43.7 million displaced: a reality beyond politics

Today is World Refugee Day and while we continue to bicker about a few thousand refugees arriving by boat to Australia, the UNHCR 2010 Global Trends report released today reveals that four-fifths of the world’s refugees are currently being hosted by developing countries.

Pakistan, Iran, and Syria have the largest refugee populations at 1.9 million, 1.1 million, and 1 million respectively.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, said in a statement: ‘Fears about supposed floods of refugees in industrialised countries are being vastly overblown or mistakenly conflated with issues of migration. Meanwhile it’s poorer countries that are left having to pick up the burden.’

But during Refugee Week in Australia it is a safe bet that our politicians will be more focused on their own political needs than the suffering of the now 43.7 million people displaced worldwide. The Gillard Government will continue to carve out its policy to send women, men and children back to Malaysia and Opposition immigration spokesperson Scott Morrison says he will fly over to Malaysia himself.

But Morrison won’t be there to look for better protection and resettlement options for the more than 90,000 refugees now in Malaysia. He will instead be trying to score political points against the Australian Government while he canes one of our larger trading partners – trade between Malaysia and Australia stood at $14.3 billion in 2009.

Gillard’s policies on asylum seekers are turning Labor voters away in droves and many Liberal voters were squirming last week as Morrison and his leader took us wading into the gutter on their trip to Nauru, a country with a population about the size of Gympie or Benalla, Bowral, Ulladulla, or Torquay.

It was back in 2001 when Nauru started detaining Australia’s asylum seekers but it was only last week, 10 years later, that the Nauruan government got around to signing the Refugee Convention (and we’ll have to take their word on that as the forms apparently haven’t yet been lodged). And why have they done it now? Not because they care about the plight of refugees – they don’t have any refugees coming over their borders – but in order to shower more contempt upon the current Australian Government.

The Nauruan government is fond of telling anyone who will listen that it is only trying to help the Australian Government. But the communications must have gone down again in Nauru because they don’t seem to be hearing the message of ‘we don’t want your help’ that our government keeps sending.

Never before can I remember a Pacific neighbour trying so hard to embarrass our government, and our country, or one that has colluded so blatantly to try to install its preferred political party into office in Australia. It is embarrassing to watch and it cannot bode well for future generations of Nauruans that their current leaders are heaping so much disdain on their largest aid donor.

On my many visits to Nauru between 2005 and 2008 I was very supportive of Nauruan people and their country. But not now. Not when they have shown themselves so willing to say and do anything for a buck. Not when they are pushing so hard to create their very own industry for locking up the most downtrodden people of the world.

The Nauruan government and Australia’s Opposition keep telling us about the open camp arrangements in Nauru but the Nauruans have never allowed large numbers of asylum seekers to roam around their island and it is unlikely they ever would in the future.

It wasn’t even until early 2005 that the first asylum seekers were …

Read the rest on The Drum HERE

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