the day we went into court and they continued for the next couple of years,” he recalled.

Only the most desperate will brave the treacherous stretch of water in a leaky boat, trying to reach sanctuary in Australia when all other possibilities have failed. And even though 90 per cent of those who arrive by boat are found to be genuine cases deserving protection, it would be better if none came this way – not only because of the breach to Australia’s border security, but more importantly because of the threat to the lives of those who try to make the trip.

The way to slow down boat arrivals is not only to get tough on people smugglers, but to see that the increasing number of people fleeing wars, civil strife and persecution (Amnesty International estimates there are 14.2 million refugees worldwide) have access to speedy legal avenues such as temporary embassies in refugee camps and diplomatic representation in regions of war and civil strife.

Australia has, after all, only reached about a third of the Millennium Development Goal target of spending 70c of every $100 of national income on development aid projects.

Wayne Crawford From: the Mercury TUESDAY APRIL 28, 2009