Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

The post The Lebers, a family of ratbags appeared first on Inside Story.

That attitude was by no means universal. Others in Germany had no interest in smooth management of the influx. Some even took to the streets to demand Germany’s borders be closed and asylum seekers already in the country expelled. When it comes to accommodating people seeking Germany’s protection, we in Germany have remained bitterly divided.

Politicians, particularly those on the right, frequently decry a division that extends well beyond attitudes towards refugees and call for policies to reunite Germany. Often, they simply mean that the government ought to give in to their demands: by closing Germany’s borders to migrants (at least to those who hail from outside Europe or are Muslims), for example, or by indefinitely allowing Germans to drive petrol-fuelled cars and rely on oil and gas heaters, or by discontinuing the official use of gender-neutral language, or by appeasing Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The Scholz government has been sufficiently concerned about the electoral impact of the little that’s left of its reformist agenda that it too has vowed to heal the rift bemoaned by the naysayers, whose mantra seems to be: “Wir schaffen das nicht.”

Much less attention has been paid to another fault line that is both imagined and very real: between residents who consider themselves genuine Germans, on the one hand, and those who are, or descend from, migrants, on the other. Even those who said “Wir schaffen das” with Merkel rarely imagined an inclusive “we” that encompassed migrants and non-migrants. The “we” Merkel conjured in her famous line would have included the Germans flocking to railway stations to hand out teddy bears to Syrian children, but not those children and their parents.

In fact, “we” often doesn’t even include migrants who settled in Germany many years ago. They supposedly don’t belong, because they aren’t German citizens, don’t speak “proper” German, are of the wrong faith or don’t look the part.

Or because they don’t share “our” history. At least that perceived shortcoming can be easily remedied. Whether migrants are an integral part of Germany’s history and have played a crucial role in shaping today’s society is a matter of interpretation. All that’s required for a shared history is a persuasive narrative.

Jan Plamper, who previously wrote mainly about twentieth-century Russia — his doctoral dissertation examined Stalin’s personality cult — and the history of emotions, has offered such a narrative. Four years ago he published a book about postwar Germany as a country of immigration, and he has now translated that book into English.

The German edition was titled Das neue Wir: Warum Migration dazugehört — Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen (“The New We: Why Migration Is Part of It — An Alternative History of the Germans”). His English publisher opted for a very different title, which is no less provocative but in my view misses the point of the book: We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany.

No, we in Germany are not all migrants, although many of us emigrated, particularly in the nineteenth century, and although close to one in four of us has at least one parent who wasn’t born a German citizen. Plamper opens with a prologue of sorts about German emigration, but other than that his book begins at the end of the second world war. Was Germany already a multicultural nation in the 1950s? Hardly. Even today, large swathes of rural and regional East Germany are arguably not part of “multicultural Germany.”

We Are All Migrants is not a history of postwar Germany with a particular focus on its migration history. Nor is it a comprehensive chronological account of immigration and of migrants in Germany. Plamper decided to focus on some aspects: the resettlement of ethnic Germans fleeing or expelled from Eastern Europe, including Germany’s former eastern provinces, in the aftermath of the war; labour migration to West Germany; labour migrants in East Germany; the so-called Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and Central Asia (in the last two decades of the twentieth century alone, more than three million Aussiedler and their families settled in the Federal Republic); Jewish migrants from the Soviet Union and its successor states; and the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16. Two additional chapters provide snapshots of Germany in 1945 and 1989 respectively.

Other possible chapters could have featured the Romanians and Bulgarians who accounted for one out of five new immigrants before the intensification of Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022, or the 3.8 million citizens of the German Democratic Republic who settled in the Federal Republic between 1949 and 1990, or the Indochinese “boat people” resettled in Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or the Bosnian nurses who helped to keep the German hospitals afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But I’m not taking issue with Plamper’s selection of cases. That it partly reflects his earlier specialisation as a historian of the Soviet Union is appropriate, because We Are All Migrants is also a highly personal book. It mentions Plamper’s father, an ethnic German who was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1946 and later, after he retired in 2011, taught German to refugees. Plamper’s daughter Olga, who grew up speaking Russian and moved to Germany when she was eleven, features too. When once, while the family was living in Berlin, asked by her father what nationality she identifies with, she replied “Ausländerin natürlich,” meaning “of course” she considered herself a foreigner living in Germany.

We Are All Migrants is also a personal book in the sense that it features the lives of individual migrants. Among them are Hassan Ali Djan, who fled Afghanistan aged sixteen, Ibraimo Alberto, a Mozambique-born former labour migrant in East Germany, and the Spanish “guest worker” Carlos Pérez. Their stories, as well as the author’s own, contribute to the book’s readability. So does its prose.

Often non-fiction suffers when it is rendered into English because long sentences that read well in German can appear convoluted. Not in this case, because Plamper’s German is that of somebody who for many years has worked in an English-speaking environment. His writing is economical and engaging. Both the German original and the English translation are a pleasure to read.

Plamper is optimistic about the viability of what he calls a “New We” made up of both migrants (“PlusGermans”) and non-migrants. I suspect two factors contribute to his optimism: the impression left by the Willkommenskultur, Germany’s welcoming culture of 2015, was still fresh when he completed Das neue Wir, and he wrote as an outsider who hadn’t lived in Germany for many years and was teaching in Britain. I found his optimism endearing and the vision of a new Germany informed by it appealing.

In the English edition, too, Plamper lets his history end in 2018. I suppose the past five years would have provided him with more grounds for optimism. Since February 2022, Germany has accommodated more than a million refugees from Ukraine without much fuss. Optimism helps us to envision alternative futures, and that may be reason enough to focus on success stories. Yet I don’t entirely share Plamper’s optimism — for four reasons.

First, he may underestimate the disillusionment of “PlusGermans” about the willingness of non-migrant Germans and government institutions to respect and protect migrants. True, hundreds of thousands of people attended the candle-lit demonstrations against xenophobia held in 1992 and 1993 after migrants had died in arson attacks, but these rallies weren’t able to stop the racist violence. Nor were they accompanied by legislation to allow all long-term residents to vote and make it easier for migrants to become citizens.

When the terrorist group National Socialist Underground, or NSU, murdered a policewoman and nine migrants between 2000 and 2006, the police focused their suspicions on associates and family rather than far-right terrorists. Only after two of the perpetrators committed suicide did the police conclude that the murders were related and had all been motivated by racist hatred.

Only last month, in the city-state of Hamburg, the ruling Social Democrats and Greens once again decided against setting up a parliamentary inquiry into the handling of the investigation into the murder of the Hamburg greengrocer Süleyman Taşköprü by members of the NSU in 2001. The response to the NSU murders, by the state but also by society at large, has disabused many migrants of the idea that it’s easy to become part of Germany.

Second, Merkel’s departure paved the way for the return of conservative ideologues who argue that migrants need to adapt to German values. Her Christian Democrats are now led by Friedrich Merz, who in 2000 had initiated a debate about the need for migrants to adhere to a Leitkultur, a set of allegedly essential German values and principles. Merz’s resurrection marks not only a shift to the right by Germany’s largest party but also a validation of an ethno-nationalism that pretends to be culturally determined, and a return to debates about parallel societies and migrants as welfare bludgers.

Third, the demand for more rights and the discourse against racism are now too often couched in the terms of identity politics — which, incidentally, also inform far-right discourses about Germanness. Calls for social justice seem to have gone out of fashion. And the focus is too often on symbolic gestures. What’s the point of avoiding terms with racist connotations when the historical injustice they represent is not dealt with?

Fourth, migrants remain disadvantaged. It’s true that it is now easier for them to take out German citizenship than it was, say, thirty years ago. It also true that the immigration of large numbers of Syrians since 2014 and Ukrainians since 2022 has not met with the same hysterical response as the arrival of refugees from former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. And yes, migrants do play an increasingly prominent role in Germany, even in German politics. But Plamper’s “PlusGermans” tend to be poorer than non-migrant Germans and, even more concerning, second-generation migrants still typically lag behind their non-migrant peers.

In their 2015 book Strangers No More, Richard Alba and Nancy Foner compared the long-term disadvantages of people with a migrant history in Canada, the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany. Germany’s report card was particularly poor, even when compared with the three other European countries. Alba and Foner found that “the chance of a German native obtaining some level of post-secondary education was about three times that of a youth from a Turkish immigrant family.” That’s not least because the highly stratified German school system favours children from native German-speaking families.

This is where another recent book, Betiel Berhe’s Nie mehr leise: Die neue migrantische Mittelschicht (“No Longer Quiet: The New Migrant Middle Class”), comes in. Berhe, the daughter of Eritrean refugees, grew up in West Germany. Her book is concerned with class prejudices and class-based structural inequalities as well as with racism. She knows from first-hand experience how rarely migrant children are promoted to the Gymnasium, the German high school, and how the school system reproduces inequality.

Berhe is impatient and angry. She has little time for a well-meaning white middle class unwilling to give up its privileges, and she mounts a spirited defence of identity politics. But she also concedes that the issue is not whether identity politics divides society, but what kind of identity politics produces a more just society in which everybody has the chance to participate meaningfully. Such a society, she says, would eventually make identity politics redundant.

She is sick and tired of being invited to “sit at the table,” for that table no longer fits. “True change will only happen,” she writes, “if we smash the old table that’s much too small, to make room for a new large table that can accommodate everyone.”

Nie Mehr Leise is a reality check for Plamper’s “success story.” But Berhe too is an optimist. And, like Plamper, she imagines a new “we.” Her starting point is not an imagined community of non-migrants and “PlusGermans”; it is those “who feel how I feel.” And that’s not where the story ought to end, she says: “We: that’s all those who demand that all forms of structural discrimination, repression and exploitation are abolished.”

Berhe’s book is trying to lay the groundwork for the formation of a new “we” by enabling Germans other than women of colour to empathise and extend their solidarity — and not to stop there: “True solidarity would mean that we demand a distinctly different society for everybody, us included.”

Plamper and Berhe occupy privileged positions in the knowledge economy. He holds the chair of history at the University of Limerick; she is an economist who, according to the bio in her book, “gives talks, runs workshops and provides advice about issues of migration, (anti-)racism, diversity and education.” The author of a third recent book has never attended high school, is a poet and trained mechanic, and owns a small publishing company that he subsidises by working occasionally as a forklift driver.

Dinçer Güçyeter’s book Unser Deutschlandmärchen (which means “Our Fairytale about Germany” more than “Our German Fairytale”) has just won the Leipzig Book Fair’s prize for fiction, one of Germany’s most highly regarded literary awards. And while some observers were surprised by the shortlisting of a book from a publisher hardly anybody knew about, and written by an author who thus far had only published poetry, those who have read the book have expressed nothing but praise.

“The novel… lets the words soar into the sky, but is also attentive to the humiliations on the ground,” the judges of the Leipzig award wrote. “Dinçer Güçyeter catches stories with a net that’s more finely woven than a butterfly net… and has gifted us a polyphonic novel whose poetic chorus will reverberate.“

Please note the first person plural pronoun in the title of Güçyeter’s book, too. It refers to just two people: the author and his mother Fatma, a Turkish-born woman who in 1965 joined her husband, a Turkish labour migrant, in Germany, where their son Dinçer was born fourteen years later. The book is the story of Fatma’s and Dinçer’s lives, told by an author impersonating both of his characters.

“You have always shrouded your longing in silence. You thought that way nobody could see through you, nobody could hurt you,” Dinçer tells Fatma. “You see, years later your son tries to turn your silence into literature, ponders, rages, searches, loses…” Güçyeter is generous enough to share with his readers not just the result of his searches but also the searching. And we also learn about his anger — an anger that at times appears even more deep-seated than Berhe’s.

But Unser Deutschlandmärchen is not an angry book. It is often heartbreakingly sad but told in a way that makes sometimes make the reader laugh, albeit uneasily. This contradiction is in the nature of fairytales, which often hide unspeakable violence inside an enchanted world where all live happily ever after.

Güçyeter’s novel is a story of coming to terms: with living in a strange country (in the case of Fatma); with growing up and not conforming to society’s expectations of masculinity (in the case of Dinçer). Neither the author nor his mother always copes well with the challenges thrown in their paths. But then, it’s just a fairy tale, where bad things happen and all ends well.

The book is unusual because of Güçyeter’s mastery of poetic language. It’s also unusual because of its format: a novel that’s not fiction, illustrated by — unfortunately poorly reproduced — photographs that make it resemble a family album, with the author writing in the first person, with that person being at times a guy named Dinçer and sometimes a woman named Fatma.

In his conclusion to We Are All Migrants, Jan Plamper writes that he used to assume, as “an internationalist of the Left,” that a collective national identity was unnecessary. He has since changed his mind. His book is a “plea for a collective identity.” He advocates a “national New We” because he believes it’s important to have an “effective emotional glue” and thereby meet the demand for a national German identity from non-migrants and migrants alike.

I still cringe when either of my nations’ national anthem (the German “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit” or “Advance Australia Fair”) is played, and I am uncomfortable when I see others deeply moved by the display of national symbols. Mind you, I happily barrack for the German football team — for the women’s, not the men’s — though not because they are Germans but because they play such an attractive brand of football. And yes, I did cheer on the men’s team once, but that was when Mesut Özil and Miroslav Klose were its stars — not because they were PlusGermans but because I was seduced by their artistry, their ability to read the game and their skill in befuddling their opponents.

“What it means to be German remains a blank, is still missing something elementary — new terms, concepts, and stories,” Plamper claims. Not only do I think that shouldn’t alarm us. I’m also not sure that Plamper’s diagnosis is correct — unless of course the sense of being German is necessarily tied up with a territorially bounded nation-state.

I am emotionally attached to certain German landscapes, to some German music and, particularly, to some writing in German, including Unser Deutschlandmärchen. I was moved by Güçyeter’s book. I loved the rhythm and timbre of its language. It took me to places I had never visited. The book is part of a distinctly German universe I admire and cherish, a universe so much larger than the German nation. And wouldn’t an emotional attachment to a German nation inevitably entail an attachment to the German nation-state?

Plamper embraces what he calls the “open border position.” As a historian he also knows that there is nothing natural about what the anthropologist Liisa Malkki once referred to as the “national order of things. “One day national borders will seem like a remnant from a bygone epoch, much like slavery or the exclusion of women from general elections do in the Western world,” Plamper writes. “There will be a truly universal right, a human right, of freedom of movement.”

In the meantime, for strategic reasons, ought we nurture an emotional attachment to a German nation? To offer an alternative for the Turkish Germans who, come 14 May, may save Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s bacon because they are emotionally attached to the nationalism he offers? Or to offer a less fraught option for those following PEGIDA, the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, to stop them from shouting “Absaufen! Absaufen! Absaufen!” (“Drown! Drown! Drown!”), as happened when a speaker at one of their demonstrations in 2018 referred to the German NGO Mission Lifeline, which has operated a search-and-rescue ship in the Mediterranean?

The PEGIDA followers are hardly going to be attracted by a “New We” that includes PlusGermans like Berhe and Güçyeter. They have shown little interest in defining and periodically redefining national collective identity through democratic processes — unless of course, they are promised that these processes will reflect their idea of an ethnically, if not racially, defined, homogenous nation. But let them pontificate about “we Germans” — and let us assure the targets of their racist vitriol that we in Germany do not wish to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, nor between native and non-native speakers of the language of Goethe and Güçyeter.

I am not so worried about the rift between those who demand that Germany close its borders and those who believe we ought to respond to new arrivals with hospitality and solidarity. I can’t think of a compromise position that would allow Germany to uphold the human rights of migrants and at the same time exclude people seeking its protection.

I expect that “we Germans” are deeply concerned about the nation’s apparent lack of a unity of purpose. “We in Germany,” I would like to think, are more concerned about the fact that migrants are left to drown in the Mediterranean.

Unlike Jan Plamper, I fail when trying to envisage a day when “national borders will seem like a remnant from a bygone epoch.” But after having read his book, and Berhe’s and Güçyeter’s, I too am cautiously optimistic.

Over to Dinçer Güçyeter for the last word: “We will combine the past with what’s still to come and write our own fairy tale, mother.” •

We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany
By Jan Plamper | Cambridge University Press | $43.95 | 274 pages

Nie mehr leise: Die neue migrantische Mittelschicht
By Betiel Berhe | Aufbau | €22.00 | 205 pages

Unser Deutschlandmärchen
By Dinçer Güçyeter | mikrotext | €25.00 | 213 pages

The post We in Germany appeared first on Inside Story.

A couple of days later, a nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan was reported to have badly hurt himself when he tried to climb out of a fifth-floor window of a reception centre for asylum seekers. He had panicked at around 3am when police came to his room to deport him to Croatia, where he had first entered the European Union. His fear may well have originated in experiences he had while passing through that country on the so-called Balkan route from Greece to Germany.

All three people — the two young women from Ukraine and the young man from Afghanistan — have sought refuge in Germany from countries ravaged by war. But while the women are allowed to remain in Germany until at least the end of 2023 without applying for asylum, the nineteen-year-old is prohibited even from seeking protection here. The women are employed and live in private accommodation; the young man was put up, with some 370 others, in a hostel run on behalf of the city of Hamburg.

In both cases, the European Union uses the same term, “solidarity,” to frame its response. Solidarity means that millions of Ukrainians have been allowed to settle temporarily in the twenty-seven EU member countries, and it is also the key concept underlying the EU’s common policy on asylum. But solidarity isn’t the exclusive preserve of the EU: activists campaigning against the deportation of asylum seekers have also assured the young man from Afghanistan of their solidarity.

Over the two centuries since it was first used, the English term solidarity has been “endlessly pliant,” in the words of the Swedish historian of ideas Sven-Eric Liedman. Are we perhaps talking about different kinds of solidarity here that have nothing to do with each other? Not quite. Bear with me, while I take you on a tour of European solidarity.

Solidarity is a buzzword in and around the EU’s headquarters in Brussels. A search of the European Commission’s official website, for instance, yields more than 40,000 hits for the term, and almost 4000 for the more specific “European solidarity.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, for solidarity has long been deemed a distinguishing attribute of the European project.

The term features more than a dozen times in the Treaty on European Union, which underwrites EU law. In Article 2, the treaty refers to the EU’s foundational values of “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” “These values,” adds the article, “are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”

Another key document, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, goes further. In its preamble it lists solidarity as one of four “indivisible, universal values” on which the EU has been founded (the others being human dignity, freedom and equality). The charter helps illuminate the kind of solidarity the drafters of the Treaty on European Union had in mind: the twelve articles in its “Title IV: Solidarity” deal with things like healthcare, workers’ entitlements and social security — that is, with social and economic rather than civil and political rights.

The EU also prides itself on extending its solidarity to other, less fortunate nations. In recent months, Ukraine has been a prominent recipient of European solidarity, and so too have the countries most affected by climate change. At the conclusion of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declared the conference to have “opened a new chapter on financing loss and damage” — a reference to Europe’s support for a fund to mitigate the impact of climate change — “and laid the foundations for a new method for solidarity between those in need and those in a position to help.”

Von der Leyen’s rhetoric was echoed by governments that strongly identify with the European project. German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said that “Team Germany” had travelled to Egypt to campaign “for more solidarity with the most vulnerable states.” The EU would like to be seen internationally as a “normative superpower,” a major player whose actions are informed by ethical considerations. Affording solidarity to the weak and poor is as much the result of these considerations as are criticism, censorship and punishment of nation-states whose performance runs counter to the norms and values embraced by the EU.

More important for the EU’s identity than solidarity of, among or for its residents — or solidarity with climate-affected nations or war-torn Ukraine — is the solidarity EU member states extend towards each other. Here the EU’s rhetoric has been more innovative, applying to nation-states a concept that has been more commonly used, as it is in Title V of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, to characterise relationships involving individuals.

References to such intra-EU solidarity appear in foundational texts from the 1950s. One of them — the May 1950 Schuman Declaration, incidentally published on the EU’s website under the heading “70 Years of Solidarity” — is French foreign minister Robert Schuman’s proposal for the EU’s earliest forerunner, a coal and steel community comprising France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Europe, Schumann said, would be “built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”

Schuman’s idea was picked up the following year in the preamble of the treaty establishing that community, which recognises that “Europe can be built only through practical achievements which will first of all create real solidarity.”

One apparent expression of the solidarity principle is the EU’s system of transfer payments from affluent to poor members. Croatia and Lithuania receive payments amounting to more than 4 per cent of their respective gross domestic products, and Hungary, Greece and Latvia each receive the equivalent of around 3.5 per cent of GDP. Political figures in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and elsewhere might complain that tens of billions of euros are lavished each year on poor cousins in eastern and southeastern Europe — conveniently ignoring the fact that the payments amount to less than half a per cent of the GDP of wealthy member countries — but the system is nevertheless working well.

But those payments don’t prove that the solidarity principle governs relations between member states. To understand how much heed is paid to the principle, we need to look beyond the EU’s routine budget negotiations to what happens in times of crisis.

When Greece was facing national bankruptcy during the eurozone crisis, it expected countries like Germany to cancel its debts (in much the same way as German debts had been cancelled in 1953). But the Tsipras government’s understanding of solidarity couldn’t easily be reconciled with the kind of solidarity promoted by the governments in Berlin, Paris or The Hague. Where the Greeks saw European solidarity as tantamount to debt reduction, the governments of affluent European countries insisted that solidarity involved a corresponding duty — namely, substantial cuts to the Greek budget. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble famously declared that solidarity was not a one-way street.

When Schäuble’s views eventually prevailed, I wrote in Inside Story that the outcome was “appallingly bad” not just for Greece but also for Europe. I stand by that assessment, not least because the eurozone crisis demonstrated that any aspiration the EU’s leaders may have had for the “real solidarity” envisaged by its founders remained just that: an aspiration. It did not translate into action. Schuman had a valid point when he suggested that inter-state solidarity doesn’t miraculously materialise but rather is created by means of “concrete achievements.”

Solidarity among member states is not just about money. It is also about sharing other resources — medicines and intensive care beds during the Covid pandemic, for example. Here, too, member states’ performance has rarely matched their lofty rhetoric. During the early days of the pandemic, Germany and France were roundly and for good reason condemned for imposing export bans rather than sharing their (admittedly meagre) supplies of masks and ventilators.

Sharing electricity or fossil fuels during the current energy crisis could also be evidence of solidarity among member states. But will they really be prepared to help each other out during winter rather than reserve resources for their own use? In Germany, the Scholz government recently created a national €200 billion rescue shield to protect businesses and households from rising energy costs. It could have pushed instead for a European emergency fund that would have extended benefits much more widely (though not as generously as the German subsidies). Its decision indicates how national governments will react if freezing temperatures stretch Europe’s capacity to avoid power cuts, keep industries running, and heat residential and public buildings.

The most controversial aspect of European solidarity comes in Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, headed “Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.” Article 67(2) stipulates that the EU “shall ensure the absence of internal border controls for persons and shall frame a common policy on asylum, immigration and external border control, based on solidarity between Member States, which is fair towards third-country nationals.” The role of solidarity is further emphasised in Article 80: “The policies of the Union… and their implementation shall be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its financial implications, between the Member States.”

Burden-sharing of this kind is not a new idea. Back in 1950 France suggested that the UN Refugee Convention should include the following provision: “In a spirit of international solidarity, the High Contracting Parties shall take into consideration the burden assumed by the countries having first admitted or granted temporary asylum to refugees, and facilitate the permanent settlement of the latter, more especially by relaxation of the procedure for admission.” The proposal was rejected not so much because other delegations objected to burden-sharing but because they weren’t convinced that a reference to the spirit of international solidarity was necessary. One delegate argued that the convention’s effectiveness would obviously “depend on the good will and the spirit of solidarity of the signatory States.”

Solidarity eventually appeared in the 1967 UN Declaration on Territorial Asylum (which unfortunately is barely remembered today). Article 2(2) reads: “Where a State finds difficulty in granting or continuing to grant asylum, States… shall consider, in a spirit of international solidarity, appropriate measures to lighten the burden on that State.” Subsequent references to solidarity appear in statements issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as well as in the 2018 Global Compacts on Refugees and for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

UN-level attempts to lighten the burden of countries that host a disproportionately high number of asylum seekers have largely failed, at least in the past forty years. Despite its continuing emphasis on the principle of solidarity, the EU hasn’t done any better. In fact, it could be argued that its common policy on asylum has flown in the face of its rhetorical commitment to that principle.

The cornerstone of the EU’s asylum policy from 2003 to 2013 was the Dublin II Regulation. It provided for protection claims to be assessed in the first EU member state an asylum seeker entered. When the EU adopted the regulation, asylum numbers not only appeared manageable but were also on a downward trajectory. When irregular arrivals picked up again in 2008, EU members that served as entry points for asylum seekers — particularly if they bordered the Mediterranean — began complaining about a system that made them responsible for the majority of new arrivals. The criticism intensified as the number of protection claims skyrocketed in the early 2010s.

The EU tinkered with its asylum policy in 2013, replacing the existing legal framework with the Dublin III Regulation. The principle underlying its predecessor remained untouched. But the regulation became increasingly dysfunctional. Italy and Greece, for example, routinely allowed asylum seekers to pass through without registering their identities. Countries in the north of Europe were compelled to stop transferring asylum seekers back to Greece, even if it could be proven that they had entered the EU via that country, because refugees, particularly children, were not afforded adequate protection there.

During the influx of refugees in 2015–16, some central and northern European members — particularly Germany, Austria, Sweden and Finland — relieved the pressure on Greece and Italy by welcoming asylum seekers who had entered the EU from the Turkish mainland (via Greek islands in the northern Aegean) or from North Africa. Germany probably did so because Angela Merkel’s government naively expected that other countries, impressed by its example, would extend their solidarity in turn to Germany.

At the same time, some countries that had benefited from the Dublin regulations acknowledged that Italy, Malta and Greece were barely able — and couldn’t be expected — to cope with the large number of arrivals from across the sea. They advocated a new mechanism whereby asylum seekers would be distributed across the EU. But the so-called Visegrád group — Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic — supported at times by other EU members in eastern and southeastern Europe, demanded “flexible solidarity” and successfully objected to mandatory relocation.

Even the equitable distribution of relatively small numbers of people from Italy and Greece largely failed. Some member states simply refused to accommodate any asylum seekers who had first entered the EU elsewhere.

Since then the two EU heavyweights, France and Germany, have led a push for a mechanism to share the burden of processing and caring for asylum seekers equitably. This would involve either allocating each country a share of irregular arrivals depending on its capacity and size, or directing compensatory payments from countries unwilling to accommodate asylum seekers to those that are. Schemes that would have enabled relocations from countries of first asylum were welcomed, naturally enough, by the “Med 5” (Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Greece and Spain).

Because the Visegrád 4, among others, wouldn’t budge, France and Germany resorted to promoting voluntary arrangements. Finland brokered an agreement between Malta, Italy, France and Germany in 2019 covering migrants rescued by private search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. In their joint declaration of intent, the four countries pledged to set up a “more predictable and efficient temporary solidarity mechanism.” But that mechanism has not functioned well: each time migrants are rescued in the Mediterranean, the EU member states still argue over who will take responsibility for them.

In 2020, the European Commission proposed a new Pact on Migration and Asylum designed to effect a “fair sharing of responsibility and solidarity.” Rather than replacing the Dublin Regulation with a bold new scheme, the pact envisages a series of incremental steps. Implementation once again relied on the goodwill of all member states, and when Poland and Hungary, in particular, strongly resisted any moves towards enforced solidarity the French government once more proposed a voluntary mechanism.

In June this year, the end of its presidency approaching, France brokered an agreement signed by eighteen of the twenty-three EU member states, as well as Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which committed signatories to a “voluntary, simple and predictable solidarity mechanism” that would provide the Med 5 “with needs-based assistance” from other member countries “complementary to European support, by offering relocations (the preferred method of solidarity) and financial contributions.” While some of the signatories accepted asylum seekers who landed in Italy, others simply ignored the pledge they made.

The latest move by the European Commission has been a twenty-point Action Plan for the Central Mediterranean. It is largely the result of lobbying, if not blackmail, by the new Italian government, which would like to prevent any irregularised migrants from making landfall in Italy (and deport many of those already living in Italy). This plan is unlikely, though, to lead to a new common policy on asylum to replace the Dublin Regulation.

In the meantime, irregularised migrants keep breaching the EU’s external borders, with more than 90,000 having arrived in Italy alone so far this year. National immigration authorities keep trying to deport asylum seekers like the nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan to where they first set foot in the EU. According to the Hamburg state government, twenty-nine people were deported from Hamburg to other EU countries in the third quarter of this year, in line with the Dublin Regulation. These deportations tie up scarce resources and cause much anguish.

As more asylum seekers have breached Europe’s southern maritime borders it has become all too obvious that the Dublin Regulation is not “based on solidarity between Member States” but privileges the interests of some EU members over those of others. In other words, it shields central and northern European member states from irregularised migration. Because the likes of Poland and Hungary rejected a mandatory distribution mechanism — advocated by the European Commission, the Med 5 and some EU members in central and northern Europe — the EU’s response has been to try to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe in the first place.

In the course of making its external borders increasingly impenetrable, the EU has disregarded the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’s stipulation that a common asylum policy must be fair towards third-country nationals. Not only has the much-evoked principle of solidarity among member states proven to be little more than a rhetorical gesture, but the violence of its border regime has made a mockery of the EU’s self-declared ambition to stand up for human rights worldwide. There is no greater hypocrite than the winner of the 2012 Nobel peace prize.

In some cases, the EU is paying third parties to keep irregularised migrants away from Europe. Thus Italy and the EU have funded Libyan militias to operate a “coastguard” charged with intercepting migrants and confining them to Libya’s notorious detention centres, which German diplomats once likened to concentration camps.

In other cases, the EU turns a blind eye when its members flout national and EU laws by pushing migrants back across the border, as has been happening in at least half a dozen EU countries. In June, for example, when hundreds of migrants tried to climb over the border fortifications separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco, at least twenty-seven died and many of those who had managed to enter Spanish territory were returned to Morocco without being allowed to lodge a protection claim.

Or, to give another example, Latvia declared a state of emergency at its border with Belarus in August, allowing the government to restrict the movement of journalists and NGO representatives. Erik Marquardt, a Greens member of the European parliament, explains why the Latvian authorities don’t welcome monitors:

A typical horror trip in the limbo of the border region looks like this: The asylum seekers try to cross the green border through the forest to Latvian territory to apply for asylum. On Latvian territory they are picked up by border guards and taken to unregistered tent camps somewhere in the forest, far away from civil society, press and NGOs. Here… commandos harass, beat and abuse the detainees. They use batons and stun guns — sometimes even on their genitals. Their cell phones and valuables are taken from them. The shelter seekers have to sleep overnight in a tent in the middle of the forest, sometimes outdoors, at up to –20 degrees. The commandos also take away their lighters, the only way to make a fire to warm themselves against the cold temperatures and to protect themselves against wolves and bears. Often in the early morning hours, the refugees are bussed back to the border with Belarus and have to walk the rest of the way back through the forest.

Similar incidents have taken place at the borders between Croatia and Bosnia, and between Poland and Belarus. In the Turkish–Bulgarian borderlands — the setting of Haider Rashid’s haunting feature film Europa, which premiered to much acclaim last year at Cannes — migrants have to contend not only with zealous border guards but also with vigilantes.

But the Greek coastguard is probably most notorious for violating the rights of irregularised migrants. Over a two-year period from February 2020 until February 2022, a Forensic Architecture research team documented 1018 “drift-backs” in the Aegean Sea involving 27,464 people. Migrants were prevented from landing in Greece and then towed out to sea to a spot from where currents, waves and winds are likely to take them back to Turkish territorial waters. According to the researchers, this sometimes-lethal method is designed to “provide a measure of deniability for those perpetrators, shielding them from accountability.”

The EU has regularly condoned practices that are illegal under international human rights and refugee law. In its defence, it often maintains that it is merely protecting itself against acts of hybrid warfare perpetrated by the likes of the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Try telling that to migrants who are drowning or freezing to death at the European border.

But intra-EU solidarity on asylum is working in one sense: member states cover for each other when they violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights in their “defence” of the EU’s external border. The European Commission, while supposedly still committed to its 2020 Pact on Migration and Asylum, has in some instances been turning a blind eye and in others actively encouraging violators — as happened in March 2020, when von der Leyen praised Greece for “being our European ασπίδα,” or shield.

It should be some consolation that the securitisation of the EU’s external borders, and the violence this entails, is contested by other European institutions. The European parliament — and particularly the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, led by the indomitable Juan Fernando López Aguilar — has frequently spoken out against human rights violations at the borders and often put itself on a collision course with the European Commission and Frontex, the European border agency. But the parliament’s powers are limited.

The European courts have also ruled against the likes of Hungary on many occasions and upheld the rights of asylum seekers. Yet, as a recent study by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee has shown, EU member states often fail to implement judgements by the European Court of Human Rights and other bodies.

In one respect, European solidarity has functioned reasonably well. Since the Russian invasion on 24 February, the EU has provided substantial financial and material assistance to Ukraine. Its response to the war hasn’t been entirely united — Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s support for the government in Kyiv is lukewarm at best — but that hasn’t stopped it from also unanimously imposing sanctions on Russia, Belarus and Iran (which supplies drones to Russia), and on numerous individuals and entities in those countries.

The EU has also welcomed people fleeing Ukraine (though citizens of Ukraine more happily than others caught up in the war). In early March it invoked its Temporary Protection Directive, adopted in 2001 but never used, which gives refugees from Ukraine a residence permit for up to three years without the need to apply for asylum. The permit provides the right to work, gives access to social security payments and healthcare, and allows its holders to move freely between countries.

Because of that free movement, and because citizens of Ukraine can enter the EU for ninety days without a visa, the exact number of refugees in EU countries is anyone’s guess. The figure is probably around 4.5 million, with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic between them accounting for well over half.

The length of residence permits and other benefits for Ukrainian refugees vary greatly. As of June, Germany paid each Ukrainian refugee living in government-provided accommodation €449 (A$690) per month, France less than half that amount, and Poland, the country that has accommodated by far the most refugees, just over €15. In some countries, Ukrainian refugees have access to free language courses, in others they don’t. Their chances of finding employment and the extent to which Ukrainian qualifications are recognised also vary greatly.

In the early weeks of the war, EU leaders demanded that refugees be spread across the twenty-three member countries. They argued that Portugal and Ireland, for example, although a long way from Ukraine, ought to help relieve the burden placed on Ukraine’s immediate neighbours. Some refugees were indeed relocated — but only from Moldova, which had received more Ukrainian refugees on a per capita basis than any other country.

In practice, relative proximity to Ukraine and existing diasporic networks have proved more important than local assistance in Ukrainians’ decisions about where to stay. Calls for a redistribution of refugees have become much less frequent, not least because countries hosting a large number of refugees receive additional EU funding. Besides, a compulsory mechanism to distribute Ukrainians across the EU would probably be unworkable under the Temporary Protection Directive. It has also proved unnecessary, and is in fact undesirable because it might prevent refugees from living in places where they can rely on diasporic support networks.

What is true for the EU is also true for individual member states. Germany ordinarily places asylum seekers across its sixteen states according to the so-called Königstein formula, which takes account of a state’s economic strength and population. Within states, asylum seekers are then allocated to districts, usually according to a similar formula.

An informed estimate puts the number of Ukrainian refugees in Germany at between 630,000 and 750,000, of which approximately 100,000 are in Berlin, a city of 3.8 million people. If Ukrainian refugees had been distributed according to the Königstein formula, Berlin would have received around a third of that number. Berlin authorities have certainly been complaining loudly about the challenges posed by large numbers, but only about 3000 Ukrainian refugees actually live in government-provided accommodation.

In parts of the country where the Ukrainian diaspora is smaller and Germans are less willing to share their apartments, most refugees allocated according to the Königstein formula would have needed accommodation in hostels, sports halls and container villages. Conflicts with the locals might have ensued, much like during 2015–16.

The situation may change, of course, not just in Germany but also elsewhere in Europe, if Russia succeeds in forcing more Ukrainians to flee. So far, predictions that the bombing of Ukrainian power stations would lead to a mass exodus have proven as wrong as the assumption that Poland would quickly buckle under the influx of refugees.

The reception of Ukrainian refugees suggests that efforts to distribute asylum seekers equitably across EU member states may not be what’s needed. On the contrary: rather than deporting asylum seekers back to the European country where their fingerprints were first taken, the EU may prefer to let them move to wherever they are supported by diasporic communities or civil society networks. The Ukrainian case suggests that one aspect of Article 67(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union is achievable, namely “a common policy on asylum… which is fair towards third-country nationals.”

The Ukrainian case doesn’t prove or disprove the idea that a common system could be “based on solidarity between Member States.” It doesn’t allow any inferences to be drawn about the validity of the claim that nation-states can behave as if they were individuals extending solidarity towards each other.

But the EU’s undeclared war on irregular migrants, including those seeking its protection, has had the unintended consequence of encouraging individual acts of solidarity of the kind referred to in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. They are not directed towards fellow EU residents, however, as envisaged in that article, but towards people the EU wants to keep out or expel.

As a consequence, activists have repeatedly intervened when authorities across Europe have tried to deport asylum seekers to places of danger or to where they had entered the EU. Even more significant than the anti-deportation campaigns, though, is the work of activists who assist refugees as they cross borders and who document unlawful attempts by the EU and national governments to prevent them from doing so.

In the central Mediterranean, where at least 25,000 irregularised migrants have died over the past eight years, private search-and-rescue operations have saved the lives of thousands of migrants. They enjoy considerable support not just in northern and western Europe but also in Italy and Spain.

In Poland, Grupa Granica has provided life-saving humanitarian assistance to migrants stranded in the forests at the Polish–Belarusian border, and monitored the human rights situation there. In Greece, volunteers have been assisting irregularised migrants who have made it to the islands of the northern Aegean, as well as refugees who have been left to fend for themselves in Athens. Much like the search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, these volunteers have also tried to hold Frontex and the Greek coastguard accountable.

In all these cases, activism is not just the result of an affective response to suffering, and the sufferers are not regarded only as suppliants. We are indeed seeing solidarity in action.

With member states using the EU’s Facilitation Directive of 2002 to criminalise such acts of solidarity, activists have often paid a high price. Since 2016, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain have between them initiated sixty administrative or criminal proceedings against private organisations involved in search-and-rescue operations.

To make matters worse, the twenty-point action plan recently announced by the European Commission includes the following: “17. Promote discussions in the International Maritime Organization on the need for a specific framework and guidelines for vessels having a particular focus on search and rescue activities, particularly in view of developments in the European context.” These ominous lines suggest the European Commission, goaded by Italy’s racist Meloni government, is intent on further hindering the work of Sea-Watch, SOS Mediterranée and other private search-and-rescue organisations.

Prosecutions of this kind are worrying, and the prospects of further criminalisations dire. But if Robert Schuman was right in observing that solidarity is created by a process of practical achievements, then the solidarity targeted by governments such as Meloni’s and Orbán’s, as well as by the European Commission, has become a force to reckon with. Activists have thwarted attempts to turn Europe into an impenetrable fortress. Compare their efficacy with that of the inter-state solidarity of EU member states, which often exists only in the increasingly hollow appeals of the European Commission.

Acts by the likes of French farmer Cédric Herrou and seafarer Carola Rackete have captured the imagination of Europeans and inspired others to act in solidarity. Herrou was convicted of a délit de solidarité, a “solidarity offence,” for ferrying migrants from Italy to France and inviting them to camp at his property; Rackete, who captained the Sea-Watch 3, defied the Italian government’s order not to disembark irregularised migrants rescued in the Mediterranean.

Such acts have also inspired municipal governments to take action. Some of them have challenged the national authorities to allocate more asylum seekers to them than they are required to accommodate according to the official quota.

There is another reason why I am optimistic regarding the prospects for solidarity à la Herrou — as opposed to the European shield advocated by Ursula von der Leyen and others — and that’s to do with motivation. The intra-EU solidarity so frequently conjured by the European Commission is perhaps too easy a target. Because it isn’t practised (and may in fact not be necessary, at least in the context of a common policy of asylum), the solidarity of Articles 67 and 80 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union remains a weasel word.

The solidarity offered by the EU to others needs to be taken more seriously, not least because climate change will require countries of the global north to reposition themselves in relation to the global south. In her statement at COP27, von der Leyen said that solidarity means those in a position to help should assist those in need. She didn’t say why Tuvalu islanders or Bangladeshi farmers were in dire straits, or why the EU is in a position to help, but talked as if the EU were a charitable organisation that happened to be able to do good. Solidarity, to be successful and sustainable, needs to be grounded in notions of justice. That is something Herrou and Rackete know but von der Leyen, if she knows it, prefers not to acknowledge. •

The post European solidarity appeared first on Inside Story.

It is clearly more than that. That’s because Boochani’s journalistic pieces, which first appeared mainly in the Guardian and the Saturday Paper, are accompanied by essays written by his translators and other “invited researchers, writers and confidants.” It’s also because Boochani’s journalism — a frightening and detailed view of what was officially called the Manus Regional Processing Centre — deserves to be republished. At the same time, the journalism allows the reader to understand why it was possible to survive detention on Manus: namely because of “love, friendship and brotherhood.”

Some five or six years ago, Boochani’s dispatches would have been read mainly for the information they contained about what went on in the Manus detention centre at a particular moment in time. Now that’s of interest mainly for historians. But it’s possible to appreciate these texts for their careful, indeed delicate and poetic, portrayals of other detainees.

My favourite is “The Man Who Loves Ducks,” an article about Boochani’s animal-loving fellow prisoner Mansour Shoushtari that first appeared in the Guardian in 2017. “Getting to know Shoushtari has been a blessing and an inspiration,” Boochani writes, and such is the power of his writing that I too feel privileged to have met Shoushtari. Shoushtari — and, I guess, writing about Shoushtari — helped Boochani to survive:

For the short time I was in his presence I forgot about all the violence and hardship associated with this prison; my love for life increased after I spent time with him. I was reassured by the fact that there were warm people like Shoushtari in our close company. I think I’ll keep these memories of him with me for years to come.

Some of the book’s other essays help the reader to contextualise Boochani’s texts. Among them are articles by Moones Mansoubi, who arrived in Sydney as a student from Iran the same year Boochani was deported from Christmas Island to Manus, and went on to become one of his translators, and by Ben Doherty, who has reported on Australia’s detention archipelago for the Guardian. For Doherty, Boochani morphed from a source into a fellow journalist who filed articles from inside the Manus camp, written on his mobile phone and transmitted to the Guardian in WhatsApp messages. This process took a while: it was only in late 2015 that Doherty published one of Boochani’s poems, and it took another three months for his first article to appear in the Guardian.

For Doherty, Boochani’s ability to survive had less to do with his relationships with fellow detainees and more to do with his professional ethos. He “was, and saw himself as, a working journalist on Manus,” Doherty writes. “He was a man with a mission, every day, a reason and a rationale in that place. Journalism kept him busy, kept him focused, gave him a resolution and a cause… [J]ournalism — a sense of mission to bear witness, an unshakeable belief in his ‘duty to history’ — gave him a purpose that many others held in that place were denied.”

I was puzzled by the inclusion of some of the other essays, particularly those written by academics. Their affirmation of Boochani’s views seemed to me to be unwarranted, and I found the at times gushing tone embarrassing. If the editors were afraid that a republication of Boochani’s journalistic pieces on their own could not have been justified, then their concerns were groundless. If the intention was to invite authors to critically engage with Boochani’s ideas and prose, then some of the invitees were not up to the task. Maybe they thought that critique necessarily amounted to criticism?

A critical engagement with Boochani’s writings, rather than hero worshipping, could be for another book project. Its editors ought to draw not only on fellow refugees, forced migration scholars and refugee activists, but also on writers who could give voice to the people of Manus.

In Australia, too often, their voices haven’t been heard. On the few occasions when they were, they weren’t properly listened to. Note to future editors: if you found it difficult to identify somebody able to give voice to Manus Islanders, you could do worse than to republish Michelle Nayahamui Rooney’s wonderful 2018 essay “The Chauka Bird and Morality on Our Manus Island Home.”

The pieces by Boochani assembled in Freedom, Only Freedom were written for publication. They were designed to let the public, particularly in Australia, know about the Australian government’s disregard for the human rights of those whose imprisonment on Manus it had authorised. The diary of Uwe Radok, which has now been edited by his daughter Jacquie Houlden and the historian Seumas Spark, was not meant for publication. In fact, it was probably not meant to be read by anybody except its writer.

What links Freedom, Only Freedom with Houlden and Spark’s Shadowline is the fact that Boochani and Radok were refugees held prisoner indefinitely without having been charged with a crime. Only the historical circumstances were different: one was detained by Australian authorities and imprisoned in Papua New Guinea, the other detained by British authorities and held captive in Australia.

Uwe Radok, born in 1916 in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) to a non-Jewish mother and Jewish father, left Germany in 1938 for Britain, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. On the direction of MI5, he and his brothers Jobst and Rainer were arrested in September 1939. Unlike the majority of German refugees living in Britain at the time, the three brothers were considered threats — not on account of their political views (they had no sympathy for Nazi Germany) but presumably because their brother Christoph was serving in the German airforce.

On 30 June 1940, together with more than 1200 other internees and some German POWs, the three brothers were put on the SS Arandora Star, which was to take them to Canada to be interned there. On 2 July, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the ship. Some 800 of those on board died.

The brothers survived and were taken back to Britain by their rescuers, and on 10 July 1940, together with more than 2000 other internees, embarked on the HMT Dunera. This time the destination was Australia. On arrival there, the Radoks were interned in Tatura in northern Victoria and, unlike the majority of the Dunera internees, who had not been regarded as an immediate threat to Britain, they were only released in May 1942.

The published diary covers the period from Uwe Radok’s embarkation on the Arandora Star until 12 February 1943. Half of it is about his time as an internee, the other half deals with his life as a member of the Australian army’s 8th Employment Company. It’s not made clear why the published text ends several months before Radok stopped writing a diary. It’s also not evident to me why it has been necessary to omit Radok’s notes on books he read — they might have told us more about him.

The two books also have in common that Boochani’s texts and some of Radok’s were translated, and that all were copyedited. We can only wonder how much of Boochani’s voice got lost or altered when his WhatsApp messages were turned into English and then attended to by a Guardian subeditor. I am curious to see the first book written by him in English.

Radok wrote some of his diary in English, some of it in German, and some of it in a mixture of both languages. The editors opted for a smooth English text, with some German expressions and misspellings deliberately left in place “to retain the ring of the original.” It’s to their credit that they illustrated the text with images of parts of the original diary. But rather than mere illustrations, they actually show how many liberties were taken with the original.

Radok’s diary says much about one man’s experience of internment (and more about his infatuation with a fellow internee) but much less about camp life. It is hard to warm to its author, who comes across as self-obsessed and arrogant. While Boochani’s portraits of his fellow detainees are remarkably generous, Radok’s depictions of others (including the man with whom he was infatuated and even more so the woman who was to become his wife) are often mean-spirited. Unlike Boochani, Radok didn’t assume the role of a witness. But since he probably didn’t intend others to read his diary, he can’t be blamed for that.

In their introduction, Spark and his Monash colleague Christina Twomey write that “The stereotypes that now envelop the Dunera boys and their place in the history of post-war Australia have conflated individual stories into an increasingly homogenous narrative, a singular triumph of good citizenship and material success.” They cite films and a book from the 1970s and 1980s in support of their argument. But Spark himself was involved in two recent books about the Dunera that attempted to open up that narrative, and Uwe Radok’s diary shouldn’t have been needed to warn us “against the comforts and conceits of generalisation and mythology.”

At least as problematic as the conventional narrative about the contribution of the “Dunera boys” to postwar Australia is the idea that their internment experience was somehow emblematic of civilian internment in wartime Australia. More than half of those interned in what were sometimes labelled, at least initially, as “concentration camps” by the Australian authorities were interned by Australia (rather than by Britain, as in this case) and not just in Australia. They included German and Austrian refugees who, unlike the Radok brothers, were sometimes interned with committed Nazis, and sometimes for far longer than most of the Dunera internees.

Also unlike the Dunera internees who were in a position to talk publicly after the war about the injustices suffered at the hands of the British (particularly aboard the Dunera), the refugees interned by Australia had no ready audience for their stories. Their postwar lives, which were sometimes marked by the traumas of internment, were not the subject of celebratory books and films.

Boochani’s experience wasn’t typical either. There were no women and children in the Manus camp when he was there. He was eventually able to leave and has since been granted refugee status in New Zealand. Others who were with him on Manus weren’t so lucky.

We must also keep in mind that Boochani’s dispatches don’t describe a phenomenon that’s now in the past. The current Labor government has been as wedded as previous Coalition and Labor governments to the punitive treatment of refugees and the wretched system of preventing people seeking Australia’s protection from submitting their claims in Australia. In fact, the recent federal budget included a $150 million increase in funding for off-shore processing. And the British government is determined to emulate the Australian example by deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. But I am confident Behrouz Boochani will keep reminding Australians from his exile in Aotearoa New Zealand that he was describing unfinished business. •

Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani
Edited by Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi | Bloomsbury | $32.99 | 344 pages

Shadowline: The Dunera Diaries of Uwe Radok
Edited by Jacquie Houlden and Seumas Spark | Monash University Publishing | $34.99 | 181 pages

The post Inside the wire appeared first on Inside Story.

The anniversary well-wishers included German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who said the convention “was drawn up in view of the immeasurable suffering that millions of people were forced to endure during and after the second world war. Its clear aim was to ensure that this could never happen again.” He also reminded us that more than eighty million people are currency displaced — a fact that made the convention “indispensable today.”

With these words, Maas conjured two sets of images. His “never again” was clearly a reference to the Holocaust, perhaps evoking the black-and-white photographs of emaciated survivors taken by the Allies immediately upon the liberation of the concentration camps. And his mention of today’s displaced people would have reminded his audience of televised footage showing thousands of predominantly Syrian refugees making their way through Hungary and Austria in the summer of 2015, or masses of people living in squalid conditions in refugee camps in Africa or Asia.

Neither of these sets of images has much to do with the origins of the Refugee Convention. Yes, two major refugee crises in the second half of the 1940s produced images akin to those that we might see today depicting refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Venezuela. But neither of those early postwar crises — the Nakba, which displaced some 700,000 Palestinians, and the Partition of India, when more than ten million people fled or were driven from their homes — were much discussed among those negotiating the Refugee Convention.

Instead, their attention was focused on what were known as “DPs,” or displaced persons. Millions of people had found themselves outside their country of origin at the end of the war. Most of them had been swiftly repatriated — some, against their will, to the Soviet Union. But by 1946, about a million DPs were still stuck, most of them in the French, British and American zones of occupied Germany.

Despite the war still being fresh in their minds, the drafters of the convention had set out to tackle the consequences rather than the causes of mass displacement. They wanted a convention that defined the status of displaced people rather than dealt with their “immeasurable suffering.” Resettlement wasn’t even designed solely for their benefit. When Eleanor Roosevelt warned the UN General Assembly in December 1946 that the DPs’ presence was delaying “the restoration of peace and order in the world,” her chief concern may well have been to prevent a potentially volatile situation in the DPs’ host societies, particularly in Germany and Austria.

Most of the DPs were from Poland, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, the Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe. Most were stranded in Germany and Austria because that’s where they had been taken as prisoners of war or forced labourers during the war. Some were in Italy, the Middle East, East Africa, India and China, and some were Jewish survivors of the concentration camps.

In other words, today’s international refugee regime originated not in the refugee crises in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the 1940s, and not in the Holocaust (or in the earlier failure of nation-states to provide a refuge for European Jews). It lay in the anxiety provoked by DPs in the second half of the 1940s and the early 1950s, and in the effort to resettle the “last million” — initially to countries in Western Europe, but soon to Israel, Australia and the Americas.

The role of the “last million” in international discussions about the attributes and rights of refugees and in the making of international law is a key reason why studies of the DPs are so relevant to today’s debates. Much has already been written about the International Refugee Organization, or IRO, which was given the job of facilitating the resettlement of DPs, and much about the resettlement of DPs in Australia and other countries. Ruth Balint’s immensely readable and highly original book Destination Elsewhere adds to that scholarship. What makes her contribution particularly valuable is her concern not so much with the IRO or the reception of DPs in Australia and elsewhere, but with the DP experience.

Most importantly, Balint shows how the question of who ought to be counted as a refugee played out not just in the conferences where diplomats and international lawyers haggled over the definition used by the IRO and the terms of the draft Refugee Convention, but also in submissions by DPs, in interviews with DPs and, more generally, in the autobiographical narratives DPs fashioned to bolster their identity as refugees. The question, what were the grounds for a DP’s eligibility as a refugee?, runs like a thread through the book’s seven chapters.

Balint is less interested in the content of policies than in how they were implemented and how much wriggle room they provided. Drawing on dozens of cases, she explores not only how policies and practices affected the lives of individuals, but also how individuals negotiated their way around existing rules.

The cases featured in Destination Elsewhere are complex. Among them is that of Arthur W., a non-Jewish German married to a Jewish woman who had survived the Holocaust — not least, I imagine, because she was protected by his having resisted the pressure to divorce her. Arthur himself had been imprisoned in a concentration camp from 1944 until the end of the war, and was initially classified as a refugee, which would have allowed the couple to emigrate to join their son, who had left Germany ahead of them. But just as they were about to embark to the United States, the IRO realised it had made a mistake. Like other non-Jewish husbands of refugees, and unlike the wives of eligible refugees, Arthur was deemed ineligible for IRO assistance.

Also ineligible, but for very different reasons, was a couple whose son Gabor had a disability. Their application to settle in Australia was rejected, according to their emigration file, “because the child is a mongolian idiot.” The IRO advised the parents to leave Gabor behind. They separated over the issue, with the father emigrating after their divorce and the mother remaining with their son. A year later, the mother changed her mind and consented to separate from Gabor permanently.

Or consider the case of Gregor L., aka Michael Kolossov, a Red Army officer who defected in 1945 and was then advised by an official in the American zone to conceal his Russian identity. Changing his name, date of birth and nationality (and now claiming to be of Polish Ukrainian origin), he, his wife and their two children lived for four years as DPs in the city of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, until they were accepted for resettlement in Australia. There, Gregor came clean, telling the authorities of his former identity, because, he said later, “I wanted to show that I was honest and loyal.”

A 1946 cartoon illustrating the obstacles impeding the emigration of displaced persons to the United States. The DP camp depicted in the background is identified as Wentdorf. Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen

The Australian authorities were “less interested in protecting Communist defectors than they were in sheltering Nazi ones,” as Balint dryly notes, and promptly declared him a security threat. His case received sympathetic attention in the Australian press, but he was deported back to Germany. Because the Australians told the IRO that they suspected him of having worked for Stalin’s secret police, the Americans kept him under close surveillance in Germany as a possible Soviet agent while inviting him to participate in the Harvard Project, an attempt to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union by interviewing refugees. The researchers much valued Kolossov’s assistance, with one of them later praising his “sincerity” and “objectivity.”

Concerning this last case, Balint tells us that the family may have lived in Germany until 1955 and then emigrated to Canada, but concedes that “even this is unclear.” In most other cases, we don’t learn what eventually happened to her protagonists. As a reader, I found the fragmentary nature of these accounts of DPs’ lives intensely frustrating. What became of Arthur W.’s family? Were they eventually resettled? If they weren’t, how did they fare in the country where they had been persecuted? Did their son return to Germany? And what about Gabor? Were his parents able to make a new start?

Arthur W.’s story also raises the question of whether he provided the IRO with a truthful account. Had he really been imprisoned in a concentration camp? If so, on what grounds? Such questions suggest themselves even more so in Gregor L.’s case. Was he also “sincere” and “objective” when it came to retelling his life? Was he identical with Michael Kolossov, or was L., as the Australians claimed, someone else altogether?

Of course this was not meant to be a book about the life histories of refugees. And the effort involved in comprehensively researching that many lives would have been considerable and, given the focus of the book, unreasonable. In fact — on second thoughts — I suspect that it may be the individual stories’ open-endedness that makes the text strangely intriguing and prompted me to read on. At the same time, the lack of closure focused my attention on the issues that the cases were meant to illustrate.

Historians trying to turn the past into a narrative tend to be influenced by at least three factors: their own present, the availability of sources, and what I would like to call the course of history. No historian is immune from these influences. But how they shape a historical narrative depends also on how much the historian is aware of, and able to respond to, them.

As Balint has demonstrated in her other books (most recently in Smuggled, which she co-wrote with Julie Kalman and which also came out this year), she is what the French call an écrivaine engagée, a writer who is perturbed and at the same time motivated by her own present, not least by its injustices. She is troubled by the categorical and seemingly unproblematic distinction between political refugees and economic migrants today, and aware of how much a person’s recognition as a legitimate refugee depends on their ability to offer a convincing narrative about their life. She knows that the more truthful the narrative the more convincing it is — but that here “truth” is in the eyes of the beholder, and depends on what seems credible to somebody else: for example, a person working for the UNHCR, an immigration officer or a judge.

Balint is appalled by the fact that the response of her own country, Australia, to people seeking its protection often doesn’t reflect the international treaties it has ratified, be it the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “Australia’s immigration laws still require all migrants to be screened for medical conditions, so as to prove they will not be an economic burden on the community,” she writes. “This affects children most of all.” In October, Australian Paralympic athlete Jaryd Clifford recalled the case of Pakistani refugee Shiraz Kiane, who twenty years ago set himself on fire outside Parliament House because the immigration department objected to his family’s joining him in Australia on the grounds that his daughter’s medical treatment would be too expensive.

“The book is a work of history concerned with the present,” Balint writes. Because she, like Clifford, is troubled by the present, she is particularly sensitive to instances in the past in which the present is prefigured. As she avoids any moralising, this honing in on historical issues to which she is particularly attuned adds a degree of passion to her text that contributes to its readability.

Balint is acutely aware of the second factor shaping her narrative, the limitations of her archive. Her book “began with a chance visit” to the International Tracing Services archives in Germany, which holds records relating to seventeen million people and had only recently been opened to researchers. This visit appears to have prompted her to consult the IRO’s records, which are held at the National Archives in Paris. And there she discovered the decisions of the IRO Review Board, which became a main source for her project.

Because of the richness of the review board’s files, the cases featured in her book tend to be complex and were contested at the time. But the majority of refugee status determinations involving DPs were presumably comparatively straightforward, which means that they didn’t leave an extensive paper trail. Balint’s reliance on the records of the review board partly explains why she was rarely able to say what eventually happened to people like Arthur W. and Gregor L.; for obvious reasons, the review board took no further interest in the fates of individuals once it had arrived at a decision.

The fact that archives are not merely repositories that can be mined to answer the historian’s questions is not peculiar to Balint’s project, but I wish she had taken her reflections about the peculiar archival further —that may be a suggestion for another text, however, one that engages with the peculiar challenges posed by archival research about refugees. In Destination Elsewhere, Balint seems to take shelter behind fellow historians Carolyn Steedman and Natalie Zemon Davis, who have both reflected on the historian’s reliance on and engagement with archival sources. “Nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there,” Steedman writes. “You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.”

Finally, the narratives produced by historians are informed by a presumed course of history. When looked at it with the benefit of hindsight, the so-called DP problem seems to have come about because many Eastern European DPs could not or did not want to be repatriated, and it was largely solved when a handful of countries of immigration — most prominent among them the United States, Australia and Israel — offered to resettle hundreds of thousands of people stuck in Central Europe. That outcome was in the interests of the Allies, who were responsible for looking after the DPs; of the IRO, naturally; of host countries Germany, Austria and Italy, much of whose infrastructure was in ruins and some of whose people were starving; of countries of resettlement, like Australia, that were experiencing a labour shortage; and of the DPs themselves, who often wanted to get away from Europe.

But it was by no means self-evident that resettlement would be the answer to displacement. I can think of only two other instances in which people who were displaced because they fled, or otherwise found themselves outside, their home, were swiftly resettled. One concerns refugees who fled Hungary to Austria or Yugoslavia after the failed 1956 uprising and ended up in pretty much the same countries that had accommodated DPs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The other relates to concerted international efforts to resettle Indochinese “boat people” stranded in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

But both before, during and after the second half of the 1940s, comprehensive resettlement schemes were the exception. Think of the Armenians in the early twentieth century, for example, or of the Palestinians in the late 1940s, or of Eritreans, Afghans and Syrians today, not to mention Jews desperate to leave Central Europe in the late 1930s. Resettlement was rarely an option for them. And when Polish or Latvian DPs first decided that they did not want to return home, they could not yet know that resettlement outside Europe would be the alternative to repatriation. Initially at least, they had to assume that they would have to remain in Europe, if not in Germany.

Only the course of history encourages us to think of the DPs’ lives in postwar Germany in the context of a trajectory that culminates in a country of resettlement. The course of history encourages us to focus on the DPs’ “quest to leave postwar Europe,” to quote the subtitle of Balint’s book. But not knowing that they might soon settle in the United States or Australia, DPs busily created social networks unrelated to their emigration.

Adam Seipp’s Strangers in the Wild Place, which I reviewed for Inside Story some years ago, illustrates the varied contacts of residents of the Wildflecken DP camp. Outside the camps, DPs interacted not only with members of the Allied occupation authorities but also with locals. In the camps, they carved out spaces where they could be in charge of their own affairs. In some camps, they elected representatives and staffed administrative bodies. They supported a vibrant cultural life. Most important, they created formal and informal networks of compatriots-in-exile and strengthened such networks and associated multiple identities through the publication of periodicals. In Germany’s American zone alone, twenty-nine newspapers and thirty-nine magazines published by and for DPs were counted in December 1947.

The course of history encourages us to think of resettlement as the norm for DPs. In places like Australia, history evidently continued. The arrival of a large number of DPs changed Australian society and helped to prepare it for a multicultural future. By contrast, the fact that a sizeable number of DPs could not be resettled and had to remain in Germany and Austria appears as a dead end. But these remaining DPs too made history. Categorised as heimatlose Ausländer (“homeless foreigners”) in West Germany and generally referred to as the “hard core” by the UNHCR and aid agencies, they acquired many of the rights usually reserved for German citizens but were nevertheless relegated to the margins of society.

From the perspective of 2021, the heimatlose Ausländer seem at least as representative of the modern refugee as Arthur Calwell’s “beautiful Balts.” And much like the experience of the “last million” tells us something about the origins of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the modern refugee regime, the lives and narratives of their “hard core” remnant, and their interactions within German society, ought to be indispensable reference points for a history of the Federal Republic.

Ruth Balint’s book is about the making of history by DPs in the sense that the period in the late 1940s and early 1950s that saw the resettlement of most of them “had a lasting impact on the definition of the refugee, the development of international law, and the creation of a modern, bureaucratic refugee regime.”

Her book is also about the crafting of histories by people who realised that the IRO and prospective resettlement countries were less interested in their wartime suffering, and more in a perceived Red menace, which led DPs to “[articulate] a narrative of persecution and [to valorise] their predicament in line with Western anti-communism.” That narrative established their credentials as refugees. Whether or not the histories that emerged in submissions and interviews were factually true is often impossible to establish. But that’s beside the point, at least as far as the argument in this excellent book is concerned. •

The post Becoming refugees appeared first on Inside Story.

This and similar claims are based on five enduring myths:

Myth #1: The Australian government’s response to the Tampa determined the outcome of the November 2001 federal election.

No doubt, the government’s handling of the Tampa’s arrival persuaded many of those who three years earlier had voted for Pauline Hanson to return to the Liberal–National fold. But pre-election polls and analyses of the 2001 Australian Election Study strongly suggest that the 9/11 terrorist attacks played a greater role in the re-election of the Howard government.

Myth #2: The Pacific Solution and Operation Relex constituted a radical departure from Australia’s established asylum seeker policies.

The introduction of extraterritorial incarceration and processing as part of the Pacific Solution and of pushbacks during Operation Relex were indeed new. But they followed a long succession of ever more draconian measures to punish people who had sought Australia’s protection, including the introduction of temporary protection visas and the isolation of asylum seekers in remote camps. Extraterritorial incarceration and pushbacks were simply the logical extension of policies of exclusion and deterrence that went back at least to the Keating government’s introduction of mandatory detention nine years earlier, if not to the Whitlam government’s resolve in 1975 to disembark Vietnamese boat arrivals into custody to be able to return them to their boat “for the purpose of departing them from Australia.”

Myth #3: The Pacific Solution and Operation Relex were innovative responses to irregularised migrants, in Australia and internationally.

The government’s response was not unprecedented. Other states had tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to prevent refugees and other irregularised migrants from entering their territory by deporting them to places where they were out of sight and beyond the reach of supporters and domestic courts. In 1940, Britain deported more than 1500 Jewish refugees who had tried to settle in Palestine to the British colony of Mauritius, where they were detained for several years at the Beau Bassin prison. The British government toyed with a similar approach in 1972, when it briefly considered deporting people of South Asian ancestry, who had been expelled by Uganda’s Idi Amin, to the Solomon Islands.

But Australian policymakers in 2001 probably looked for inspiration not to Britain but to the United States, and to its policy of interdiction, in the 1980s, and then of interdiction and offshore detention, in the early 1990s. This policy was mainly directed at Haitians trying to reach the American mainland. From 1991, those interdicted by the US authorities in the Caribbean were incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

Myth #4: Australia’s response to asylum seekers in the wake of the Tampa’s arrival has served as a blueprint for European asylum seeker policies.

Over the past twenty years, the Australian government has promoted its “solution” in Europe, with senior bureaucrats regularly trying to convince their European counterparts of its advantages. In some instances, the arguments were well received.

Some European politicians have tried to persuade their governments and the European Union to establish processing and detention facilities in other countries. Advocates of policies reminiscent of the Australian approach have included, among others, the German interior minister Otto Schily, a Social Democrat who in 2004 proposed to establish extraterritorial camps for asylum seekers, and the Danish Social Democrats, who since 2018 have sought to introduce laws to transfer all asylum seekers arriving in Denmark to a third country.

Pushbacks, too, have occurred at the European Union’s external borders, most recently in Poland, Croatia and Greece. And on 1 December, the European Commission put forward proposals for a temporary suspension of established asylum procedures at the borders of Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.

But although currently all European governments bar three —Germany’s, Portugal’s and Luxembourg’s — would like the European Union to adopt harsher measures to stop prospective asylum seekers from reaching Europe, Australia’s response has thus far not been emulated. This is because European governments are bound by domestic and European refugee and human rights law that prevents them from copying outright Australia’s flouting of international law. Or at least, it means that when European governments do violate the rights of irregularised migrants, they risk being called to account, if not in domestic courts, then in the European Court of Human Rights. In 2012, for example, the court found in the landmark Hirsi case that Italy had violated European law by turning back some 200 Somali and Eritrean irregularised migrants to Libya.

In Australia, by contrast, the absence of constitutionally enshrined human rights has allowed the government to introduce legislative changes whenever domestic courts, including the High Court, have objected to the country’s punitive asylum regime.

It’s worth noting that those who want European governments to follow the Australian example all the way tend to belong to the far right. Katie Hopkins, rather than Otto Schily, is representative of those suggesting that the Australian “solution” ought to be copied. From a European perspective, the Australian government’s response to irregularised migrants arriving by boat is extremist — and baffling even for many of those on the political right.

Myth #5: The cruel treatment of asylum seekers in Nauru and on Manus effectively deterred potential sea-borne arrivals.

The policies of deterrence caused great harm to the detained asylum seekers, were extremely costly — and were largely ineffectual in terms of their ostensible aim. Boats with asylum seekers continued to arrive after those rescued by the Tampa had been deported to Nauru. But the Howard government must have known that deterrence on its own does not work, since it had tried for several years and without much success to deter prospective asylum seekers by turning detention centres on the Australian mainland into veritable hell-holes. It was only when customs and navy ships physically prevented asylum seekers from reaching Australia that the boats stopped coming. Similarly, it was the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders, rather than the reopening of Nauru and Manus, that persuaded irregularised migrants of the futility of boarding a boat bound for Australia.

But the policies of deterrence were also successful in that they served to appease an anxious Australian public. And arguably that has been their main rationale all along.

The Tampa affair is nevertheless extraordinarily significant — not because it represented a turning point back then, twenty years ago, but because of how it has been remembered — indeed because it has been remembered as a turning point.

Turning points in history — the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, for example, or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 — are seemingly singular events. In the most extreme case, that event is reduced to a single shot, as if the broader context were a distraction that needed to be blotted out. Thus the fact that Gavrilo Princip killed not only the Austrian heir presumptive, but also his wife Sophie, has been largely erased from collective memory. Even more important, what happened before becomes part of an amorphous pre-history that cannot compete with the era heralded by such pivotal events.

The focus on a singular event is problematic when we try to understand what caused the first world war, for instance. But it is even more problematic when the significance of a particular event is overstated.

Because we remember the moment the Tampa sailed into Australian waters as a new beginning that delineated a pre-historical past from our present, we tend to forget that pre-2001 policies of exclusion reach back to the early days of the Australian nation-state. We also tend to pay too little attention to the history of mandatory and potentially indefinite immigration detention that began under the Labor government in the early 1990s.

We don’t remember that in the 1960s Australia pushed back refugees from Indonesian-controlled West Papua across the border of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea without allowing them to lodge an application for protection, and that those who were permitted to remain in the Australian territory were only given temporary protection visas. We don’t remember that some of those permissive residents were isolated in a camp on Manus in the late 1960s.

We don’t remember that the mantra “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” far from being invented by John Howard, consistently accompanied twentieth-century Australian politics. In 1934, for example, Robert Menzies, then attorney-general in the Lyons government, declared in parliament: “We have, as an independent country, a perfect right to indicate whether an alien shall or shall not be admitted within these shores.”

We don’t remember that the 2001 election campaign was not the first in which a major party tried to appeal to, and stoke, Australian fears of seaborne arrivals. In 1977, the Labor Party tried to use the spectre of Vietnamese “boat people” to gain an electoral advantage. It was then that the term “queue jumper” made its first appearance, employed by none other than Gough Whitlam. Labor’s scare campaign was unsuccessful — but who is to say that Howard would have been successful in 2001 if it hadn’t been for the threat of terrorism?

The Howard government’s response to the Tampa is widely considered a cynical ploy to win the November 2001 election. The decision to board the Norwegian container ship may indeed have been informed by the government’s poor performance in the polls. But there is more to the Tampa affair’s historical context than the Newspoll results of July and August 2001.

That context also includes the screening of the Four Corners documentary “The Inside Story” on 8 August. It showed footage shot with a camera smuggled into the Villawood detention centre. The footage, which featured Shayan Badraie, a deeply traumatised Iranian child, had a huge impact at the time, and immigration minister Philip Ruddock was initially unable to say anything that would counter it. The government risked losing control of the narrative about asylum seekers and border protection. The response to the Tampa — and, even more so, the children overboard affair — were also attempts to regain that control.

The Tampa affair has been significant because the five myths that surround it have been so enduring. The idea that the Tampa’s arrival decided the 2001 election has served as an excuse for Labor to go along with the Coalition’s policies for most of the past twenty years. Maybe key Labor leaders really have been convinced that asylum seekers are always foremost on voters’ minds when they cast their vote; certainly this “myth that grips a nation” has allowed Labor leaders who are comfortable with the Coalition’s border policies to say that they would have adopted a different stance but could not because it would have resulted in electoral suicide.

If the boarding of the Tampa by Australian special forces on 29 August 2001 was not as significant an event as is commonly assumed, then it makes sense to ask: was there anything else, in terms of Australian responses to migrants in general and refugees and asylum seekers in particular, that was more significant?

Yes, there was. Here is my selection of six days that shaped the nation.

The most pivotal date is 1 January 1901, the day the Australian Constitution entered into force — not because of what the Constitution says, but because of what it does not include: a bill of rights. Australia’s lack of such an instrument has determined not only refugee and asylum seeker policies but also the public discourse about these policies.

Australia embarked on a particular trajectory right after Federation, with the passage of two pieces of legislation on 12 December 1901: the Pacific Island Labourers Bill, which provided for the deportation of Pacific Islanders who had been brought to Queensland as indentured labourers to work on the cane fields, and the Immigration Restriction Bill, designed to ensure that only Europeans would migrate to Australia, which became the legal cornerstone of the White Australia Policy.

These were not the only pieces of legislation intended to deport certain Australian residents and exclude particular groups of prospective immigrants. The Labor Party’s first major contribution was the Wartime Refugee Removal Act 1949, which provided for the deportation of non-European refugees brought to Australia during the second world war, regardless of whether they had Australian families. And then, of course, came the numerous amendments to the Migration Act under Labor and Liberal prime ministers over the past thirty years.

The introduction of mandatory detention was another key moment. But the Migration Amendment Act 1992 was but one of many legislative changes designed to ensure that unwanted arrivals could be detained and then deported. So let me opt for another, less well-known piece of legislation that predated the introduction of mandatory detention: on 21 June 1991 parliament passed the Migration Amendment Bill 1991, which allowed the authorities, among other things, to indefinitely detain one particular individual: a Cuban refugee it had deported earlier that year but had to accept back into Australia because no other country was willing to take him.

But Australia’s response to forced migrants has been contradictory — and that too is often forgotten when we imagine Australian history as going one way until August 2001 and another way thereafter. Here are three dates that could anchor an alternative narrative: On 22 August 1945 Arthur Calwell — the same Calwell who was later responsible for the Wartime Refugee Removal Act and who in 1972 objected to Australia’s accepting a handful of refugees from Uganda because they had the wrong skin colour — decided that Jews who had survived the Holocaust and who had relatives in Australia were welcome to settle there even if they did not meet the usual entry requirements.

On 19 June 1975 Gough Whitlam — the same Whitlam who did not want Vietnamese “boat people” to enter Australia because they were supposedly jumping a queue — announced that Australia had selected Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong for resettlement. What he did not say was that this selection represented a new beginning because for the first time Australia took in refugees foremost on humanitarian grounds.

On 29 July 2008 then immigration minister Chris Evans gave a talk at the ANU in which he outlined the Rudd government’s far-reaching changes to the way it would respond to asylum seekers. Admittedly, these changes were shortlived. But they are worth mentioning, not least to debunk the idea that our present began in August 2001 and has seamlessly continued since the day the Tampa appeared off Christmas Island. •

This is an extended version of a talk delivered on 2 December at the 2021 Australian Historical Association conference.

The post Fake history appeared first on Inside Story.

Ritter argued that the Morrison government needed to come up with more ambitious climate change policies to avoid ruining Australia’s international reputation. His suggestion that in the eyes of outside observers Australia had gone “rogue” responded to Australians’ growing concerns about their country’s image overseas. It was also designed to generate maximum attention by scandalising his audience.

If Australia were indeed widely regarded as a rogue state, it would be in select but dubious company. Probably the first country that comes to mind when we hear the term “rogue state” is North Korea. It was the first Clinton administration that designated as rogue states those regimes that were considered to flout international rules and agreements, support terrorism, develop weapons of mass destruction and suppress human rights. At the time they also included Libya, Iraq, Iran and Cuba. Clinton’s Republican predecessors Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior had similarly singled out “renegade” or “outlaw” states that should live in fear of an American sheriff intent on restoring order.

Although the State Department temporarily dropped the designation “rogue state” in favour of “state of concern” in 2000, the idea remained that the behaviour of certain regimes justified the United States’ ostracising and punishing them. Punishment could mean imposing economic sanctions, as in the case of Iran. It could also involve military action by the United States, ostensibly on behalf of an international community.

When the Greenpeace CEO suggested that outside observers were regarding Australia as a rogue state, he may not have had the origins of that designation in mind. But he was probably aware of precedents for turning the term back on the very governments that had taken the moral high ground vis-à-vis the likes of Kim Il-sung, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević.

Perhaps the most famous example is William Blum’s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, published in 2000, which describes the United States as a “Mecca of hypocrisy” that harbours terrorists, bankrolls human rights violators and pays little heed to international rules and norms. American hypocrisy has also inspired books by Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida. Similarly, two well-regarded economic journalists have argued that Switzerland ought to be regarded as a Schurkenstaat, or rogue state, for facilitating tax evasion on a global scale.

Even if Ritter didn’t think of the United States or Switzerland, he would have known that he wasn’t being particularly original when suggesting that Australia’s stance on climate change might qualify it for rogue state status. As early as 2002, in a paper delivered at the Melbourne Institute’s Economic and Social Outlook Conference, the Griffith University environmental scientist Ian Lowe referred to Australia as a rogue nation when arguing that the Howard government ought to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Three years later, one of Ritter’s predecessors at the helm of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Steve Shallhorn, said that “Australia is a rogue government when it comes to the Kyoto Protocol… because on that question they are outside the norm of industrialised countries.”

Australia did belatedly ratify the Kyoto Protocol — in 2007, after a Labor election win ended John Howard’s long reign. But when the Coalition government — and thus a Howard-era approach to climate change — returned in 2013, the charge that Australia was behaving like a rogue nation resurfaced. During 2013, for example, the Marshall Islands’ climate change minister Tony deBrum said Australia, Canada and Japan, which had argued against tougher measures at COP19 in Warsaw, were acting like rogues. Two years ago, Adam Bandt, the Greens member for Melbourne, told parliament, “Increasingly in Europe and many other countries, Australia is seen as a rogue state… drunk on our fossil fuels that we peddle to the rest of the world.”

But the federal government’s support for fossil fuels is not the only, and not even the main, reason why Australia has often been likened to a rogue nation. It is in relation to the government’s migration policy that the epithet “rogue state” has been most often applied.

Earlier this year, for example, Golriz Ghahraman, the foreign affairs spokesperson of the Greens in Aotearoa New Zealand, said Australia was an “outlier” and a “rogue nation” and should be referred to the United Nations. He was outraged after the deportation of a fifteen-year-old permanent resident of Australia.

In 2014, then Greens leader Christine Milne told the Senate that she was opposed to the Migration Amendment (Protection and other Measures) Bill because “it confirms what many other countries around the world are saying — that is, that Australia, as a state party in the United Nations, has gone rogue on human rights, on international law and torture.” That same year on Lateline, Alastair Nicholson, the former chief justice of the Family Court, likened the government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Cambodia to “behaving, I think, as a rogue nation.”

The same year, Greg Barns, a former chief of staff of Liberal Party politician and federal finance minister John Fahey, wrote in the Hobart Mercury that Australia “is the newest member of the infamous rogue state club” — both on account of the government’s asylum seeker policy and because of its response to global warming.

When Greg Barns, Christine Milne, Alastair Nicholson and David Ritter said that Australia might be considered a rogue nation or rogue state, they used the term in a loose sense, ignoring some of the specific attributes identified by US State Department officials in the 1990s. They were suggesting that Australia was acting outside internationally agreed rules and norms, and/or that its actions were jeopardising the wellbeing of other nations, if not imperilling the global commons.

Such accusations have been well founded. International lawyers, Australian and international human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, various UN rapporteurs and committees, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have repeatedly and justifiably condemned Australia’s response to asylum seekers, including pushbacks, mandatory and potentially indefinite immigration detention, and the deportation of asylum seekers to former colonies. Here is not the place to revisit these arguments.

When it comes to climate change, Australia has long been one of the world’s prime greenhouse gas emitters on a per capita basis, as well as a leading exporter of fossil fuels. It has also long been a prominent naysayer at a succession of international meetings, and one of those slowing down progress on global action against climate change. Australian intransigence and recalcitrance were particularly evident at COP25 in Madrid, when the Australian delegation was reportedly instrumental in thwarting progress at the negotiating table.

Ritter had good reason to sound the alarm in August, a couple of months before the COP26 negotiations. The Australian government committed to a zero emissions target by 2050 but without revealing a roadmap to show how that target could be reached. And the government refused to revise its target for 2030, instead lauding the “Australian way,” which includes a “gas-fired recovery” and a continuation of coalmining “for decades to come.” It was not surprising that a survey by media monitoring company Meltwater Australia found Australia’s international reputation took a hit in the lead-up to COP26.

Nevertheless, Australia’s role was less controversial in Glasgow than it had been two years earlier in Madrid. That was because the Morrison government was but one of many that proved reluctant to agree to meaningful measures to slow down climate change. And because India took on the role of the principal villain, there was no need for Australia to be a prominent naysayer (it was nevertheless firmly in the camp of nations who showed little interest in substantial progress). Thus, those critical of Australia didn’t resort to calling Australia a “rogue nation,” but instead employed more moderate language, such as “laggard.”

But whether or not a negotiator is obstructing proceedings can also be a matter of perceptions. Unlike in Warsaw and Madrid, Australia tried to fly under the radar at COP26. Its delegation even agreed to a text asking governments to provide updated targets next year; only after the conference had concluded did the Morrison government admit that it had no intention of meeting this request.

The point made by Australian critics of government policy, as well as by Tony deBrum, Golriz Ghahraman and other outside observers, is not usually to argue that Australia meets any accepted criteria of a rogue nation. It is to suggest that others might well regard Australia’s behaviour as befitting that of a rogue nation. In other words, the critics have been talking about Australia’s reputation more so than its actions.

Whether or not Australia is considered a rogue nation on account of its climate change policies does matter. Here, the North Korean analogy is instructive. Because North Korea is considered to have gone rogue (by threatening to harm others rather than causing harm to people other than North Korean citizens), it has been punished with sanctions. There is no talk yet of imposing sanctions on Australia, but nations taking costly measures to slow down climate change don’t want nations that refuse to take such measures to gain an unfair advantage. The European Union, for one, will impose tariffs on products exported from countries, including Australia, that don’t do their fair share in tackling global warming.

Has Australia’s reputation been affected by its actions or policies? The answer would certainly be “yes” among those whose job it is to evaluate those actions and policies: international human rights and refugee law experts, and climate scientists.

But what about overseas publics, whose knowledge of Australia is largely mediated by journalists and other opinion-makers? Here, let me first debunk the myth that Australia’s reputation has only suffered in the past twenty years, in the wake of the Tampa affair and Australia’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Some of Australia’s Asian neighbours held highly unfavourable views of Australia during the 1950s and 1960s, well before the term “rogue state” was first officially used, because of the racist White Australia policy. Memories of that policy persisted long after it was officially abandoned in 1973. In the Philippines, for example, echoes of White Australia and the infamous Gamboa case of the late 1940s reverberated in 2005 when it was discovered that Vivian Alvarez Solon, an Australian citizen born in the Philippines, had been unlawfully deported from Australia four years earlier.

Immigration policy wasn’t the only problem. Australia attracted criticism in the United Nations in the 1960s because it held on to Papua New Guinea long after most British and French colonies in Africa and Asia had become independent, though such criticism did not extend much beyond the UN Trusteeship Council.

In Europe, concerns about Australia being an outlier, at least among First World democracies, initially arose over Indigenous rights issues in the 1990s, including the government’s native title legislation in the wake of the Wik judgement, the Howard government’s refusal to apologise to the stolen generations, and the disproportionate number of Indigenous people who died in custody.

These concerns related to the treatment of Australian citizens, in Australia, by Australian authorities. Those voicing them shared the belief that human rights violations are not just a matter for the country where they occur and that Australia’s conduct domestically represented a flouting of international human rights law, including treaties Australia had signed. The apology issued by the Rudd government did little to dampen these concerns, not least because it was accompanied by the Northern Territory intervention, carried over from the Howard government, and because endemic injustices remained.

While Australia’s international reputation was diminished among activists championing Indigenous rights causes, it took an issue affecting asylum seekers — that is, non-Australian citizens — both in and outside Australia further to tarnish the country’s reputation.

But it is Australia’s stance on climate change, especially since the 2019–20 bushfires, that has had the biggest impact on its image overseas. In 2020 Austrade published the Global Sentiment Monitor, the results of a survey about Australia’s reputation in five Asian countries, Britain and the United States. It found that Australia’s global reputation remains strong. Reading between the lines, though, it also suggests that there is much room for improvement:

To grow our reputation, we need to demonstrate the high quality of our products and services, our clean, green produce, effective climate policies, fair immigration policies, and positive contribution to global issues.

True, Australia’s self-perception as a model international citizen, on the one hand, and international perceptions of Australia, on the other, have often been at odds. And not everybody in Europe thinks first of reefs, beaches and the outback, or the Sydney Olympics, when Australia comes up in conversation. But let’s keep this in perspective. The evidence from the Global Sentiment Monitor and other surveys suggests that most people in East Asia, North America and Europe still associate Australia far more closely with an enviable lifestyle than with the poor life expectancy of Indigenous Australians, the incarceration of asylum seekers or the volume of coal shipped from the Port of Newcastle. Even New Zealanders, who tend to know more about their trans-Tasman neighbours than people in faraway Europe, would probably point to underarm bowling before mentioning the detention and deportation of fellow citizens.

Successive Australian governments, notoriously beholden to the fossil fuel industry, have argued that Australia’s share of greenhouse gas emissions is negligible. Of course, Australia isn’t on its own responsible for global warming. In fact, whether or not Australia becomes carbon-neutral doesn’t really matter in the global context. Other countries would be able to compensate if the Morrison government continued to drag its heels.

Given that global warming is indeed a global issue, Australian inaction would not even be decisive when it comes to the effects of that warming on the Australian continent. The risk of Australian bushfires does not only, or even mainly, increase because of Australian CO2 and methane emissions.

That is not to say, however, that a nation’s obligation to reduce emissions ought to depend on the size of its population. Rather, I’d suggest it should depend on its contribution to global warming historically, its emissions on a per capita basis, and its capacity to take effective measures to reduce emissions — and to assist others taking such measures.

Australia’s stance on climate change is arguably more extreme than that of other industrialised countries. Much like in the debate about the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which the Morrison government refused to sign, Australia has been an outlier. It may be instructive to consider whether Australia’s approach, both in relation to irregularised migrants and in relation to climate change, amounts to “rogue” conduct. But the value of characterising Australia’s conduct as “rogue” for heuristic purposes ought to be decoupled from the question of whether it is productive to label Australia a “rogue nation” in public debates about climate change.

A focus on Australia’s “rogue” status is, I think, unhelpful both overseas and in Australian domestic public debate. In other industrialised countries, a focus on the Morrison government’s stance detracts from the fact that most governments are not effectively addressing climate change. In the global north, there is hardly a nation that has not gone rogue. Even where I currently live, in Germany, a country that likes to think of itself as an exemplary international citizen, none of the parties currently represented in federal parliament took policies to the 2021 election that, even if fully implemented, would allow Germany to meet the 2015 Paris agreement’s target of keeping global warming to below 1.5°C.

I’m all in favour of adopting climate change policies that don’t stop at the border, such as a ban on investments in fossil fuel industries, wherever they are, and additional import duties on products from countries that refuse to transform their economies to slow down global warming. But I also believe it is more appropriate to demand action where I live, in my neighbourhood and in my city, rather than in faraway countries. That action could well have an impact in faraway countries — if, for example, it involves lobbying a German company to withdraw from a coalmining venture outside Germany (as happened, albeit unsuccessfully, in early 2020 when Siemens was put under enormous pressure to withdraw from the Adani project in Queensland).

But people overseas may not need much convincing that they should focus their attention on what’s close to home. In fact, as far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of references to Australia’s being considered a rogue nation have originated in Australia. My sense is that Europeans, for example, tend to be puzzled, rather than outraged, by Australia’s response to asylum seekers and by its stance on climate change.

Australians often overestimate the critical attention their country attracts. That has been the case in relation to asylum seeker policies: both the government and refugee advocates exaggerated how much these policies repulsed, or appealed to, publics overseas, particularly in Europe, and the extent to which other countries were prepared to emulate them.

Such overestimation could also be the result of a misconception about the originality of Australia’s rogue behaviour. Australia is not the only country that has ignored calls by scientists to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Canada under prime minister Jean Chrétien, for example, was singled out as a “rogue state” on climate before that term first appeared in the Australian discussion. And of course Australia didn’t invent the extraterritorial processing and detention of asylum seekers; they were already practised in the 1980s by the United States in the Caribbean.

The claim that others might regard Australia as a rogue nation could be intended to prompt the government to change tack lest the nation’s reputation be tarnished. If that’s the case, I don’t think it will work. Some Australian governments have prided themselves on snubbing their international partners, and Morrison and his crew may fall into that category; they might simply consider the information that their actions upset some people overseas a feather in their cap. Most Australian governments, however, have paid close attention to how Australia has been perceived overseas, and don’t need reminding by members of the public. It was not least such international attention that contributed to the demise of the White Australia policy, well before it became a major issue domestically.

If references to Australia’s poor reputation overseas are at all useful, then that’s because they may temper Australians’ view that their government’s approach to international relations is informed by a commitment to human rights, humanitarianism and the rule of (international) law. No, Australia is not a model international citizen, and could do well with the occasional reminder that self-perceptions can be deceptive.

In Australia, statements such as Christine Milne’s and Adam Bandt’s appeal to the audience’s nationalism (which sometimes manifests as a reverse pride in the nation’s flaws). Such an appeal is questionable for two reasons: first, because it could also work the other way, as the Howard government’s popular bashing of international organisations showed; and second, and more important, because a focus on the national interest is at the heart of the predicament that we are currently facing.

This has also been true in the debate about asylum seekers: rather than referring to Australia’s reputation, or to economic losses or gains for Australia, that debate ought to focus on Australia’s capacity to assist people in need of a new home, its responsibility as a regional power, its legal obligations as a member of the international community and, not least, the precarious circumstances of the men, women and children who are seeking Australia’s protection.

Similarly, rather than focusing on Australia’s reputation or the economic gains involved in a transformation of the Australian economy, we may instead want to foreground arguments that explain why such measures are desirable: because all countries need to deal with climate change to the best of their ability, and because Australia has specific obligations as a wealthy industrialised country that produces a comparatively large amount of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis and has also done so in the past. •

This is the extended version of a talk delivered on 22 November at a symposium to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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Hamburg’s Polish Jews were part of a larger group of long-term German residents deported during what was called the Polenaktion. The Nazi authorities were responding to a law passed in Poland in March 1938 — and brought into force in October — that cancelled the citizenship of Polish nationals who had been living abroad continuously for five years or more. While it didn’t specify who those Polish citizens were and where they lived, it was clearly directed at Polish Jews living in Germany and Austria who, the Polish government feared, would move to Poland if their persecution by the Nazis intensified.

About 18,000 Polish Jews were expelled from Germany in late October 1938. Because the German authorities reasoned that the breadwinners’ deportation would compel their families to follow, the majority of them were men. Most deportees were taken to the Neu-Bentschen railway station, a few kilometres from the border, and then forced to walk to the Polish border town of Zbąszyń. “We were warned not to look back, but we heard the rattling of machine guns in the rear. The SS men threatened to shoot if anyone tried to stay behind,” a woman from Hamburg told a New York Times correspondent a couple of days after her deportation.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, rifle shots broke the silence. The people ran or dropped to the ground, where they were beaten and trod on by guards. Many were injured during the stampede. I lost my baggage, as did many others. There was no time to recover it.

The worst happened when we came to a ditch right on the frontier. There was a barbed-wire fence on the other side. We were pushed across it carrying children and those who could not move.

Far from welcoming its citizens, the Polish government protested against their expulsion and initially refused to accommodate them. Thousands of them, variously referred to as deportees or refugees, remained stuck in Zbąszyń, a town of fewer than 5000 people ill-equipped to handle such a large number of arrivals. Some were put up in barns and stables, others slept in open fields. A month after the expulsions, the New York Times correspondent observed their “strange, comfortless existence at Poland’s front gate and Germany’s back door — unable to move in either direction.”

Polish Jews after their arrival in Zbaszyn on 29 October 1938. Alamy

The Zbąszyń refugee camp stayed open until August 1939. A couple of weeks after that, the German army invaded Poland. Some of those deported in October 1938 were lucky, because they had been able to leave Poland before the war. They included a handful of unaccompanied minors who were allowed to migrate to Australia. Most of the deportees who remained in Poland were murdered during the Holocaust.

The German government of 1938 wasn’t the last to try to inconvenience, if not destabilise, a neighbour by swamping it with refugees. Think, for example, of the incident in 1980 that became known as the Mariel boatlift, when Fidel Castro’s government encouraged — and in some cases compelled — about 125,000 Cubans unhappy with its rule and their own circumstances to leave for the United States. They included people considered to be socially undesirable —because they were gay, for example, or lived in psychiatric institutions or had been convicted of criminal offences.

The Mariel boatlift was designed to create problems for US president Jimmy Carter, who was committed to rescuing people from the clutches of communism but unprepared to accommodate such a large number of arrivals in a relatively short time and unwilling to resettle people who were considered socially undesirable from a US perspective.

Or think of Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempt in February and March 2020 to put pressure on the European Union by bussing thousands of refugees living in Turkey to the Turkish–Greek border, where border guards told them to cross over into Greece. His ploy largely failed because the Greeks temporarily suspended the country’s asylum regime and deployed their military at the border to prevent refugees from crossing. The Greek government had the backing of the European Union, with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declaring that Greece was Europe’s ασπίδα, or shield, gesturing towards its efforts to resist an Asian invasion of Europe 2500 years earlier.

Erdoğan’s use of irregular migrants to unsettle and blackmail a more powerful opponent — namely the European Union, for Greece was just the incidental target — was soon identified as an instance of “hybrid warfare.” For the US military analyst Frank G. Hoffman, who coined the term in 2007, hybrid warfare means the “blurring of modes of war, the blurring of who fights, and what technologies are brought to bear,” which “produces a wide range of variety and complexity.”

Vladimir Putin is a master of hybrid warfare. Employing mercenaries in one conflict, unleashing hackers or spreading fake news in another, the Russian government has become expert in using an array of non-conventional means to make life difficult for its adversaries. It, too, has used irregular migrants to put pressure on the West: in 2015 and early 2016 it encouraged refugees to enter the European Union via the Russian–Norwegian and Russian–Finnish borders, prompting US general Philip Breedlove, supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, to tell the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee: “Together Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, a Russian vassal, has emulated some of Putin’s tactics. Responding to sanctions imposed on members of his regime by the European Union, his government has opened up a route for irregular migrants to enter the EU via Belarus. Iraqis who had arrived in Minsk by plane from Baghdad began turning up at the Lithuanian border in June, ferried there by Belarusian authorities. By early August, some 4000 refugees had crossed the border. In mid August, Lithuanian border guards caught red-handed twelve members of the Belarusian security forces in riot gear who had crossed over into Lithuanian territory while they were pushing migrants across the border. When Lithuania fortified the crossing, Belarus began targeting Latvia and Poland.

People smugglers were quick to see the business opportunities created by the Belarusian government, and offered their services to desperate people hoping to be able to seek protection in the European Union. Those entering the EU via Belarus now include irregular migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, the Republic of Congo and other refugee-producing countries.

Passing by the memorial for Hamburg’s Polish Jews a couple of days ago, I was reminded that Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare hasn’t just had geopolitical repercussions but has also had an impact on the migrants he has “weaponised,” just as Germany’s actions had on the migrants forced to live in squalid conditions in Zbąszyń in 1938 and 1939. “The situation is undoubtedly complex, but it is hard to forget about the group of human beings stuck in no-man’s land,” Justyna Kajta wrote recently about the situation at the Polish–Belarusian border. “The unanswered question is: what will happen to them, and when?”

Hamburg’s monument to the 800 Polish Jews deported on 28 October 1938. Klaus Neumann

Much like Poland in 1938, the three EU member states that share a border with Belarus have resisted admitting people pushed across the border by the Belarusian authorities. All three have declared states of emergency, erected fences and deployed additional security forces at the border. Lithuanian and Polish border guards have also been accused of forcing irregular migrants back to Belarus before they can make asylum claims.

The focus in recent weeks has been on the border between Poland and Belarus. With police and border guards from both countries stopping people from leaving the immediate area, groups of migrants have been stuck in no-man’s land, without access to shelter, food, clean water or medical aid. At least four people have died, presumably from hypothermia.

In 1938 the world soon found out what was going on at Zbąszyń; in 2021, although we live in the age of mobile phones and citizen journalists, we know little about what’s happening at the Polish border. That’s because Poland has declared a three-kilometre exclusion zone around its border with Belarus, preventing journalists, lawyers and the representatives of refugee advocacy groups from talking to the people stuck there. We have only a sketchy impression of how many people have managed to slip into Poland, the circumstances of those caught between Poland and Belarus, and the means used by the security forces of the two countries to stop migrants crossing into Poland or going back to Belarus.

On 30 September, Amnesty International said that it had used “spatial reconstruction techniques” to track a group of thirty-two people from Afghanistan — twenty-seven men, four women and a fifteen-year-old girl — who crossed the Polish border on 8 August. Its analysis suggests that the group had camped on the Polish side of the border but been illegally pushed back to the Belarusian side. In each case, while they were technically in Poland or Belarus, they remained in no-man’s land.

The case of the thirty-two Afghan nationals had been brought to the attention of the European Court of Human Rights on 20 August. Five days later, in an exceptional interim ruling, the court told the Polish government to provide them with food, water, clothing, adequate medical care and, if possible, temporary shelter. But although the court told the Polish government that failure to comply with its interim measures might constitute a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Poland has so far stuck to its guns, quite literally.

Poland has just extended its state of emergency — the first since the end of state socialism — for another sixty days. Defending the decision, the Polish government claimed that it had evidence of terrorists masquerading as refugees and had found a video stored on a migrant’s phone that depicted a sexual act involving a naked man and a cow. It subsequently transpired that the video has been circulating online for years.

The governments of all three EU member states have boasted of their ability to keep out potential asylum seekers. The Latvian authorities claim that they have turned back some 1400 migrants since 10 August and allowed only thirty-eight to enter. The Lithuanian authorities pride themselves on having repelled twice as many. On 28 and 29 September alone, Poland recorded 786 attempts to enter the country from Belarus, all of them unsuccessful.

The term “no-man’s land” acquired its prominence and much of its present-day meaning during the first world war, when it denoted the stretch of land between enemy trench lines. Having been shelled repeatedly, it was devoid of trees and buildings, making attempts to cross it hazardous. But it could also be a space where the war was temporarily suspended; at night, the warring sides occasionally allowed each other to retrieve the bodies of the wounded and dead. It could even, as in Victor Trivas’s 1931 film Niemandsland, be imagined as a utopian space where peace becomes possible.

But the no-man’s land occupied by the thirty-two migrants from Afghanistan tracked by Amnesty International has little in common with the space between the trenches in wartime:

In peace, No-man’s Lands are strips of field between the frontiers of the European countries, haunted by the living. No one crawls to the barbed wire at night, to fetch a dead comrade back. There is no comradeship among the survivors of this peace.

In this peace, Europe traces its lines of barbed wire through fields and hearts. Into this land between the frontiers the continent pushes the men it has no use for.

These are lines from Renée Brand’s novel Niemandsland, published in the original German in Switzerland in 1940 and then, a year later, as Short Days Ago in New York. Brand acknowledges no-man’s land’s connotations at the time while highlighting how different her Niemandsland — a literal rendering of “no-man’s land” — is from the wasteland between the trenches of the first world war.

Brand’s novel is set in the late 1930s, not long before the outbreak of the second world war. It features a motley group of people — “ministers and physicians, teachers and engineers, painters, writers, mothers, people in love, children” — stranded on a field between Germany and an unnamed European country. “This field is No-man’s Land,” the narrator explains; it is “outside.” The people inhabiting the Niemandsland are referred to as Niemandsleute — “No-man’s people” in the published English translation.

The group includes seven men, four women and eight children, one of them born in the no-man’s land. Some of them have been deported to this piece of land, others have made their own way there. Some have been persecuted as Jews, others have left or been deported from Germany for other reasons. Some were “simply men with some responsibility, the kind of men who were what we had always thought men should be.” They have in common that the unnamed European country outside whose borders they are camped refuses to admit them, and that they can’t or don’t want to return to Germany.

While Niemandsland’s protagonists don’t yearn for a lost home, they are not projecting all their hopes onto life in a country of refuge either. They simply want to be somewhere (rather than in the nowhere of no-man’s land), and don’t harbour any particular expectations about life on the other side of the border.

Brand drew on her own experience of being a refugee. Born in 1900 in Berlin, she studied in that city and in Freiburg but quit her studies when she married in 1922. When the Nazi party assumed power in Germany, Brand and her seven-year-old son emigrated to France. They moved to Switzerland in 1934, and from there, in 1941, to the United States. While in Switzerland, Brand returned to university, and completed a doctorate in German literature. In the United States, she reinvented herself, studying psychology and eventually practising as a Jungian psychoanalyst.

Niemandsland is Brand’s only published work of fiction. Its Swiss publisher thought the novel’s literary qualities raised it above most of the literature produced by émigré writers at the time, and it was well received when it first appeared in 1940. But in the mid 1940 the Swiss censorship authorities banned any displaying, advertising or reviewing of the book, presumably out of concern that Germany might consider it provocative. The ban was only lifted in August 1945. The novel’s English-language edition attracted favourable reviews — a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times marvelled that “Wonder is aroused that such lyrical intensity, such universal passion and pity and beauty could be encompassed in so brief a tale” — but has long since been forgotten.

The widely reported deportation of Polish Jews in late October 1938 may well have informed Brand’s narrative, if not prompted her fiction. But other groups of Jews, expelled from one country but unable to enter the country they were deported to, also found themselves stuck in no-man’s land. In late 1938, about 2000 Jews expelled from Slovakia to Hungary became marooned at the Slovakian–Hungarian border for several months. Earlier in 1938, sixty-eight Jews expelled from Austria’s Burgenland to Czechoslovakia had been confined for several months on a tugboat on the Hungarian side of the Danube River — an episode that inspired the 1938 play Das Schiff auf der Donau by the German writer Friedrich Wolf, who at the time was living in exile in France.

Both because of its literary qualities and because it hasn’t dated, Brand’s novel is in a different league from Wolf’s rather didactic play. It also brilliantly analyses the essential qualities of the kind of no-man’s land inhabited by forced migrants: it is no terra nullius, it isn’t fiercely contested (as in war) and its status is not fixed. It is a no-man’s land only for the Niemandsleute: only they are confined there.

As three examples show, refugees and stateless people are often stuck in no-man’s land. In an infamous case in 1992, Israel deported 415 Palestinians from the Occupied Territories to a no-man’s land at the Israeli–Lebanese border. In 2001, authorities in Uzbekistan deported more than one hundred ethnic Uzbeks who had fled their native Tajikistan in the course of that country’s 1992 civil war; when Tajikistan refused to admit them, in the words of reporter Bruce Pannier, they became “trapped in a small stretch of land between the two countries.” In 2016, Amnesty International drew attention to the plight of 75,000 Syrians who were said to be stranded at the Syrian–Jordanian border.

The space that housed Palestinian deportees at the border between Israel and Lebanon, or the ships adrift in the Andaman Sea in 2015 because no country wanted to accommodate their Rohingya passengers became no-man’s land because their inhabitants had been deprived of rights. No-man’s land isn’t sitting waiting: it only comes into being once people are abandoned to it and enclosed on it.

Brand puts it like this: “Between [Germany’s] far-flung frontiers it has become narrow, so that one has had to invent a No-man’s Land for those who have no room in there.” She highlights the transformation of refugees and deportees into Niemandsleute. “Only former people here,” one of her characters says, “Former ministerial counsellor, former judge. Former mothers, fiancées, sweethearts. And look: our former children are running along to get their soup. Former all of them. Former human beings.”

Brand’s novel was directed at a specific audience: “Americans and Europeans of the twentieth century.” She suggests that the book’s readers have been compromised, if only because they are unable to imagine what is happening to those banished from Germany, and are unwilling to raise their voices. Addressing the reader directly, she writes: “This face at the window, behind the curtain, doesn’t it strike you as familiar? Do you not recognise your own face, well hidden behind curtains, prying through panes as yet unbroken?”

Brand doesn’t allow her readers to be distant observers. Instead she implicates them in the novel’s events and thereby encourages them to take sides. As soon as they identify the predicament of the novel’s characters with that faced by forcibly displaced people today, today’s readers are similarly called to account. They too are prompted to ask themselves: am I not hiding behind my curtain, witnessing injustices without intervening? And if so, is it not my responsibility to act?

At the Belarusian–Polish border, some bystanders have been quick to lambast the Lukashenko regime for ferrying refugees to that no-man’s land. Individual European governments and the European Commission blame the government in Minsk for the migrants’ plight. On 29 September, the commission published a communication about a “renewed EU action plan against migrant smuggling,” and used it to condemn the role of “State actors in artificially creating and facilitating irregular migration, using migratory flows as a tool for political purposes.”

But there is little the European Commission can do to stop Belarus’s weaponisation of irregular migration. On 30 September, the EU partially suspended the visa facilitation agreement with Belarus, yet it’s doubtful that this will hurt a regime whose key members are already barred from entering the European Union.

Rather than demonstrating their outrage at Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare, the European Commission ought to concern itself with the illegal practices of its member states, including Poland. Von der Leyen and her fellow commissioners may be reluctant to do so not because of a likely backlash from the Polish government but, first, because other EU members have not done nearly enough to provide credible assurances to Lithuania, Latvia and Poland that the three countries won’t be left alone to deal with any migrants seeking asylum, and, second, because Poland is by no means the only EU member state accused of pushing back irregular migrants and violating human rights.

EU member countries that don’t share a land border with a non-EU country and can’t be easily accessed by sea from outside the EU have shown no sign of being prepared to accommodate people entering Lithuania, Latvia or Poland in search of protection. If they had, then those three Eastern European countries would have had little incentive to violate international and EU law and force migrants back across the Belarusian border, confine them in no-man’s land at the border, and restrict access to them.

Any condemnation of Polish practices would be hypocritical if it did not imply a condemnation of such practices in principle. Other EU member states too have been guilty of pushbacks and of violating the human rights of people trying to seek asylum. They include Croatia, Greece and Italy, not to mention the sordid saga of the EU’s collaboration with the Libyan “coast guard” to stop migrants from crossing the Mediterranean.

It’s little wonder that the European Commission has reserved its outrage for Lukashenko and approached the governments in Warsaw and Vilnius with kid gloves. Asked repeatedly during a press conference on 29 September how the commission viewed Poland’s pushbacks, EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson was only prepared to say that “the commission has several question marks.”

The following day, Johansson met with Polish foreign minister Mariusz Kamiński. If her tweets after the meeting are any guide, then the two sides agreed to disagree. He did not seem to be troubled by whatever question the commissioner put to him. “We agreed that Belarus’s actions must meet with a firm response from the member states,” he tweeted after the meeting. He assured Johansson that “Poland grants international protection to people whose life and health are at risk.”

“Europe… is this field here Europe? Or what continent is it?” asks one of Renée Brand’s protagonists, whereupon another responds: “There is no Europe any more. It has become a lie. Could it be true that men live as we live in the heart of Europe?”

No matter how you look at the Niemandsland, it is outside, Brand explains in the opening pages of her book. “Outside of moon and earth: in the sphere of total indifference.” Later, she seemingly allows her readers to object to the charges of indifference, of hiding their face behind the curtains, only to expose their hypocrisy:

You protest. No, you say, this is not your face. You intervened wherever it was possible. How did you intervene?

With both hands you have reinforced the boundaries against which the waves of despair were surging. You appointed committees to confer on how to relieve the stricken. Honorable men and women exerted themselves. Conferences were in session for days and days. Misery is in session for nights and nights.

And maybe fifty years from now, there’ll be a memorial for those who froze to death at the European Union’s eastern border. •

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He woke up, a bit dazed and groggy and then smiled, said hello, looked at me quizzically and said, “And to what paragraph of the Public Health Order do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

I didn’t want to plead civil disobedience and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a care visit for a dying friend. Sensing that I didn’t have an answer, he looked at me, and smiled, and said, “I suppose it could be a care visit for a dying friend.” I smiled back.

For around two decades, I would catch up with Hal regularly, often every month, and we would sit down over lunch and discuss the state of the world. We discussed the law and Indigenous policy, and what George Bush or Donald Trump were up to. And we — though more him than me — would reminisce. Sometimes he told stories that I had heard before but usually they were new. Each time they were wonderful and told with a generosity and humanity that said much about the teller.

But that afternoon a few weeks ago, with Hal well aware that death was finally coming, I had the unique privilege of telling his stories back to him, reminding him of why his life was one of great meaning, why he had lived out his motto — “to thine self be true” — and why, in his own humble way, he had had an immeasurable impact on this country.

For a man with such a keen sense of humour, and who led such a reflective life, irony sometimes escaped him. I remember having lunch with him when he was eighty-seven and living up at Hawkes Nest. He was complaining that he was feeling a bit sore. I raised a curious eyebrow, but privately thought it was just an old person complaining about his ailments. However, he went on to say that earlier in the week he had used a wheelbarrow to move ten tonnes of soil from the front of the house, where it had been delivered, to the back. I asked him why on earth he would do that. His response: “I want to build up the garden beds so that when I get old, I won’t have to bend over so far.”

There has always been a certain restlessness to Hal, one that would cause him to spend two months walking the untracked reaches of the Snowy Mountains as a student; or to leave a prestigious city law firm, Minters, to join the Australian School of Pacific Administration and then head to Manus Island in New Guinea to undertake fieldwork; or to leave a lucrative practice at the bar and sell up his fledgling cattle enterprise in order to establish a law school when his only experience of teaching law had been as a part-time tutor; or to leave Australia in his late eighties to spend three months living in Ramallah in order to get a deeper understanding of the Palestinian predicament. Hal certainly gave licence to his curiosity, and the more any learning experience involved an element of adventure, the keener he was.

He once told me how he would continually ask his colleagues at the School of Pacific Administration — poets, historians, anthropologists and experienced kiaps (New Guinea field officers), many of whom had spent years working in very challenging environments — “Why?”; “Why do you say that?”; “Why is that the case?” He genuinely wanted to know the answer, but they came to think of him as the true intellectual among them for doing no more than constantly asking “Why?” That was something that amused Hal, and he continued to make good use of the technique throughout his life, often to the discomfort of his hyperbolic friends.

People often speak of Hal as a figure on the left of politics. Certainly, in his early days as a lawyer he was briefly a member of the Communist Party. It didn’t trouble the senior partner who employed him as his personal brains trust. But then Hal would later be the industrial lawyer of choice for the Packers (that’s Frank and Kerry, not the storemen) and the pastoralists. He was also the unionists’ lawyer of choice on occasion.

Whether he was for capital or labour, he was respected by both and independent of either. He was not just open to the arguments but determined to test his own assumptions and preferences. His compassion was never in doubt, but his intellect was always his guide. No one owned Hal Wootten, but he was loyal to people and causes.

Despite John Kerr’s very public shortcomings, Hal remained loyal to him. Kerr had taken Hal up as a protégé and was one of Hal’s early mentors, although never in the league of Hal’s mother and grandparents. But Hal was also one of the first to privately signal his disapproval after Sir John’s dismissal of Gough Whitlam as prime minister in 1975. When Sir John rang him on the day it happened to seek affirmation of what he had done, Hal’s response — “I’m sure you must have had a very good reason” — delivered in his sceptical tone, would not have been the one Kerr was seeking.

Like all of us, Hal was not without his contradictions. He could show enormous patience and sympathy in some situations, especially in dealing with those who were struggling, and yet be short and even cantankerous in others.

One of the few times I encountered Hal in a professional capacity was in the early days of the Native Title Act, when he was conducting a mediation as deputy president of the National Native Title Tribunal. The parties were a group of native title claimants at Peak Hill, for whom I acted, a gold mining company wanting to mine the old town reserve, the local council, and the NSW government. Peak Hill is south of Dubbo and the history of the Aboriginal people there, like elsewhere, had been one of dispossession, discrimination, suffering and exclusion.

In listening to each party speak, Hal was unrushed and very attentive. Occasionally he would ask an open question for clarification, but there was no judgement in his manner. He was there to listen and learn. Importantly, no lawyer spoke. It was the people at the heart of the dispute talking directly to one another, airing, in the case of the claimants, grievances that were generations old. The mayor acknowledged the wrongs but spoke of what the mine would do for the town; the miner’s CEO, confronted with a situation that he hadn’t experienced before, promised that they would be respectful of the community’s concerns and interests.

It was a genuine and moving exchange — until the state government, through its barrister and senior lawyers, delivered its legalistic position, which gave no scope for compromise or agreement. In an instant, Hal, the gentle grandfather, transformed into the very grumpy, acutely attuned judge. But there are limits to what a mediator can achieve in the face of intransigence, and with the state unwilling to shift, Hal terminated the mediation. Unlike so many of his successors on the tribunal, who kept matters in fruitless suspension for years, Hal knew there was no value in flogging a dead horse.

Hal had a number of important personal friendships with people “on whom the law bears harshly.” Frank Doolan, a renowned senior Wiradjuri man who is known across the state as “Riverbank Frank,” would introduce Hal to friends as “Gill’s legal aid boyfriend.” Frank, who always had a very deep affection and respect for Hal, remembers him as “a kind, gentle man with enormous strength of character.” He goes on: “Although I often argued (or tried to argue) about Black issues with him I can’t recall a single time when I won the argument. Hal would sigh, look at me, with the patience of Job and say, ‘Frank you’ve got to have a plan.’ The Aboriginal Legal Service, which was born in Redfern, actually came into being because Hal and people like Neville Wran, Frank Walker and Paul Landa supported Indigenous Australians and saw their great need for proper representation in the legal world.”

For some years until he was well into his nineties, Hal and Gillian would join Frank in quiet protest at Villawood Detention Centre each Australia Day. Hal was concerned for the plight of refugees in Australia, especially those arriving by boat. One was Ali Gulzari, who became Hal’s friend when Ali’s remarkable success as a new arrival at high school in western Sydney led to them being put in touch. The friendship between these two flourished and they both learned much about the world from sharing stories with one another, sometimes on long exploratory drives across the country, including visits to Richard Frankland, a respected Aboriginal leader from Western Victoria who assisted Hal in the landmark work of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Richard recalls that he first met Hal when he was about twenty-five. “We investigated First Nation deaths in custody together. It was a hard job, and we covered many miles together, over a period of about four years. As I watched Hal work, I was astounded at his ability to listen and actually hear what people had to say. We heard stories from many people who had lost a friend or family member in custody, stories about grief, injustice, systemic discrimination. Hal humanised what had been dehumanised. I once asked Hal what advice he would give a young man, meaning myself. He said, ‘Love with an open hand, have humility and give of yourself generously.’”

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hal was disturbed by events in the Middle East and the tensions between Islam and the West, so he decided to develop a deeper understanding of the roots of the conflict. In particular, he was concerned at the demonisation of Muslims. He returned to university, this time as an undergraduate student in Arabic studies. But this was not enough, and he decided to spend three months living in Ramallah, on the West Bank. It was a time in which he formed friendships on both sides of the border and made links that led to a program of Palestinian lawyers undertaking doctoral studies at UNSW. It also led to a close friendship with Naser Shaktour, the founder and director of the Palestinian Film Festival in Australia.

Hal was arrested among a group of Israelis defending Palestinian farmers from Israeli settlers in the West Bank. He insisted on the soldiers telling him under what law he was being detained. Eventually they released him without charge, but he refused to leave until all of the protesters were let go. After hours and hours of waiting around, the whole group was released.

Hal cherished his time as a barrister and a judge, but establishing the law school at UNSW was, for him, the highlight of his career and the source of his greatest professional pride. How a country trains its lawyers is no small thing. In setting out to change legal education, Hal was conscious of the impact that it could have on changing the country.

By the time I came to study law in the early 1980s, UNSW had already marked itself out as a progressive and highly innovative law school that broke with century old methods of how lawyers were to be trained. Importantly, the UNSW law school took seriously its obligation to engage students actively in their training, while inculcating a strong sense of professionalism and the responsibilities to society as a whole, especially “those on whom the law bore harshly,” who were the corollary of the privileges of practice. The pedagogy designed by Hal was based on the simple but effective principle of avoiding all that he had found miserable and useless in his own legal education. As time has gone on, elements of Hal’s approach have been adopted in every law school in the country, and overseas institutions, from Harvard down, have made efforts to explore UNSW’s approach.

No brief reflection like this can ever do justice to such a rich, purposeful and long life as Hal’s. Brought up by his widowed mother and her parents, he studied law part-time while working as a government clerk and went on to become a leading law student, adviser to the senior partner of a leading commercial firm as a graduate lawyer, New Guinea field worker, lecturer in law for colonial government administrators, leading industrial barrister, secretary-general of LAWASIA, foundation dean of a law school offering a new mode of legal education, founding chair of the first Aboriginal Legal Service, adviser to the government of the newly independent Papua New Guinea, Supreme Court judge, chairman of the NSW Law Reform Commission, chairman of the Australian Press Council, chancellor of NSW Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology Sydney), president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, royal commissioner into Aboriginal deaths in custody, deputy president of the National Native Title Tribunal, patron of the Environmental Defenders Office, Queen’s Counsel, Companion of the Order of Australia, farmer, activist, conservationist, humanitarian, friend of the downtrodden.

Hal was intellectually brilliant, warm, quick-witted, generous and humble. But of all his many wonderful qualities, three made him stand out.

The first was his vision of what could be achieved. He was so often the johnny-on-the-spot, trusting his instincts and judgement; he saw what others couldn’t but which in hindsight was so often blindingly obvious.

The second was his practicality. He didn’t hesitate in taking the first, often simple step and seeing where it would lead. He was courageous and tenacious in doing what needed doing.

And lastly, he was principled. One friend has said that he held a mirror up to the country, which he did, but not before he held it up to himself. •

This article is based on Andrew Chalk’s reflections at Hal Wootten’s funeral in Sydney on 6 August.

The post Why, and why not? appeared first on Inside Story.

This is a story of 9/12, not 9/11, but sometimes the response to an act of murder and aggression can be just as telling as the act itself, and every bit as pertinent to the present.

Howard was in Washington on 11 September 2001. He’d celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of ANZUS, hosted a barbecue for senior Bush administration officials at the residence of Australian ambassador Michael Thawley, met Rupert Murdoch for a private dinner and was about to address a joint sitting of Congress. As the ABC’s political correspondent I was part of the press pack.

The prime minister’s visit coincided with the Tampa crisis. Four hundred and thirty-three asylum seekers had been rescued in late August by the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, refused permission to be offloaded on Christmas Island, and transferred at gunpoint to HMAS Manoora, which was sailing through the Timor Sea on a voyage its commander, at that stage, knew not where.

Australia had yet to secure permission from Nauru to land the unfortunate asylum seekers who were the first victims of what became the Pacific Solution. Most of them were Afghan Hazaras, members of a minority fleeing persecution by Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, up to and including rape and murder.

Immediately after the 9/11 attack, Howard offered any assistance Australia could provide to help punish the perpetrators. Invoking ANZUS would come later. President George W. Bush demanded the Taliban give up Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda foot soldiers. The Taliban refused and the United States set about building a coalition to support an invasion of Afghanistan.

In the shell-shocked hours after the attacks, I wondered whether this lethal obscenity changed the status of the Tampa asylum seekers. They were Hazara, persecuted by the Taliban who were now Australia’s enemy. Did not the old cliché “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” apply, I wondered.

After being whisked to the basement of the Australian embassy and then spending a night at the ambassador’s residence, the prime minister emerged on 12 September for a late-morning media conference under the spreading limbs of the mansion’s autumn oaks, before making an early return to Australia. Amid the questioning, I asked him whether the fact we had offered the United States whatever assistance it needed meant Australia’s attitude to the Tampa’s passengers would change. Were they deserving of our protection because they were victims of people who were now our enemy?

After a bit of backing and filling, Mr Howard responded that it was not a matter he was prepared to contemplate at that moment. Meanwhile, the Manoora was sailing through the Torres Strait towards Nauru. When it eventually reached its destination, most of the Hazaras were put ashore, with another 130 destined for New Zealand.

Ninety-two of the people set down in Nauru were eventually given temporary protection visas. Twenty years later, in the wake of the “forever” war, around 4300 Afghans live in similar limbo in Australia, not quite assured of permanent residency, let alone citizenship.

And now, of course, a sizeable number of the hundreds of Afghans who worked as interpreters, guards and the like for the Australian military, Australian diplomats and Australian aid projects have been left behind, along with their families, because of the procrastination surrounding the operation to rescue them.

According to the UN refugee agency, more than 3.5 million Afghans are internally displaced — one tenth of the population — and the number is rising. Some of them, including Afghans who worked for Australia, and their families, have already made their way into Pakistan. A fortunate few have been airlifted from Islamabad; many more have been left behind.

The Hazaras on the Tampa had been fleeing the last Taliban regime; the early behaviour of the Taliban 2.0 suggests time has not tempered its murderous behaviour. Just as happened two decades ago, tens of thousands of Hazaras and other vulnerable Afghans are likely to be on the road seeking a better life, perhaps in Australia.

Some could end up in Indonesia looking for a boat to get here, just as their predecessors did, including Afghans who have risked life and limb for us over the past twenty years. But Scott Morrison insists that no Afghans, not even those with visas who got left behind in the chaos, will be allowed into Australia if they arrive by boat.

In 1975, Gough Whitlam was rightly excoriated by Malcolm Fraser and the Coalition for refusing to assist Vietnamese people who worked for Australia to escape Saigon. As prime minister, Fraser set out to achieve and won bipartisan support for the settlement of Vietnamese fleeing the communist regime.

Hundreds of the Afghans and their families who worked for Australia weren’t fortunate enough to run the gauntlet to safety in Kabul or to make it to Islamabad in time to be rescued.

Should our government be throwing resources at rescuing them from their peril in Afghanistan and Pakistan after what they did for us, or should it leave them to fend for themselves, increasing the likelihood that some of them will end up in Indonesia seeking passage to Australia on a leaky boat?

Does Morrison really want to find himself in the same boat as Whitlam? •

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Despite coming from a nation that prides itself on hard borders, many Australians have experienced the world as a porous and relatively borderless place. Until eighteen months ago, it was unfathomable that Australian citizens and permanent residents would be prevented from re-entering their own country. Or, indeed, that we would be prohibited from leaving it. Still more unthinkable was the idea of hard borders between states and territories.

For the many people whose families, lives and livelihoods crisscross internal and international borders, these new obstacles offer a glimpse of the experience of those who flee persecution or serious harm in their home countries and are blocked from reaching safety by administrative and legal barriers — barriers that can seem unfair, opaque, arbitrary, ever-changing and unresponsive to personal circumstances.

If we hadn’t realised it before, we now know that borders aren’t physical or geographic. They are legal and administrative constructs, created and controlled by governments. We also know that border closures don’t always benefit those for whom they are purportedly enacted.

As we have already seen this year in Myanmar, Hong Kong and now Afghanistan, conflict and persecution continue to shape patterns of movement in our region, just as Covid-19 has. So too, increasingly, will a changing climate and related disasters. To set our border policies as if these are not Australia’s problems, and can be pushed back indefinitely, is short-sighted and dangerous.

Somehow, we need to start preparing public sentiment for the introduction of more appropriate policies. The Covid-19 pandemic may provide the opportunity to do so.

For many Australians, the coincidence of disturbing footage from Afghanistan and the twenty-year anniversary of the “Tampa affair” has been particularly unsettling. It was back then, in August 2001, that the Howard government began building the most draconian asylum policy yet seen in Australia. Parts of our territory were “excised” from the migration zone to prevent people from claiming asylum; offshore processing was introduced; and the military was given new orders to intercept and turn back boats.

Since then, Australia has pushed back boats with little regard for the circumstances to which the people on board are returned. We have left people to languish in Nauru and Papua New Guinea until they disintegrate physically and mentally. We have detained people in prison-like conditions in Australia, despite the availability of less restrictive alternatives. And the “lucky” ones — those who are recognised as refugees and permitted to live in the Australian community — have been condemned to a life of rolling temporary visas shown to cause and exacerbate anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly in children.

This physical and psychological harm has been meticulously documented by private contractors, doctors and trauma counsellors. It has been noted with growing alarm by every independent human rights body to review Australian asylum practice. It has even been referred to the International Criminal Court — six times since 2014 — as amounting to crimes against humanity.

Increasingly, though, ordinary people are horrified, or at least discomforted, by where Tampa politics have led us. Nowhere is this more evident than in the national groundswell of support for the Murugappan family, driven by an unlikely source: the rural Queensland town of Biloela, where the family members lived until they were ripped from their home in a dawn raid.

The Murugappans’ young girls, both born in Australia but deemed “unlawful non-citizens” once their mother’s visa lapsed, have since grown up in detention. The youngest, Tharnicaa, was just eight months old when she was first detained. By the time she was two, four of her teeth were rotten and required surgical removal, apparently because of a lack of fresh food and sunlight in detention. Shortly before her fourth birthday, she was again rushed to hospital, this time with a suspected life-threatening infection. Many Australians, even those who have reservations about immigration, were disturbed by images of this child crying on a hospital bed as her older sister Kopika, herself just six, tried to comfort her.

As the support for the Murugappans makes clear, it is not a matter of “left” versus “right,” “idealists” versus “pragmatists,” or supporters versus opponents of refugees. Good people across the political spectrum and from all walks of life are speaking out about how Australia’s treatment of vulnerable people offends their sense of decency.

But the political space for reasoned debate on refugee protection has all but vanished. Battle lines have been drawn and the topic remains bitterly divisive. For many years, the outlook for a more humane approach has been bleak.

Or at least it was until Covid-19. The pandemic is the most significant global disruption to occur since the seismic political and social shifts that followed the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Just as those shifts shaped Australia’s handling of the Tampa affair and its aftermath, this pandemic may provide an opportunity to shape how we will approach asylum issues in the future.

In an election speech a few weeks after Tampa, John Howard delivered the refrain that has haunted Australian asylum policy for decades: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” It was bold, powerful, and yet untrue. Prior to the pandemic, no country had ever been able to totally control who arrived at its borders, or their mode of travel. But facts are not where the power of Howard’s statement lay. It lay in the concept — sold to and readily accepted by many — that our border needed to be “protected” and “defended” with an iron fist rather than simply managed in an orderly and humane way.

By using wartime language, enmeshing asylum policy with national security, and singling out asylum seekers arriving by boat, this approach framed maritime migration as a threat to be feared. It gave a false impression that there are two categories of non-citizens entering Australia: those who enter at airports and seaports with correct documentation and, by reason of having “done the right thing” administratively, pose no inherent national security threat; and those who arrive by boat without prior approval and without the proper paperwork.

Is this distinction accurate? Before 2020, thousands of people flew in and out of Australia every day with little or no active government decision-making. They did so because they were fortunate enough to hold the right passport. With eGates and other new technology, some may have entered and left Australia without a single word to a border official. The government would have no record of their background and circumstances, why they were here, or what they did during their stay.

By contrast, asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat are among the most closely vetted groups of non-citizens. In the words of Malcolm Turnbull, “We know exactly everything about them.” We scour their backgrounds and plumb the depths of their traumas as they undergo rigorous screening and refugee status processes. As they await decisions on their claims, almost every aspect of their lives is monitored and controlled by the government.

Where the individuals themselves can’t be found to pose a threat, attention shifts to the risk that would arise if “everyone” came. This fear of invading masses goes back a century or more, but in the past twenty years it has become accepted as truth, even by moderates and progressives. Across the political spectrum, there is a shared view that steps must be taken to deter people from making their own way to safety in Australia.

The reality is much more complex. Almost 60 per cent of the 82.4 million people displaced in 2020 remained within their own countries. Most of the rest are unlikely ever to end up on a boat to Australia, regardless of our policies, because we are too far away or they have already found a safe haven. The overwhelming majority of refugees stay close to home, in neighbouring countries and among other displaced compatriots.

For those who do seek safety further abroad, the risks inherent in being smugg-led across the sea are a powerful deterrent. And if they do reach Australian soil, they face a rigorous legal process to determine whether they meet the strict criteria for protection. The idea that deterrent policies are the only thing holding millions of people at bay doesn’t match the reality of displacement.

Nor does the humanitarian trump card that offshore processing has “saved lives at sea.” Cruel policies are justified as necessary to prevent people from getting on boats and potentially drowning, but there is little evidentiary basis for this defence. We know that offshore detention, for example, didn’t stop boats or save lives. Boat turnbacks may reduce drownings, but only to expose people to risks of death and serious harm elsewhere. The militant secrecy surrounding these operations makes it impossible to assess the full extent of the dangers to which people are returned, but we do know that people have been turned back only to face persecution and flee again.

Finally, drownings can’t be attributed only to the treachery of the sea and smugglers. Some governments delay complying with their obligations to render assistance to people in distress at sea in an attempt to avoid responsibility for looking after rescued asylum seekers. Journalist David Marr recently described how Australia did just that with the Palapa 1 (the passengers of which were rescued by the Tampa), with potentially fatal consequences. Australian navy officers have described to the ABC how unseaworthy asylum seeker vessels were left to founder because of pressure from Canberra. One incident resulted in “a line about seventy miles long of bodies” in the sea. Yet we rarely hear about the role Australian government decision-making plays in exacerbating the risks of maritime migration.

We don’t need to find new and workable “solutions” to the problem of boat arrivals. We need to dislodge boats from the centre of the debate and neutralise their political potency.

The best way to stop people from travelling via dangerous routes is to establish safe and legal pathways. Sufficiently large and targeted resettlement programs, together with generous support for the countries hosting large numbers of refugees in affected regions are the most effective ways to reduce the number of people risking their lives in search of safety.

Australia could establish protected entry procedures and expand the processing capacity of Australian officials abroad. And we could implement simpler meas-ures immediately. As Peter Mares wrote recently online in Inside Story, “border protection proceeds bureaucratically and out of sight.” Many people are denied visas if officials suspect they might apply for asylum after arriving in Australia. If that criterion had been removed, at-risk Afghan students and workers might have been able to fly safely into Australia long ago, rather than being caught in the chaos and violence engulfing Kabul airport and the rest of the country.

Even then, people might still arrive at the Australian border, by sea or by air, without seeking prior approval. So long as such arrivals are not spun for political gain, Australia could — with strong leadership — manage them in an orderly and humane way. We have the capacity to process large numbers of people fairly and efficiently, and to settle anyone entitled to protection. If arrivals by sea or air did happen to spike temporarily and put pressure on the system, assistance could be sought from other governments and global agencies.

Rather than punishing people already in Australia, we might audit existing asylum policies to see where changes need to be made. Critically, this would need to be an agile system, strengthened by its flexibility in the face of emerging challenges and ever-shifting international dynamics.

These suggestions may seem radical, but as the Kaldor Centre Principles for Australian Refugee Policy demonstrates, a renewed commitment to our international legal obligations would both improve Australia’s reputation as a good international citizen and a leader in human rights, and provide a stronger basis for cooperation between Australia and other countries on refugee protection issues, within the Asia-Pacific region and globally. Such an approach is feasible, and could be modelled on good practice from abroad and Australia’s own past experience. It is also in the national interest. Human mobility and displacement are realities that we should be able to manage in a sustainable way.

Other lessons can be drawn from the pandemic. Many millions of Australians have experienced hard lockdowns and are likely to have a newfound appreciation for the value of liberty. While some returned travellers lamented fourteen-day stays in relatively well-appointed hotel quarantine facilities, sick refugees were held for more than a year in close quarters in hotels and motels that weren’t designed for this purpose. In fact, Australia broke with international trends by increasing its immigration detention population by nearly 12 per cent in the first six months of pandemic.

Australians have also been separated from family members and friends abroad or interstate, or indeed in the same city, for indeterminate periods, not unlike the refugees who make it to Australia only to be told they will never be able to bring their spouses, children, siblings or parents to join them.

And the indiscriminate nature of Covid-19 is a reminder that we are all in this together. The wellbeing of our society as a whole depends on that of each individual member and group. Viruses do not differentiate on the basis of immigration status or background, and developments elsewhere — particularly new Covid-19 variants — can directly affect daily life here. Our reinforced interconnectedness reveals that isolationist tendencies are no longer appropriate or sustainable, if ever they were.  Unfortunately, recent statements from the prime minister and his ministers indicate that they have no interest in using these pandemic lessons to rethink Australia’s refugee policies. While the internet was awash with frantic scenes from Kabul airport, we saw Scott Morrison admonishing Afghans who didn’t come to Australia “the right way” and sending “a very clear message to people smugglers in the region that nothing has changed.”

Until our leaders are ready to catch up, the rest of Australia might consider slowly, tentatively, starting to unpick the Tampa’s legacy and chart a better way forward. If managed properly, this “once-in-a-lifetime” pandemic could offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a new approach to refugee policy — one that is not only more humane and just, but also more orderly and sustainable as we tackle the challenges of a post-pandemic world. •

The post Unpicking the legacy of the Tampa appeared first on Inside Story.

On the morning of Sunday 26 August 2001 the Tampa, a Norwegian freighter, diverted from its route from Fremantle to Singapore to go to the aid of a small Indonesian boat, the Palapa 1, adrift in heavy seas with a failed engine. The Tampa had been alerted to the boat’s plight by the Rescue Coordination Centre at the Australian Maritime Safety Authority in Canberra, and was guided most of the way to the scene by a plane from Coastwatch, the surveillance arm of the Australian Customs Service.

By the time the Tampa reached the wooden vessel it was breaking up in the swell. Australian authorities had warned the Norwegian vessel to expect to find eighty or more people aboard. But by the time the dangerous high-seas rescue was complete, the Tampa’s twenty-seven crew members had been joined by another 438 people — 433 asylum seekers, all but nine of them from Afghanistan, and the Palapa’s five Indonesian crew.

In responding to Australia’s call, captain Arne Rinnan and his crew not only demonstrated great courage, they also observed a foundational principle of seafaring enshrined in the Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea — “a general obligation for masters to proceed to the assistance of those in distress.” Yet they got no thanks from the government in Canberra.

When the Tampa reached the Palapa, it was only about four hours from Christmas Island. But with the distressed boat technically in the Indonesian maritime rescue zone, Captain Arne Rinnan was directed to land the rescued asylum seekers at the Indonesian port of Merak, more than twelve hours away. As he steered towards Java, an agitated delegation came to see him. The five men were threatening that people could jump overboard or riot if the Tampa did not change course. Recalling the moment in a feature to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Tampa affair for Radio National’s The History Listen, the vessel’s chief officer, Christian Maltau, described the men as rude and very aggressive: “We never felt really threatened, but everything on board was very confusing.”

Concerned for the safety of all on board, Rinnan consulted Australia’s search and rescue authorities. He was advised that, as master, it was up do him to decide what to do. This is another key plank of the international convention: “the role of the Master in exercising his professional judgement over decisions necessary to maintain the security of the ship.”

Erring on the side of caution, Rinnan opted to make for the closest port, on Christmas Island. Maltau told the History Listen that it was effectively a declaration that the Tampa was “not seaworthy” — that it wasn’t safe for the cargo ship to cross a large stretch of ocean equipped with lifeboats and equipment for just thirty crew and twelve passengers when there were more than ten times that number of people on board.

As the Tampa neared Australian territory, Rinnan was again contacted by Canberra. This time it wasn’t the rescue authorities on the line but an immigration department official, who warned Rinnan that he risked prosecution for people smuggling if he brought the asylum seekers to Australian territory. The captain maintained his course for Christmas Island but stopped outside the twelve nautical mile limit that demarcates Australian waters. A stand-off ensued. At a lunchtime media conference on Monday 27 August, prime minister John Howard announced that the Tampa would not be permitted to land. Rinnan did not test this declaration but stayed put, requesting medical care for his rescued passengers.

The following day, having spoken to Rinnan, Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service assessed that there was a “mass situation medical crisis” on board and that “medical attention was urgently required.” Many people were dehydrated, and fifteen were unconscious, but the ship had depleted its supplies of intravenous fluids. There were women in the later stages of pregnancy, and some adults were on a hunger strike and suffering diarrhoea and abdominal pains. Among the sick was a child, a person with a broken leg, and many people with open sores and skin infections.

By that evening, with no help in sight, Rinnan renewed his appeal, this time signalling medical distress on board in the form of a “pan-pan” emergency call. The next morning, Wednesday 29 August, he repeated the call. Still no help came.

Finally, three days after the rescue, the master of the Tampa defied Canberra’s warnings and sailed towards Flying Fish Cove at Christmas Island. Prime minister John Howard despatched Australian Special Air Service commandos to take control of his ship, insisting that “it is in Australia’s national interest that we draw a line on… an uncontrollable number of illegal arrivals in this country.”

These were the events that gave rise to Australia’s policy of offshore detention for asylum seekers arriving by boat. Despite repeated assertions of Australia’s overall generosity towards refugees, the approach has been endorsed by both major parties for all but four of the past twenty years.

The Coalition was in office when the Tampa sailed into Australia’s political waters in 2001, but Labor backed the government’s actions at almost every turn, declaring it would not be “a carping opposition” in circumstances that required a bipartisan approach. Kim Beazley, opposition leader at the time, might recently have claimed that it was “a no-brainer intellectually and morally” to do everything possible to stop people embarking on such dangerous voyages, but the motivation had less to do with safety than with preserving Australian sovereignty. Howard captured the bipartisan mood in his ringing election declaration: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

The prominence of the argument that the offshore detention policy saved lives is more recent, and follows a series of tragedies including the drowning of fifty people in 2010 after their boat smashed into rocks off Christmas Island.

In hindsight, John Howard’s stand against the Tampa is seen as a political masterstroke that enabled him to overcome poor polling and guide the Coalition to a third successive election victory. Offshore processing is widely credited with “stopping the boats,” and the Tampa affair is remembered as a fundamental break with past policy. But none of these interpretations is entirely accurate.

Let’s start with the idea that Howard’s response to the Tampa won the election. He was behind in the polls at the time but had already clawed back considerable ground through the course of 2001 with targeted spending in marginal electorates, cuts to petrol excise, and generous handouts to retirees.

This is not to suggest that Howard’s stand against the Tampa wasn’t popular. Egged on by tabloid newspapers and talkback radio, a large majority of Australians supported his refusal to allow Rinnan to disembark the asylum seekers at Christmas Island, not least because, just prior to the rescue, three asylum boats carrying almost 1000 people between them had arrived within the space of six days.

So while it’s true that the sense of crisis and the polarising effect of Howard’s response to the Tampa worked to his electoral advantage, polling suggests that issues like health, education and jobs would have proved more decisive at the ballot box.

If any single factor sealed Howard’s electoral victory it was more likely to have been the 11 September terror attacks in New York and Washington. This is certainly the view put by defeated opposition leader Kim Beazley in The History Listen. As we have seen during the pandemic, moments of national crisis tend to benefit incumbent governments.

To scour media reports from the time is also to be reminded that Howard, whose instincts were aligned to the popular mood, was acting without a script and his improvised lines failed to find a receptive audience with much-needed international partners.

Australia first tried to send the Tampa and its rescued passengers back to Indonesia, but the plan was made public without even a preparatory phone call to Jakarta. Not surprisingly, Indonesia accused Canberra of megaphone diplomacy. In any case, there was no way that Rinnan could have sailed his freighter to Merak after arriving at Christmas Island. Rescuing the asylum seekers and continuing straight to Indonesia might have been an option, but setting out on a new voyage from a safe harbour was not. Even resupplied with food, water and medicines, the Tampa was neither equipped nor insured to make the journey with so many people on board.

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, offered a compromise. If Canberra disembarked the asylum seekers and processed their claims in Australia then it would find countries willing to resettle anyone in need of protection as a refugee. (New Zealand and Norway agreed to help, and Britain and Canada were being consulted.) Australia rejected the offer.

Meanwhile human rights lawyers were preparing action in the Federal Court that could force the government to bring the asylum seekers ashore. In the first instance, Justice Tony North ordered the government to do just this, invoking the “ancient power of the Court… to protect people against detention without lawful authority.” The judgement was handed down on 11 September, hours before the attacks in New York and Washington. It was later overturned on appeal and never tested in the High Court. As with other details from the time, the litigation has largely slipped from view.

A week after the rescue, the headline in the Sunday Age read “Refugee Deal a Shambles.” In the Weekend Australian the previous day, Paul Kelly described the government’s handling of the Tampa as an “inept saga of crisis management” and expressed astonishment that John Howard went in “without any exit strategy.”

Yet the government was still exploring options and, Kelly noted, Australia’s diplomatic resources had been “fully mobilised.” Heads of missions around the region had been instructed to ask their host governments about the possibility of detaining and processing the asylum seekers on Australia’s behalf. This was the fix that became known as “the Pacific solution.”

At the time, Sue Boyd was high commissioner to Fiji, which was still working its way through the repercussions of a coup the previous year. In her recent memoir, Not Always Diplomatic, Boyd describes the government’s response to the Tampa as “an opportunistic and racist move” designed to win votes at the pending election. She says implementing the government’s directive caused her and her staff great distress. “I did not agree with the policy and was extremely reluctant to put the request to the poorer governments of Fiji, Tuvalu and Nauru,” she writes. “I also found the Pacific solution internationally embarrassing.”

Informal approaches were also made to Kiribati, Palau and even a recently traumatised East Timor, which had held its first-ever free elections under UN supervision on 30 August.

Defence minister Peter Reith eventually sealed an agreement with bankrupt Nauru, sweetened by $20 million in development assistance. Nauru didn’t even rate a separate line item in the Australian aid budget prior to the deal, instead sharing an annual sum of $10 million with five other small island states. New Zealand also offered support, agreeing to accept families and several unaccompanied teenage boys from the Tampa — a total of 132 people.

The assertion that offshore processing “stopped the boats” also falters when it runs up against reality. After the Tampa, a further twelve suspected illegal entry vessels, or SIEVs, arrived in Australian waters carrying 2126 passengers between them. A thirteenth — the so-called SIEV-X — tragically sank en route, with 353 lives lost.

It’s conceivable that news of the Tampa affair, detention on Nauru and the SIEV-X disaster helped to deter some asylum seekers in Indonesia from risking a boat journey to Australia. Indonesia also intensified its efforts to break the smuggling rackets and the Taliban were soon driven from power in Kabul, opening the prospect of displaced Afghans returning to their homeland.

But close reading of the Senate select committee report on A Certain Maritime Incident (better known as the children overboard affair) suggests that the decisive factor in deterring boats was Operation Relex — the deployment of naval vessels to force asylum seekers back to Indonesia. Between the arrival of the Tampa and the end of 2001, four vessels carrying a total of 502 people were returned. This news would have circulated quickly among asylum seekers contemplating the journey and would have undermined the promises of people smugglers.

This analysis is supported by research by Madeline Gleeson and Natasha Yacoub at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law. They show that Labor’s reintroduction of offshore processing in 2012 — designed to “send a message” to asylum seekers and people smugglers in Indonesia — failed to halt arrivals. The boats continued even after Kevin Rudd doubled down in July 2013, declaring that asylum seekers arriving by sea would have “no chance” whatsoever of settling in Australia as refugees.

As Gleeson and Yacoub conclude, the dramatic drop in boat arrivals came only “after Australia began maritime interceptions.” In short, they attribute the success in deterring boats to “changes in Australia’s engagement with vessels at sea” — namely “turnbacks and takebacks” — implemented under Operation Sovereign Borders, Tony Abbott’s equivalent of Howard’s Operation Relex.

The turnback operation remains active, with home affairs minister Karen Andrews declaring, in a video posted just eight days after the fall of Kabul, that the Australian government “is responding to the security situation in Afghanistan” and “Australia’s strong border protection policies have not — and will not — change.” Andrews warns asylum seekers not to attempt a boat journey to Australia: “You have zero chance of success.”

If turnbacks and takebacks are what stops boats, and the policy of interception remains in place, then there is no reason to keep refugees in Nauru or Manus. Offering permanent settlement in Australia or New Zealand would not restart the boats. The same can be said of refugees who have been transferred from Manus and Nauru to Australia on medical grounds, and for the thousands of refugees living indefinitely on temporary protection visas. As Robert Manne concluded years ago, while the naval blockade remains in place, the continuation of such policies amounts to “purposeless cruelty.”

The Tampa affair was undoubtedly a decisive moment in Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. But it didn’t so much overturn past approaches as build on them. I’ve described this elsewhere as a shift from a policy of deterrence by example to a policy of deterrence by force.

Mandatory detention, formalised by a Labor government in 1992, was a key plank of deterrence by example. Locking people up indefinitely in places like Woomera, Curtin and Port Hedland was meant to warn asylum seekers off travel to Australia. So were temporary protection visas, first introduced in October 1999, nearly two years before the Tampa.

The Pacific solution was simply an extension of the belief that restricting refugees’ rights would make Australia a less attractive destination. You might eventually have your case heard and find safe haven, but the process would be slow, circuitous, legally dubious, highly uncertain and very, very unpleasant. The decisive shift to deterrence by force came when the navy was deployed not just to intercept boats, but to turn or take them back to Indonesia.

This was not unprecedented internationally. The United States had used its coast guard to intercept and return “boat people” from Haiti.

With these policies, Australia contributes to ensuring that the vast bulk of refugees attempt to eke out an existence in the countries neighbouring their homelands, which often have the least capacity to provide for them. Pakistan and Iran can both anticipate new refugee flows from Afghanistan, and while we’ve all but forgotten about the 1.2 million refugees sheltering in camps around Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, this week marks the fourth anniversary of the mass exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar.

Meanwhile, countries like Australia continue to build higher fences, though the mechanisms are rarely as crude as sending out the navy. Generally, border protection proceeds bureaucratically and out of sight: visas are refused to anyone deemed likely to claim asylum; airline counter checks prevent travellers without a visa from getting on a plane; any airline that lands an inadequately documented traveller on Australian soil is penalised. It is these measures that drive vulnerable people to undertake dangerous journeys by boat.

If the Howard government hadn’t intervened on the Tampa, the boats would have kept coming, and probably in growing numbers. The increase in arrivals under Rudd and Gillard is evidence of that. This presents a dilemma for governments of any stripe — they are elected to serve the people, and voters want them to secure Australia’s borders and maintain an orderly migration program. Yet leaders could make a greater effort to explain that Australia’s obligations under the international refugee convention don’t disappear simply because they are inconvenient.

On the other hand, to argue that we should simply deal compassionately with anyone who manages to make landfall in Australia is to risk lives at sea and let money and smuggling networks determine who gets protection and who does not. If we were to go down that route, then we would be better to fly refugees from Indonesia to Australia by plane — but that would encourage more and more desperate people to move there.

The choices aren’t simple. But we do know that interception and turnback doesn’t solve the refugee challenge; it simply pushes it elsewhere and forces people to take other risks or endure lives in limbo. The policy depends for its success on Jakarta’s goodwill and would be unsustainable if the asylum seekers were Indonesian citizens fleeing a despotic regime or an upsurge in communal violence.

The real challenge is to work harder to build a coordinated regional response to refugee flows that treats displaced people with dignity and respect. If we committed the $1 billion-plus dollars a year we spend on offshore detention to supporting efforts in that direction, then who knows what we might achieve? •

The post A line in the water appeared first on Inside Story.

In the circumstances, it was a gratuitous comment. It was the policy of turning boats back, not temporary protection visas, that long ago stopped the people smugglers’ trade. But the prime minister was no doubt counting on his remarks playing well with voters.

On the ground in Afghanistan, Australia’s policies are having real-life affects. Amanda Hodge reported in the Weekend Australian on a conversation with a locally engaged agent of the Australian Border Force who spent four years persuading Afghans not to try to use the services of people smugglers to come to Australia. He is now in hiding from both the Taliban and dozens of angry and frightened men who followed his advice. His attempts over months to contact the Australian government for help have failed.

The Australian government’s role in perpetuating this “misery” is a reminder of the utter hypocrisy of Australia’s bipartisan refugee policy. Its rationale has always been to do what was popular, not what was right. This involved creating multiple myths that have unfortunately become embedded in public opinion.

One is that asylum seekers are a threat if they come by boat, yet no problem at all if they’re among the many more who come by air. The true difference is that the first attract media attention, while the second are largely invisible. The government calls the first illegals but not the second, but there is no such distinction under the Refugee Convention to which we purport to subscribe. And most of those who came by boat have been assessed as genuine refugees, desperate to flee despite the risks involved, as opposed to those who fly here and apply for asylum.

Another myth, exploded by the turmoil in Afghanistan, is that asylum seekers should form an orderly queue and wait patiently to have their cases considered by Australia. There has never been a queue, let alone an orderly one.

Few people in fear of their lives from the Taliban have the option of making it to a refugee camp in another country. Even if they could, their chances of being assessed, let alone accepted, are minuscule. Afghans can’t ask the Australian embassy for help — we have closed it.

Most of the Afghans who made it to Australia are Hazara. Long a persecuted minority in Afghanistan, they are ethnically distinct, and therefore visible, and mostly Shiite Muslims. They have been treated particularly brutally by the Taliban, who follow their own extreme brand of Sunni Islam.

One practice the Taliban adopted during the long war was to kidnap young Hazara men and conscript them into their fighting force. On occasions they would use them as human mine detectors, forcing them to walk ahead into landmined areas until they were blown up.

Is it any wonder that parents were so desperate for these men to escape that they pooled the life savings of extended families to pay people smugglers? The justification for Australia taking this trade away was that the smugglers extorted large payments from their customers and carried them in unseaworthy boats that regularly sank, drowning their occupants. Yet despite the well-known risks, the demand for their services never went away.

By stopping the people smugglers, the government boasts that it stopped the deaths. It didn’t: it simply wiped its hands of the problem and moved it elsewhere. People in fear of their life — which, by the way, is one of the criteria for being assessed as a refugee — will take any option available. When they were stopped from coming to Australia, some headed for Europe. Some drowned on the way, some suffocated to death in containers or trucks. Others remained stuck in Afghanistan, where they now await their fate.

Having joined the United States in prosecuting a twenty-year war that we lost, we should feel some moral responsibility for these people. Rather than condemning the evil trade of people smuggling, we should look for alternatives.

In the wake of the Vietnam war, where we had a similar obligation, Southeast Asian countries agreed to stop pushing Vietnamese boats with asylum seekers back out to sea in return for the United States, Canada and Australia accepting those assessed as refugees and Vietnam and Laos taking back those who were not. The result was that the vast majority of refugees were resettled and asylum seeker boats stopped coming to Australia.

It was not a popular move: we had not long before abolished the White Australia policy and had accepted few Asian immigrants. But the Fraser government accepted its responsibility anyway and secured the support of the Labor opposition. All the fearmongering about Asian ghettos and crime gangs turned out to be wrong or exaggerated.

There are no such signs of generosity of spirit this time. We are not expanding the existing refugee intake but instead offering to reserve 3000 places for Afghans, with the vague possibility of more in the future. Britain and Canada have offered to take 20,000 each.

The government’s default position is to accentuate the negative. Morrison muscled up to the people smugglers and presumably expects asylum seekers to wait in line at Kabul airport’s check-in counter. Defence minister Peter Dutton is in no greater hurry to help, suggesting some Afghans who worked with Australian forces could pose a security threat. ASIO can take months, if not years, to grant security clearances.

The government has ruled out allowing Afghan refugees in Australia the right to stay permanently. Instead, they will remain on temporary protection visas, meaning they have to reapply every three years, cannot travel overseas (or if they do they cannot return to Australia) and cannot apply to bring family members to Australia.

This is part of the cruel suite of policies meant to deter asylum seekers. Yet they are pointless: it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the progressively harsher treatment of those who made it here made no difference until the defence force started turning boats back. •

The post Morrison’s message: nothing’s changed appeared first on Inside Story.

Howard introduced his “border protection” regime on 29 August 2001, after the Norwegian freight ship Tampa had rescued 433 Afghan asylum seekers from a sinking vessel in the Indian Ocean. Arne Rinnan, the Tampa’s captain, asked to land them on Australian territory. With an election pending, and his Coalition government trailing Labor in opinion polls, Howard ordered forty-five Australian SAS soldiers to board the Tampa and thwart Rinnan’s bid.

Within days, the government had struck deals with Nauru and PNG to host Australian detention camps. The hapless Tampa refugees became their first inmates, and later boatloads entering Australian waters were sent there too. Howard called his action the Pacific Solution.

Labor closed the offshore camps in 2008 after Kevin Rudd defeated Howard, only to open them again four years later. For both sides, the political justification was that this harsh regime would deter more “boat people” from risking the journey. But Madeline Gleeson, of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of NSW, says, “We’ve been mired in this policy for so long for purely political reasons.”

Indeed, to many Australians its sheer longevity suggests that offshore detention has always been this country’s way of dealing with asylum seekers. But the policy is facing its own crisis, and apparently crumbling from within, with no sign of a fresh, more humane and less expensive approach from either main political party.

In late June I travelled to Albion Park, south of Sydney, for a different milestone — one that offered an insight into how Australia once reacted to boat arrivals.

About 250 people had gathered at the HARS Aviation Museum to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Australian navy’s rescue of ninety-nine Vietnamese asylum seekers on 21 June 1981. Known as the “MG99” (for “Melbourne Group”), they were among millions of people who fled Vietnam and neighbouring countries after the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Some started arriving on Australia’s shores in 1976, with more over following years, giving Australia its first experience of dealing with boat-borne refugees. Another Liberal, Malcolm Fraser, was prime minister at the time.

The contrast with Howard’s approach could not have been more striking. Claire Higgins of the Kaldor Centre explains it: “The immigration department considered several ideas, but the Fraser government rejected the options of turning back boats and potentially indefinite immigration detention, because they would be inhumane, damaging to Australia’s international reputation and would not provide a lasting solution for people forced to flee.” Higgins says Fraser government decision-makers recognised that such options were “harsh and ill-conceived from the start.”

Australia also worked with the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, in a bid to find a genuine regional approach, and with other resettlement countries such as the United States and Canada. Australia admitted over 65,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia over seven years to 1982, many from regional refugee camps.

“There was a sense that Australia and America had a moral duty to do something because we’d been involved in the Vietnam war,” says Madeline Gleeson. “We also had political leadership then of a kind that we haven’t had for a long time.” Fraser had his opponents within the governing Coalition, but his policy prevailed.

On military exercises in the South China Sea in June 1981, the Royal Australian Navy aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne rescued the MG99 refugees after a Tracker surveillance aircraft spotted their leaking boat. All ninety-nine, including nineteen children, were hauled safely up the side of the vessel at night. The ship landed the refugees in Singapore, where UN and Australian officials processed them in a refugee camp. The Melbourne asked the Fraser government to resettle seventy-seven. They arrived on a Qantas flight in Australia a month after their rescue.

At the Albion Park anniversary, former navy people involved in the rescue, and some of those they saved, made speeches. The Tracker aircraft that found them rested near the stage as a museum exhibit. The late Mike Hudson, then commander of the Melbourne, was recalled as saying, “The MG99 rescue was the highlight of my career.” The contrast with John Howard’s use of military commandos on the Tampa twenty years later was sharp.

Stephen Nguyen, aged twenty when he was rescued, later told me how his life unfolded in Australia. “It wasn’t easy at first with barriers of language, loneliness and no relatives,” he said. “For my generation it was very hard.” He taught himself English, worked in factories and started a food shop business in western Sydney so he could support younger siblings who followed him to Australia.

Two of those siblings became doctors, another an electronic technician. Another brother later worked for the State Library of NSW. Nguyen now has four children, three of them at university.

The first boat arrivals from Vietnam and neighbouring countries were assessed for refugee status in Australia. Then, under an international agreement struck to handle the continuing flow, the UN refugee agency assessed them in camps in Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines for resettlement in the West — avoiding their need to risk perilous journeys by boat that later claimed many lives.

I asked Nguyen his view of Australia’s offshore policy, under which people have been detained indefinitely. He paused. “You can’t treat them as prisoners, as abandoned people,” he said. “To me the offshore policy is a horrible policy. You have to treat people like humans, and to make the screening process faster in a humanitarian way. The Tampa story has tarnished Australia.”

Where does the Tampa policy stand after twenty years? Government figures show Australia sent 1637 asylum seekers to Manus Island and Nauru in the seven years between when Howard opened the camps in 2001 and when Kevin Rudd’s Labor government closed them. Despite Howard’s claim that the Tampa drama was about keeping “boat people” out, most were resettled in Australia and New Zealand.

Another 4180 people have been sent to the offshore camps since Julia Gillard’s government reopened them in late 2012, making a total of almost 6000 people detained in both places. When Rudd usurped Gillard briefly as prime minister before the 2013 election, he sought to out-tough the Coalition by declaring that no island detainees would ever settle in Australia. And when Tony Abbott won the election, he out-toughed Rudd, reverting to Howard’s militarisation of asylum policy by creating Operation Sovereign Borders and using the navy to turn back boats.

Australia hasn’t sent detainees to the islands since 2014 — mainly, it seems, because boats have been turned back and some asylum seekers have been deported to their countries of origin. Many others have been quietly transferred to Australia for medical help and to remove children from Nauru. They’ve been left in detention centres here or on six-month bridging visas in the community, with no indication of where they’ll end up, or when. A Senate committee was told in March that this group could number more than 1200. Another 137 asylum seekers are still in PNG and 123 in Nauru. Onshore or offshore, the government sticks to its line that they will never settle in Australia.

But if island detainee numbers have fallen, the policy’s financial cost has only soared. Governments have kept secret the precise burden on Australian taxpayers, but parliamentary and think tank researchers have assembled credible figures from budget papers and other sources. They paint a staggering picture.

Madeline Gleeson told Britain’s House of Commons home affairs committee late last year that offshore processing at a “conservative estimate” costs Australia roughly $1 billion a year. Building camps in such remote places, outsourcing their management (often without adequate cost controls) to private companies, and funding charter flights and healthcare are just some of the costs. Australia also pays Nauru visa fees of $2000 per refugee per month, bringing total visa costs to $26 million in 2016–17 alone.

Gleeson says offshore processing’s real cost “consistently exceeds” government projections. In 2017–18, it cost Australia $1.5 billion, more than twice the estimate of a year earlier. Even with smaller offshore numbers, the government forecast spending $1.2 billion on offshore processing in 2020–21.

The government’s undisclosed legal fees, defending challenges to its treatment of asylum seekers, would inflate the bill even more. Last March the Australian Lawyers Alliance sent a freedom of information request for claims lodged by and compensation paid to asylum seekers for wrongful detention and personal injury in Australia, PNG and Nauru over the decade to 2021. It asked for similar information on personal injury applications by detention centre staff. The home affairs department claimed it had no relevant documents in its possession.

Drawing on costings by the consultancy firm Equity Economics, a 2019 report by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Save the Children and GetUp! estimated that offshore detention and processing had cost $9 billion between 2016 and 2020. It built on an earlier report by Save the Children and UNICEF that estimated offshore processing and boat turnback costs of $9.6 billion between 2013 and 2016.

Even allowing for the onshore detention component of these figures, they suggest that the offshore policy cost taxpayers the best part of $19 billion from 2013 to 2020. Assuming Gleeson’s conservative estimate of $1 billion a year also applied to the Pacific Solution from 2001 to 2008, the offshore policy appears to have cost Australians about $26 billion, in both its versions, since 2001.

The psychological cost for detainees kept offshore for years is bad enough. But could Australia have also saved money with a different approach?

The 2019 report argues it could. It calculates that keeping asylum seekers offshore costs $573,000 per detainee per year. If asylum seekers were dealt with more speedily in Australia instead, the costs would fall sharply: to $346,000 per detainee in onshore mandatory detention per year, and to $10,221 a year for each detainee living in the community on a bridging visa. The report calls the cost of keeping people offshore since the Pacific Solution restarted in 2013 “enormous both economically and morally.”

Apart from the 1200 or so people the government has transferred to Australia from Manus and Nauru, about 30,000 asylum seekers who arrived by boat during the last years of the former Labor government are still living in Australia. Coalition governments have called them the “legacy caseload,” banning them from lodging visa applications for up to four years and receiving legal aid. They can’t apply for permanent residency, just for three- or five-year temporary visas. The UN Refugee Agency brands these as “punitive measures” imposed “largely for political reasons.” Australia, it says, could be violating its obligations under the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.

Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration department, argues that these people are unlikely to be deported. “I think the present government’s policy is just to ignore them,” he says. “That’s bad policy. Australia had always had a just policy that if you were in Australia you’re either on a pathway to permanent residency or to be sent back if you’re not eligible as a refugee. Ignoring them is more American policy.”

Then there’s what Rizvi calls a “fifth wave” of asylum seekers who started arriving about six years ago. These people aren’t brought by people smugglers; they arrive by air on visitor visas. Typically from Malaysia and China, they then apply for asylum through agents here and overseas who’ve arranged their trips; this gives them work rights, usually on farms, while they wait. Rizvi estimates about 27,000 such people whose asylum applications have been refused are still in Australia, and growing at about 500 a month. He says the applicants are being exploited by employers and agents, and some have probably been injured, or even died, but their plight is rarely reported. Rizvi calls this wave a “scam” and “the biggest asylum seeker wave we’ve ever had.”

Taken together, the “legacy caseload,” the “fifth wave,” the transfer to Australia of detainees from the islands, and the release of asylum seekers who were brought to Australia for medical treatment under the repealed medevac law sends a message about a government that once boasted credentials of “strong border protection” and never allowing “unauthorised” arrivals in.

Rizvi’s conclusion is damning. “I’d say our borders have never been more permeable and never managed so badly than under Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton [the former home affairs and now defence minister],” he says. “The borders are being used by scam organisers of the fifth wave. And the medevac releases show the government has given up. It knows these people aren’t going to leave.”

Labor under Paul Keating’s government pioneered detention centres onshore. But Rizvi speculates the offshore policy that Howard started with Tampa would not have happened under other postwar leaders, including Robert Menzies, the Liberal Party’s founder: “If this question had been put to Menzies he’d have found a different pathway to residency for those who’re eligible. He was much more conscious of social cohesion, as were Bob Hawke, Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating.”

One political notion has largely driven Australia’s offshore policy: refuse people on boats entry to Australia. The problem with such a narrow approach is that it eventually leaves governments stranded. As Madeline Gleeson of the Kaldor Centre points out, it has no “exit strategy”: what to do with people once they’ve been found to be refugees.

At times, governments have desperately tried to find a way of dealing with these people caught in limbo. The Abbott and Turnbull governments struck deals with Cambodia and the United States respectively to take refugees from offshore camps. Just seven in Nauru agreed to resettle in Cambodia, at a reported cost to Australia of $55 million; four later returned voluntarily to their countries of origin rather than stay there. A Senate committee was told in March that 890 refugees have been resettled in America. That country, not Australia, now benefits from the initiatives that newly settled refugees like the MG99 group usually bring to immigrant countries.

Since the Taliban’s taking power in Afghanistan, the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany and others have signalled plans to take in thousands of Afghan refugees. So far, the Morrison government seems to be sticking to its line that Afghans on temporary visas in Australia should stay that way. Marise Payne, the foreign affairs minister, says they won’t be asked to return to Afghanistan “at this stage.” Such an approach is mired in the past. The crisis is bound to trigger more boat refugees from Afghanistan, and it should challenge the government to emulate the Fraser government’s response to another humiliating military finale, in Vietnam.

Gleeson thinks that the offshore detention policy is winding down by default. “It’s been winding down slowly since 2014, the last time new boat arrivals were sent offshore,” she says. “It’s an admission by the government that it’s not a long-term policy, and that it’s never going to work. It was meant to deter people from arriving by boat, but it didn’t.” •

The post No way out? appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s not hard to see why Germany’s leaders opted for a new hard lockdown. The “lockdown light” that has been in place since 2 November has failed to reduce the number of daily infections. On Friday, the Robert Koch Institute, the agency that tracks infectious diseases, reported 29,875 new infections and 598 new fatalities, the highest daily figures since the pandemic began. According to the DIVI register, which monitors hospital capacity, more than 4500 Covid-19 patients are in intensive care and some hospitals can no longer accept new patients. Most alarmingly, perhaps, the number of clusters of cases in aged care homes is rising rapidly.

“After a temporary stabilisation of case numbers at a higher level in late August and early September, a steep increase in case numbers ensued in October in all federal states,” the Koch Institute reported last Friday. Measures introduced at the beginning of November had failed to cut new cases significantly, with numbers “sharply increasing” over the previous week.

Until recently, Germany had managed the pandemic reasonably well — not as well as East Asian countries but certainly better than its European neighbours. Even as late as the end of September, after infections started to climb again, Germany’s numbers were not particularly alarming compared with those elsewhere in Europe.

On 30 September, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Germany’s cumulative number of cases per 100,000 people over fourteen days was just over thirty, better than each of Germany’s eight neighbouring fellow EU members. Apart from Poland, all had recorded figures in excess of 120.

A month later, Germany’s figure had risen to 195.6 — but even then the country was still doing better than all of its neighbours except Denmark, with the rates in three of them (the Czech Republic, Belgium and Luxembourg) exceeding 1000, and France and the Netherlands both recording a fourteen-day cumulative total of about 750 per 100,000.

By Sunday, though, Germany’s figure had climbed to 334.9, significantly worse than the equivalent figures for France and Belgium. Immunologists agree about the success of the far-reaching restrictions introduced by France and Belgium, like those of other European countries that experienced exponential rises of infections in September and October. By contrast, Germany’s restrictions during November were too weak: while bars and restaurants, and cinemas and theatres were closed, shops remained open, as did schools and childcare centres.

Angela Merkel can’t be blamed for those half-hearted measures. She has long argued that the coronavirus needs to be taken seriously and reportedly wanted stricter restrictions as soon as it became clear that the “lockdown light” hadn’t had the desired effect. She was uncharacteristically emotional last Wednesday when she warned in parliament that too many contacts over the following fortnight might make the coming festive season “the last Christmas with the grandparents.”

Part of the explanation for the slow response to the latest surge lies in the country’s federal system of government. Although Merkel wanted tougher measures, she had failed to convince all of the state premiers. It is their governments that are responsible for imposing and, with local councils, implementing such measures, and they preside over different infection rates and intensive care capacities. The fact that the premiers of the most populous states, Markus Söder of Bavaria and Armin Laschet of North-Rhine Westphalia, have championed diverging approaches throughout the pandemic — not least because they are both vying to succeed Merkel as chancellor — hasn’t helped.

But state–state and federal–state rivalries don’t entirely explain the dithering. The state governments’ fear has been that stricter measures would be met with popular anger.

At first sight, such an explanation seems counterintuitive. Most Germans have long supported a decisive response to the pandemic and have endorsed the government’s handling of the crisis, including the imposition of a strict lockdown earlier in the year. An opinion poll conducted last Thursday, three days before the announcement of tougher measures, showed that 49 per cent of those surveyed wanted more restrictions while only 13 per cent considered existing restrictions excessive. And Merkel’s popularity, and the approval rate for her Christian Democrats, has been exceptionally high since the beginning of the pandemic.

At the same time, polls suggest that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, which has opposed all measures to contain the virus, would fall short of its performance in the 2017 federal election (when it scored 12.6 per cent of the national vote), never mind attract the kind of support it enjoyed a year ago, when one in five surveyed Germans said they would vote for it.

To understand why federal and state governments didn’t heed the almost unanimous advice of the medical experts and impose more drastic measures earlier, we need to go back to the Merkel government’s response to the influx of refugees from Syria in 2015. Or rather, we need to look at how that crisis is remembered, particularly within Merkel’s party, but also among other German politicians outside the AfD.

A powerful narrative says that it was a mistake to open the country’s borders that year, thereby alienating a sizeable minority of Germans opposed to an ethnically and culturally diverse Germany while irritating a majority who didn’t think that the loosening of border controls was justified. For those who have embraced this narrative, polarisation and the rise of the AfD — which in 2017 became the first party of the far right since 1953 to be represented in the Bundestag — have been more traumatic than any other event in reunified Germany’s short history.

This account tends to overlook three facts. First, the government didn’t open Germany’s borders in 2015; rather, it decided not to close them (and not to defend them in any way that echoed the pre-1989 German Democratic Republic’s defence of its border with West Germany by shooting people trying to cross it). Second, polls at the time revealed that a majority of Germans approved of the Merkel government’s response to the refugees. Many may later have changed their minds, but a clear majority still agrees that Germany has an obligation to provide sanctuary for people fleeing war or persecution. Finally, those who voted for the AfD in 2017 hadn’t suddenly become opposed to migration, or to living in a multicultural society, and hadn’t suddenly developed a longing for an authoritarian political leader. Rather, in 2017, it made sense to them to vote for a party that seemed to represent their views.

But whether the facts get in the way of the story is irrelevant. The key thing is that it is held to be true. For many of those who believe the narrative, a repeat or prolongation of the trauma associated with the rise of the AfD must be avoided.

You might imagine that Christian Democrats would want to solve this dilemma by adopting the policy positions of the AfD to try to make it disappear. But Germany’s post-Auschwitz identity works against a rapprochement between centre-right conservatives and the AfD because large sections of the latter are considered ideologically close to the Nazis. This contrasts with countries like Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands, where centre-right or centre-left politicians have espoused positions on refugees and migration that were previously owned by the far right.

Also working against any rapprochement is the fact that past attempts by the Christian Democrats to neutralise a far-right party by adopting its vocabulary or policies have backfired. Ahead of the 1992 state election in Baden-Württemberg, for example, the Christian Democrats moved to the right to attract potential voters from the extremist Republikaner, a precursor of the AfD. The strategy failed miserably: the Republikaner won 10.9 per cent of the vote and the Christian Democrats shed 9.4 percentage points of support compared with the previous state election.

More recently, ahead of the Bavarian state elections in 2018, the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats, the Markus Söder–led Christian Social Union, or CSU, attempted to mimic the AfD’s rhetoric, particularly in relation to asylum seekers. But Söder soon realised that he risked losing more votes to the Greens (because many Christian conservatives were appalled by that kind of rhetoric) than could be gained from potential AfD voters. He changed tack, won the election, and is now a good bet to be the next chancellor, leading a coalition of Christian Democrats and Greens.

This leaves Christian Democrats, in particular, in a quandary. They would like to keep the AfD small (or ideally make it disappear altogether) by wooing potential AfD voters, but without appearing to embrace AfD positions. So they have made do with telling AfD supporters that their concerns are legitimate and are being taken seriously, hoping to thereby avoid provoking the anger of the people who responded so strongly to the refugees.

For the AfD, the pandemic has been disastrous in the sense that it has pushed asylum seekers, who were no longer front-page news anyway, further into the background. But the current crisis has also provided an opportunity for the party. Having initially criticised the government for doing too little, too late, the AfD proceeded to lambast the government for doing too much.

The change of heart had much to do with the emergence during spring of a motley bunch of groups — New Agers, anti-vaxxers and others — that considered the government’s measures an overreaction and didn’t accept the science that informed them. The AfD and other groups on the far right tried, often very successfully, to harness this growing movement. AfD politicians ridiculed face masks, argued against closing schools and businesses, suggested Covid-19 was no worse than the flu, alleged that the government would force the entire population to vaccinate, claimed that restrictions to halt the disease amounted to a suspension of civil liberties and a breach of privacy, and organised demonstrations to channel fear and anger.

The government was taken by surprise when thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — protested. Because the anger was reminiscent of the anger of people decrying the accommodation of asylum seekers in their neighbourhoods, federal and state governments generally handled the protesters with kid gloves, bending over backwards to convince them that their concerns — which often turned out to be based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories — were being taken seriously.

Although a largely silent majority of Germans would have supported earlier and tougher measures to keep infections low, it was this loud, even shrill, minority whose views informed decision-making. That was particularly the case in the East German states, where the far right is comparatively strong — and perhaps nowhere more so than in Saxony, where the AfD won 27 per cent of the vote in the 2017 Bundestag elections and a shade more in the state elections two years later. Saxony’s premier, Michael Kretschmer, repeatedly met with protesters and listened to their concerns, no matter how absurd they were. He also criticised harsher measures adopted in other states, saying that Saxonians could be trusted to behave responsibly without threats of sanctions.

In rural and regional Saxony, in particular, discontent about the federal government’s handling of Covid-19 was widespread and conspiracy theories gathered followers. People often refused to wear masks, even on public transport. But the East German states generally did well during the pandemic’s first wave, with the number of reported infections lower than in West Germany.

During the second wave, though, East Germany has been particularly hard-hit, and Saxony worst of all. Although the state was hardly touched in spring, it now has the highest number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants nationally. On Sunday, its infection rate was twice as high as the national average and more than four times higher than in the West German states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.

But the state government’s hesitant approach and the influence of the AfD can’t be blamed entirely for Saxony’s catastrophic numbers. The state shares borders with the Czech Republic and Poland, both of which were hit hard, and early, by the pandemic’s second wave. Unlike in spring, the borders remained open, and Poles and Czechs continued to commute to Saxony for work, shopping and leisure. (But they were able to do so also because Saxony’s government was reluctant to resort to border controls, lest its own people grow even more restless.)

The influence of the popular movement against coronavirus restrictions, fostered if not orchestrated by AfD politicians, can’t be discounted either. Rural Saxony has been for Germany what the Dakotas have been for the United States. It’s no accident that the districts where the AfD enjoys particularly strong support have been hardest-hit by the virus, while the city of Leipzig, where the AfD does comparatively badly, has an infection rate of about a third of the state average.

One other recent example of the impact of the 2015 refugee narrative is worth mentioning.

Germany’s public broadcasters are funded by a monthly fee payable by households. Last set in 2015, it amounts to €17.50 (A$28) per month for households with a television set. Earlier this year, the sixteen state premiers agreed to a moderate fee rise, to €18.36, effective from January 2021.

The plan attracted some opposition. The AfD in particular has long claimed that journalists with the public broadcasters tend to be left-wingers who use publicly funded programs to promote their views, and the fee is thus misspent. Much like Donald Trump has done in the United States, Germany’s far-right politicians have targeted journalists as “enemies of the people.” At rallies organised by far-right organisations, including protests against coronavirus restrictions, journalists are frequently abused and sometimes assaulted. But the protesters represent but a very small minority; most Germans trust the public broadcasters and value their programs.

The fee rise must be ratified by all sixteen state parliaments. Ordinarily, this would be a formality when the premiers have already reached unanimous agreement. But in the small East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, which is governed by a coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens, Christian Democrat parliamentarians defied their own party’s state premier and declared they would vote against the rise. With the AfD, which also opposes the rise, the Christian Democrats command a majority of seats; the government’s motion would therefore have been lost.

That vote would have been the end of the governing coalition. Neither Greens nor Social Democrats would continue to work with a party that makes common cause with the far right. In the end, the state premier, himself a Christian Democrat, averted the fall of his government by sacking his interior minister, the ringleader of the revolt, and then electing not to put the fee rise to a vote, which means that it won’t go ahead as planned, either in Saxony-Anhalt or in the rest of Germany.

When it comes to the funding of Germany’s public broadcasters, the Christian Democrats’ fears about provoking extremists in Saxony-Anhalt will probably be inconsequential in the long run. The public broadcasters will take their case for a funding increase to the High Court, and they are confident of winning the case. The rise will come, albeit with a slight delay.

The dithering about new measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus is a far more serious matter. I concluded an earlier Inside Story article, in May this year, by declaring that “it would be wrong to make extensive concessions to the protesters — and in the process perhaps risk Germany’s exposure to the virus increasing exponentially — in the hope of ending the discontent.” The government might not have made concessions as such, but its approach has been unduly influenced by the protests and the exponential rise in infections is one of the results.

Premier Michael Kretschmer seems to have realised that his earlier decision to trust all Saxonians to act responsibly was wrong. Even before Sunday’s emergency meeting his government opted for a full lockdown starting on 14 December. Blaming a minority of Saxonians for the catastrophically high incidence of Covid-19 infections, he opted for an uncompromising stance. People have had long discussions about this issue, he told Spiegel, but now “we’re done with that… Anyone who wants to can still have a different opinion and question our measures, that’s the way it is in a free country. But that’s no longer crucial, these people now have to step aside… After all, opinions aren’t facts.” Elsewhere, he said that what was now required were “authoritarian measures by the state.”

Not only do these statements smack of a spurned lover’s revenge, the vocabulary is also grist to the mill for the AfD, which claims that the state is hell-bent on eroding personal freedoms. But it’s good to hear even Kretschmer now telling conspiracy theorists to get lost.

By resisting both the €0.86 fee rise and measures to curb the coronavirus, a small minority has exercised undue influence by being loud and, even more importantly, because the noise is reminiscent of the anti-refugee protests of the recent past. Members of the German majority have received less consideration because they have behaved meekly and their support is taken for granted.

It would be disastrous if the government paid too much attention to loudmouths orchestrated by the far right when it formulates its polices in other key areas — climate change, a challenge that dwarfs Covid-19, chief among them. When Germans are again able to focus their attention on that issue, the majority needs to make itself heard, and “these people” might then again be asked “to step aside.” •

The post Enemies of the people appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a fitting motif in a text that leaves no doubt about the butterfly effect. The Next Great Migration uncovers a living, moving, evolving planet in which all organisms are — and always have been — far more interconnected than believed. The smallest of changes sets in motion events that radically transform life on the other side of the world, or effects that are still felt centuries later.

Sonia Shah meticulously teases out these transformations and interconnections, taking readers not just to the science but to the very sources of scientific knowledge. The acclaimed author of Pandemic and The Fever, she is a veteran investigator of matters of history and science. Here, she turns her lens on two of the greatest challenges our future holds: climate change and migration. The result is a fascinating, sweeping and at times confronting audit of movement and survival — both human and “wild” — through history.

Shah’s central thesis is that movement is an inherent, constant and unstoppable feature of life on this planet. Movement isn’t an “anomaly,” an “aberration,” an “exception,” a “catastrophe” or a “violation of the natural order”; it is essential, and provides possibly our best and only chance at surviving the impending effects of a warming earth. It is potentially life-saving, not just for those who move but also for those receiving migrants into their midst.

The book’s greatest strength lies in how its stories, human and wild, are juxtaposed and interwoven. After opening with a series of vignettes depicting plants and animals on the move, Shah shifts her focus to migrants, refugees and people driven from their homes by disasters and climate. While the movements of wild species are constrained primarily by their own biological capacities and the geographic features they encounter on their journeys, the paths of human migrants are shaped (and often blocked) by abstractions — legal and political barriers to movement rooted, often, in historical racism and xenophobia.

Shah’s vivid storytelling brings to life enthralling revelations. Coral reefs, “literally stone walls,” are moving northward at a speed of fourteen kilometres per year. Forests are steadily climbing the Himalayas of their own accord, at a rate of nineteen metres each decade; their march brought the first known mosquitos to Tibet in 2009.

Other revelations will be more unsettling, even for the most enlightened of readers. Shah discredits much of the underlying work that has led to the classification of living things as being “from” certain places, debunking any notion of stability or stagnation among wild species. She also draws from science to argue that the arrival of “alien” species in established habitats can be positive, promoting biodiversity and filling “gaps” in existing ecosystems rather than destroying their delicate balances as once feared.

But the results of Shah’s investigation of anti-migrant sentiment make for the book’s most disturbing moments. She takes familiar narratives of migrants as national security threats, health risks, violent criminals and purveyors of social destruction and methodically debunks them. In doing so, she reveals how these narratives managed to take root in the first place. Her conclusions would be troubling at any time but are especially so in the “fake news” era. She demonstrates not only that such narratives run far wider and deeper than the populist Trump administration but also that they are the direct successors of a long line of bogus claims, dressed up as some of history’s most respected scientific truths.

As Shah traces the origins of scientific thought from eighteenth-century European naturalists through to their twentieth-century descendants, much of what she describes is grotesque. The abuse of African bodies in the name of “science” is appalling, particularly where it involved preoccupation with the sex organs of African women. Even after the focus shifts from “race” to global population control, the shocking stories continue, including one in which Indian police threatened to massacre a village of mostly poor Muslim families in the 1970s if the men and boys did not surrender themselves for forced vasectomies.

The common thread through the centuries is a crazed search for proof that humans can be divided into distinct groups, some biologically superior to others. Readers who don’t subscribe to such notions may be shocked to learn how certain words and concepts common to our modern vocabulary derive from these views. These insights are deliberately discomforting, forcing readers to acknowledge the extent to which apparently outdated notions of racial difference and disproven science still shape our lives in various ways.

In exposing the racist roots of anti-migrant sentiment and presenting scientific evidence that living creatures have always moved, Shah’s treatment of her subject matter is not always entirely dispassionate. At times she seems to be downplaying the very real threats that migration can pose. Moreover, some tensions between what she uncovers and prevailing beliefs about migration remain unresolved. Past and present attempts to classify all living creatures as from a fixed place and to stifle movement may be flawed, but that does not negate the fact that people, plants and animals are “from” certain places, and some migrations are exactly as destructively catastrophic as feared. Shah does not provide easy answers, and in some cases the existential and intellectual challenge she sets for her readers is compelling. But this tension is one with which an Australian readership in particular may feel unease.

Much of Australia’s native flora and fauna is unique, and a source of national pride. Far from promoting biodiversity, the introduction of “alien” species such as rabbits and cane toads has previously wrought great harm on our native ecosystems. Moving from the wild to the human, the attempt to uncouple people from specific places becomes outright problematic. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are from Australian lands, deriving from them identity, history and culture. Meanwhile, this country is still marred by the destructive legacy of British migration to Australia. Far from promoting biodiversity, that great migration resulted in genocide, the loss of language, culture and knowledge that can never be restored, and critical ongoing disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Nor do generalisations about migrant demographics hold true the world over, and certain aspects of Shah’s critique of barriers to human movement are misdirected. She is unduly disparaging of the Refugee Convention, and her explanation of its refugee definition is not entirely accurate. The book also makes only fleeting mention of the world’s 45.7 million internally displaced people, despite the fact that they far outstrip the number of refugees worldwide and potentially belie some of Shah’s conclusions about human movement.

But my biggest reservation relates to Shah’s engagement with the titular subject matter. “The next great migration is upon us,” she declares, early in the piece, but it is not until the second-last chapter that we get some idea of what that might be. Whereas human migration historically “flowed more rapidly from east to west,” Shah predicts that the pattern will “switch” in the new era, “flowing from south to north along the gradient of our warming planet.” The pace will be faster, she claims, with migrations unfolding over years and decades rather than centuries and millennia.

The evidentiary bases for these claims are neither articulated nor supported by reference material. Earlier, Shah writes that “a wild exodus has begun,” as animals and plants migrate towards the poles in search of cooler lands and waters. It is possible that she has extrapolated the future trajectory of human movement from scientific observations of other species. But even those movements are only northwards in the northern hemisphere. Surely, if humans were to follow our “wild cousins,” that would mean migration in both directions away from the equator.

Even then, does it necessarily follow that humans would move along the same routes, or deploy the same survival strategies, as other living creatures? As Shah herself documents, humans have long lived in and adapted to seemingly inhospitable climates and forbidding landscapes. Before modern political and physical barriers to movement were erected, all of humanity didn’t try to crowd into the most temperate patches of the earth’s surface.

With the adverse impacts of disasters and climate change intensifying, adaptation strategies must include mobility options; but, as Shah rightly explains, some of this mobility will involve temporary or seasonal movements, or follow opportunities for work rather than a cardinal direction. Preventative mitigation measures might even limit the need for migration at all and should be pursued as a priority for those communities that wish to remain in their homes as long as possible.

A massive and relatively fast displacement of human populations into the “Global North” in response to a warming planet is by no means a foregone conclusion. Nor is it in keeping with the recent history of forced migration, which has consistently seen displaced people remain close to home, overwhelmingly accommodated in developing countries.

But this failure to fully identify or provide supporting evidence for the “next great migration” doesn’t undermine the book’s value, for despite her title Shah’s purpose is to challenge readers to reflect deeply on the fundamental beliefs and supposedly incontrovertible “truths” that shape how we understand the living world more broadly. In this, she undoubtedly succeeds.

The “next great migration” may never eventuate, or not in the shape Shah predicts. But no readers will walk away from this book without a profound shift in their relationship with the world around them. •

The post World in motion appeared first on Inside Story.

No detainee in an immigration detention facility has tested positive to Covid-19, a representative of the Australian Border Force told me by email. The unnamed representative confirmed that a detainee had required healthcare outside the Mantra facility. Without addressing the particular case or the period of isolation, the representative added that, “In quarantine, detainees are placed in a single hotel room with access to food, activities, television and mobile phone. These measures are continually reviewed in line with the current health advice.”

Refugee advocate Pamela Curr says the sequence of events is consistent with what she knows of other cases. “I know of a man who finally had a tooth extraction after a year of pain,” she says. “He was brought back to Mantra and put in two weeks of isolation. A second man who also waited in pain for a year had his treatment and was then locked in quarantine for two weeks. On the day he was freed from isolation he was told he had a further medical appointment the next day, which would then trigger another two weeks in isolation. Not surprisingly, the man refused to attend the second appointment.”

The Mantra men complain of discriminatory and “inhuman” treatment, and query what happens to ordinary citizens who spend a few hours at a hospital. The Border Force representative didn’t respond when I asked whether the accompanying guards are also required to isolate for fourteen days.

Immigration detainees in Melbourne’s northern suburbs are treated at a public hospital operated by health network provider Northern Health. The hospital follows Department of Health and Human Services guidelines, a representative told me, and would only require non-Covid patients to isolate after being tested as a precaution prior to having a procedure.

Curr says that refugee advocates have long been concerned about delays in treating the health conditions that required the men held in the Mantra to be evacuated from Papua New Guinea and Nauru during 2019. “The pandemic may have been a contributor to some of those delays over recent months,” she says. “But now we have men refusing treatment due to the fourteen-day isolation enforced after they return from a couple of hours at a supervised medical care visit. If the guards are not also required to isolate for fourteen days, then it is plainly an unnecessary condition added to an already harsh detention regime, and a further contributor to the men receiving delayed treatment.”

The federal member for Cooper, Ged Kearney, regards the sixty-five men held in the Mantra Bell City motel, which is in her electorate, as among her constituents. “I have been horrified by the lack of appropriate healthcare that the men who are locked up in the Mantra have received over the last seven months,” she says. “The Australian government should be able to provide healthcare and keep the men, who are my constituents, safe from Covid, without using increasingly punitive forms of detention.”

Meanwhile, in Canberra on Wednesday, human rights campaigner Craig Foster renewed his #GameOver appeal to the Morrison government to accept New Zealand’s offer to resettle 150 refugees annually, with priority given to those still on Nauru and in PNG. A deal with New Zealand would eventually provide a viable resettlement option for those detained in the Mantra motel and hundreds of others with no prospect of ever being settled in Australia. “Australians across the country have been asking for this for many years,” Foster said in a recent statement. “The mental and physical anguish these people have suffered has been terrible and it’s time for the Australian government to do the right thing and accept the New Zealand offer.”

Signalling his intention to ramp up support for his campaign among sporting codes on both sides of the ditch, Foster, a former Socceroo, was joined in Canberra by former All Black Sonny Bill Williams. “This is not about politics,” says Williams. “This is about a few hundred refugees who have suffered for too long and who are in need of a solution. New Zealand has offered to provide that solution, Australia should accept.” •

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Last month the Refugee Council of Australia warned premier Daniel Andrews that 164 people in his state were set to be moved from community detention, with no provision for ongoing housing or support. Sixty had already been removed in New South Wales, seventy-six in Queensland, thirty in South Australia and twenty-two in Western Australia.

Home Affairs officials confirmed on Monday that the numbers have since increased in all states but Western Australia. In response to a question from senator Nick McKim at a Senate committee hearing, they confirmed that it is the department’s “intention” to include Victorian cases among another 300 community detainees targeted for removal.

As the department describes it, the removal process gives people three weeks of “transitional support,” during which time they can stay in their current government-provided housing and receive their last income payment. Once the transitional period is over, they have the right to work (though no guarantee of a job) and to Medicare, but have lost their accommodation and government benefit.

Senator McKim expressed surprise that the move was proceeding during a pandemic and recession. Were people in Victoria on hold, he asked, or had “a decision been taken that, once a certain thing happens, then the people in Victoria can start receiving these [bridging visa] grants?”

“No decision has been taken on what that milestone would be,” replied the department’s Justine Jones.

The government provides a six-month final departure bridging visa to people being moved on from community detention, by the end of which they are expected to have left Australia, either for their home country or to return to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Having vacated their homes and lost their government-funded income payments, they are expected to find housing and provide for themselves.

The current community-detention cohort of more than 570 people are not allowed to work or study, and so must rely on the government for their housing and a monthly allowance. They can move about during the day but must be at their assigned accommodation each night. Children can go to school, but school camps, for example, are off-limits without written permission from authorities.

As refugee advocate Pamela Curr points out, these people have had no chance to prepare themselves for work. “Their chances of finding jobs to fully support themselves and, in some cases, their children would be tough at the best of times. To require that of them when unemployment is higher than it has been for decades is a test of Olympian proportions.”

Curr’s assessment is backed by Sister Brigid Arthur, joint coordinator of the Brigidine Asylum Seeker Project, which has been providing emergency funds, food and other material aid to refugees and people seeking asylum since 2001. The project is a Melbourne-based initiative of the Brigidine Sisters.

“We are preparing for a crisis to hit,” says Arthur. “We estimate that we need to find another one hundred accommodation units to house families and individuals likely to find themselves homeless within the coming month.” Adding to the difficulty, she says, is the fact that agencies like hers must deal with a “climate of secrecy and lack of any rationale which would allow us to understand exactly what is about to happen and why it is happening.”

The Australian Border Force is responsible for immigration detention, including community detention of those previously held on Nauru or PNG who were brought to Australia for medical treatment, mostly in the years before the since-repealed medevac legislation came into effect. Management of the people in community detention and their needs is contracted out to organisations including AMES and Life Without Barriers in Victoria. Other church and community welfare agencies are among the contracted providers in other states.

The Border Force, led by commissioner Michael Outram, is an operationally independent statutory authority within Peter Dutton’s home affairs portfolio. The published organisational structures of the department and the Border Force don’t make clear to whom Mr Outram reports, so it is assumed to be Minister Dutton. This makes it difficult to say whether the decisions and actions of Border Force fit into any coherent implementation of refugee policy or ministerial priorities.

“Having had seven years to find a solution to the dilemma of what to do with refugees covered by a ‘never, ever’ ban on settling in Australia, we say that this is a proven policy failure,” Curr says. “But we don’t want to criticise without offering a better way.”

Curr and Arthur have offered an alternative process that would see the Morrison government move people from community detention to a new community protection visa with full work and study rights, and access to Medicare, JobSeeker and continuing housing and income, until they are securely supporting themselves.

Arthur believes there is time to avoid the crisis about to hit in Victoria if the federal government willingly works with those who are concerned, informed by experience and well connected in the refugee support sector.

Advocates like Arthur and Curr may well be among the “informed citizenry” Mike Pezzullo had in mind when he addressed the National Security College at the ANU last week. Summarising his vision of national security as a “positive and unifying force,” he said that it should not entail the administration of fearful and anxious subjects.

“Security should be contested by an informed citizenry who share a common horizon of threat awareness and agency in relation to risk and opportunity,” he continued. “On this reading, security is a dialectic between the state’s mandate and capacity to act, and the population’s collective specification of the trade-offs and the costs that it is willing to bear in the name of protection and survival.”

This suggests a shift in the national security narrative. Since prime minister John Howard declared in 2001 that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” refugee policy has been framed as a border security issue. It was further entrenched in security debates by the actions of prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

After two decades, the trade-off in Australia’s current refugee policy is indeed contested. Refugee advocates see many costs — denial of human rights, trauma compounding harm, punitive treatment of people seeking protection — but no greater sense of security.

Figures in this month’s federal budget indicate that the government is continuing its push to reduce the cost of support for asylum seekers, which commenced in last year’s budget. But with costs reported in a fragmented manner across departmental programs, it is difficult for interested citizens to assess the full picture. With the department’s broadbrush response to my detailed questions shedding no new light, it can’t be said definitively whether the move to evict people from community detention is a cost-saving measure or a response to other, possibly political imperatives. Decisions on removing people from community detention are put directly to the minister on a case-by-case basis.

There is, however, clear provision in the budget for a further $55.6 million to “reactivate” the Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island, which was placed on a contingency setting last year. The Kaldor Centre’s analysis of the budget finds that “onshore compliance and detention” expenditure in 2020–21, set at $1 billion, includes voluntary return packages and the management of onshore detention facilities.

These facilities include traditional fenced-and-locked facilities as well as the hotels and motels where around 160 men medevaced from PNG and Nauru in 2019 are being held. So far, these men — in the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel in Brisbane and the Mantra Bell City motel in suburban Melbourne — have not been included among the proposed evictions from community detention. Neither have those who still have a chance of resettlement in the United States. According to the home affairs department, “The US government continues to progress cases under the resettlement arrangement. Those actively engaged in the US resettlement process are able to continue with this process.”

Many of those in Victoria who are expected to be moved out of community detention in coming weeks are aware of what has happened in other states. “Everybody is talking about it,” one resident told me. “But our immigration case worker has said nothing. We don’t know. We are just waiting. We are always waiting.” •

The post “We are just waiting. We are always waiting” appeared first on Inside Story.

A superior public health infrastructure with a large number of intensive care beds helps explain Germany’s comparatively low mortality rate. At no stage have hospitals been overwhelmed by patients requiring ventilators; in fact, German hospitals have been able to treat patients from Italy, France and the Netherlands. Crucial in keeping the number of infections manageable has been a nationwide lockdown and social distancing rules that have been observed by most people.

Over the past couple of weeks, Germany’s state governments have loosened restrictions. Most shops are back in business, many students have been able to return to school, and museums and art galleries have reopened. In one state, even restaurants are operating, albeit only for local residents.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and the sixteen state premiers met by video last Wednesday to discuss a further easing of the restrictions. Many of the premiers have been pushing for a speedy relaxation of the rules, and Merkel, the ever-cautious trained natural scientist, could do little but acquiesce. The only concession she secured was a commitment to reimpose restrictions locally if the number of new infections topped fifty per 100,000 inhabitants in a particular district. Since Wednesday, this Obergrenze, or upper limit, has been breached in five districts, but the local authorities’ response has been far less consistent than had presumably been envisaged by Merkel and the virologists advising her.

Many commentators have suggested that the rationale for easing restrictions quickly has been the realisation that Germany is reaching a tipping point. Germans overwhelmingly welcomed the lockdown when it was introduced in March, but now many of them are sick and tired of it and demanding a return to life as usual. A sizeable minority want to work, shop and go on holidays exactly as they used to. They are also no longer in favour of wearing the mandatory face masks on public transport and in shops, or of obeying social distancing rules.

The last time an Obergrenze became politically contentious was in late 2015 when the then premier of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, demanded that Germany impose an upper limit on the number of asylum seekers admitted in a given year. This declaration embroiled Seehofer and Merkel in a bitter conflict lasting more than two years, which he eventually won. Now it is Merkel who insists on an upper limit, and again it is doubtful she will prevail.

Talk of an Obergrenze isn’t the only reminder of the so-called refugee crisis. Then, too, many politicians and journalists warned that “die Stimmung kippt” — that Germany was reaching, or had already reached, a tipping point, after which a majority of Germans would reject the refugee policies of the Merkel government. Then and now, those predicting a soon-to-be-reached tipping point could point to opinion polls. In September 2015, a clear majority supported the Merkel government’s decision to admit asylum seekers whose claims should have been processed in Greece or Hungary. Six months later, that was no longer the case. Now, polls suggest that support for the restrictions imposed by federal, state and local governments is declining fast.

Public protests are the most visible evidence of a change of public mood. Since the beginning of the lockdown, local governments have prohibited large public gatherings. But in a country in which rallies have long been an important means of protest, it has proven difficult for the authorities to ban demonstrations altogether.

Take 1 May, a day that’s more than any other associated with noisy rallies. This year the trade unions cancelled their traditional Labour Day marches, but that didn’t stop others. In Hamburg, for example, the authorities issued permits for forty-three public protests, always with the proviso that organisers agreed to an Obergrenze (usually twenty-five demonstrators), a stationary format, everybody wearing masks and a 1.5 metre gap between demonstrators. In almost all cases, protesters obeyed these rules.

Elsewhere, wild protests have taken place without the prior approval of local authorities, along with rallies whose participants haven’t adhered to stipulated conditions. Nearly all of these protests were directed at the lockdown. They have continued even after many of the restrictions were removed.

The first of these protests was in Berlin on 28 March. Protesters gathered on Rosa Luxemburg Square and one of the organisers, the writer Anselm Lenz, handed out copies of the Grundgesetz, Germany’s constitution. In an interview he said that the state had formed an alliance with the pharmaceutical industry and digital technology companies to abolish democracy. Only forty people attended what was later dubbed the first Hygiene-Demo, but the crowds were larger at subsequent rallies. Last Saturday, the police tried to restrict access to the square to ensure that the permitted number of demonstrators — a mere fifty — would not be exceeded, whereupon more than a thousand demonstrators gathered at nearby Alexanderplatz.

The largest demonstrations have been held in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, in the affluent southwest of the country. There, the first rally took place on 18 April — but only after Germany’s high court had ruled that a ban imposed by the local authorities had to be rescinded. Last Saturday, about 5000 demonstrators gathered at Stuttgart’s Cannstatter Wasen, a large open space that is often used for festivals. Following the court ruling, the Baden-Württemberg authorities have been less restrictive and had granted a permit for a 10,000-strong demonstration.

Some of these demonstrations have been marred by violence. On two occasions, journalists were attacked. On others, there were squabbles between demonstrators and police who tried to enforce the stipulated Obergrenze and social distancing rules.

Similar demonstrations have been held elsewhere: from San Francisco to Melbourne, and from London to Naples. In all these cases, they have attracted a motley bunch of protesters, including, among others, conspiracy theorists, people belonging to far-right fringe groups, anti-vaxxers and civil rights activists. In some instances, populist leaders — most notably Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro — have given them their blessing.

What’s specific to Germany isn’t the much-reported gatherings in Berlin and Stuttgart but the numerous protests in small towns in East Germany. I believe these are the manifestations of the discontent that has made politicians nervous and eager to end the restrictions sooner rather than later.

In Zittau, a town of about 30,000 in the southeast of Saxony, close to the borders with the Czech Republic and Poland, a Facebook group of people critical of the lockdown formed about six weeks ago. On 6 April, the group sent an open letter to the local media. Its twenty-four signatories bemoaned “massive and disproportionate human rights violations.” They claimed that the restrictions represented the kind of totalitarianism that had last been seen thirty years ago. During the weekly rallies in Zittau, demonstrators have shouted, “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), the catchcry of the civil rights activists who took to the streets during the dying weeks of the German Democratic Republic in 1989.

Pirna is another medium-sized town in the southeast of Saxony. Like Zittau, Pirna is in an electorate where the candidate for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, came first in the 2017 federal elections. There, the first wild protest was organised on 22 April by a police officer who represents the AfD in the local shire parliament.

Last Wednesday, about 250 people turned up for the latest demonstration opposite the town hall. Two days later, Pirna’s mayor, Klaus-Peter Hanke, invited three of the protesters and Saxony’s minister for social cohesion, the Social Democrat Petra Köpping, to join him in a panel discussion live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

Köpping did most of the talking, trying to explain the rationale behind her government’s response to the pandemic. At the conclusion of the event, one of the protesters said he much appreciated the fact that the minister had provided a lot of information. Earlier he had complained that the information supplied by the government was contradictory and sometimes incorrect, but also somewhat proudly admitted that for the past few weeks he had stopped paying attention to news related to the pandemic.

Outside of Saxony, Köpping is known as the author of the 2018 book Integriert doch erst mal uns! (You ought to integrate us first!), which argues that many East Germans had been the victims of German reunification, and that their experience, including their humiliation at the hands of West Germans, had never been properly acknowledged. During the panel discussion, she followed the script recommended in her book: she took the protesters’ concerns seriously and implied that they were legitimate, spoke patiently and conveyed empathy.

Only once did Köpping lose her calm. When one of the panellists complained that the police response to the demonstrations in Pirna had been heavy-handed, she said that it had to be seen in the context of a general deterioration of political culture. She talked about the personal abuse directed at her, and then made a reference to the protests against refugees in 2015, suggesting that they and the more recent protests against the lockdown were comparable.

There are indeed parallels between the opposition to government policy in 2015 and the opposition to government policy now. In both cases, the protests were sometimes initiated and at other times instrumentalised by the far right. As happened in 2015, protesters have objected to not being consulted and to being disadvantaged by government policies. Misinformation campaigns, some of them led by Russian state-owned media, fuelled some of the protests in 2015. In 2020, stories that the pandemic is less harmful than the common flu or is a ploy by Bill Gates can be traced back to Russian sources.

In 2015, those opposed to the government’s refugee policy saw themselves (rather than forcibly displaced non-Germans) as victims. In 2020, too, protesters perceive government policy as a means to harm them rather than protect others. (Of course, if the rate of infections were to increase substantially, everybody, and not just people in aged care facilities, would be at great risk of falling victim to the virus.)

Recent polls suggest that the Christian Democrats have benefited from the current crisis. With its support dropping below 10 per cent, the AfD’s efforts to capitalise on any disquiet about the government’s measures have failed. By and large, so have other attempts to connect an anti-migrant message to the concerns about the recent restrictions.

The government’s response to refugees in August and September 2015 is now widely seen as a mistake, and this assessment informs government policy in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic today. About a week ago, Matthias Iken, deputy editor-in-chief of the conservative Hamburger Abendblatt, wrote that the federal government was at risk of repeating its errors from 2015, namely failing to abandon a policy “that was initially called for but which could not be sustained. In the same way in which a country can’t accommodate close to a million refugees within a few months, it can’t be put on ice for weeks.” Favourable approval ratings, a sympathetic media and admiration from Germany’s neighbours would once again turn out to be but a “fleeting blessing.”

This historical analogy implies that Merkel’s policy in 2015 was politically suicidal rather than logistically impossible. After all, eventually Germany met the challenge of accommodating the refugees successfully. The analogy also neglects the fact that the narrative about the refugee policy’s political impossibility may be true for some parts of the country, including the southeast of Saxony (where vehement opposition to that policy began well before Merkel’s approval ratings nose-dived), but incorrect for others. The idea that Germany reached, and then went beyond, a tipping point in late 2015 has been shaped by a focus on what happened in places such as Pirna that were not representative then and are not representative now.

It would be a mistake to assume that local unrest in Pirna and Zittau will be replicated in the rest of the country. Hamburg may be just as unrepresentative as Pirna, but it’s worth noting that of the forty-three protests held in that city on 1 May not one was about the lockdown. While it’s reasonable to weigh up the costs and benefits of measures designed to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, it would make little sense to let government policy be informed by a misplaced fear of popular discontent.

This is not to downplay the significance of the current demonstrations. The protesters may well radicalise, as happened during 2014’s anti-immigration Pegida marches in Dresden and 2015’s anti-refugee protests. But the anger that drives the protests now, particularly in the east of the country, needs to be understood as more than simply a response to the lockdown, in the same way that the anti-immigration protests have never just been about migrants. For that reason alone, it would be wrong to make extensive concessions to the protesters — and in the process perhaps risk Germany’s exposure to the virus increasing exponentially — in the hope of ending the discontent. •

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Successive governments have introduced a range of deterrence measures, some at Australia’s borders and some much further away. Among them are the often-bizarre information campaigns launched in countries asylum seekers are fleeing from, including Iran and Sri Lanka, and in Indonesia and other transit countries. Some campaigns have targeted the fishermen who transport asylum seekers across the ocean, but most have sought to discourage asylum seekers from leaving their home country in the first place. In one recently revealed case, the Australian government distributed fake horoscopes to deter Sri Lankan asylum seekers. According to the entry for Cancer:

Family problems will occur. Luck is not in the cards for you. Do not try to travel illegally to Australia by boat, as you will be stopped and returned. You will lose everything your family owes to debt, and face family problems.

Regardless of whether these campaigns are effective, which is questionable, the number of boats arriving in Australia has decreased dramatically. In 2013, more than 300 vessels transported at least 20,000 people to Australia; a year later, the official number was just one boat with 160 passengers, and there have been no further arrivals since then.

Australian politicians have frequently recommended their formula to other countries, especially the Mediterranean states of the European Union, where thousands of asylum seekers and migrants have arrived by sea. By 2017, according to then immigration minister Peter Dutton, at least six European countries were asking Australia for advice in managing their so-called refugee crisis.

What lies behind this apparent success in stopping the boats? And could it really be replicated by other countries?

Australia’s approach rests on three pillars, all of which are supported by the country’s two main political parties. The first is the mandatory detention of certain asylum seekers under 1992 amendments to the Migration Reform Act. Even though immigration detention is expensive and undoubtedly harms detainees, any person arriving in Australia without a valid visa must be detained by law. Australia’s first detention centres were established in remote corners of the country, often in the outback, in order to evade public scrutiny, but from 2009 the government also made use of detention facilities on Christmas Island. Some 1550 kilometres from Australia’s remote northwest coast, that centre is even further from the scrutiny of independent non-government agencies.

The second pillar is Australia’s system of “offshore processing.” Since 2013, asylum seekers arriving by boat have been prevented from submitting their asylum applications to Australian authorities, and must have their claims processed in Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Under memorandums of understanding with those countries, Australia takes no responsibility for finding a long-term home for asylum seekers even if they are found to be in need of protection. Instead, they must rely on resettlement offers from other countries or on integration into Papua New Guinean society.

Some 4177 people have been sent to Nauru or Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) since 13 August 2012 to be confined there in cruel and degrading conditions. In April 2016, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled that the detention of refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island was illegal. Instead of complying with this ruling, the Australian government resorted to coercive measures, eventually withdrawing all support services for the detention centre in October 2017 in an attempt to force the inhabitants to move to a planned new accommodation site nearer to Lorengau, the island’s main town. Contractors, under instructions from the Australian government, cut power, water, food and medical supplies to the original detention centre, leaving the refugees to fend for themselves by digging wells and making journeys to search for food at night. Those with urgent medical needs, including one person with a serious heart condition, had no access to healthcare services. After years of confinement and exposure to widespread violence, most of the remaining people suffer from anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Since February 2014, thirteen people are known to have died in offshore detention facilities or as a result of offshore processing more broadly, including seven known or suspected suicides. Australia refuses to accept responsibility for any of these deaths. Iranian asylum seeker Reza Barati was killed in a riot on Manus Island in February 2014 and Hamid Khazaei died of sepsis in September 2014 after he contracted a leg infection in the Manus Island detention centre, for which he did not receive the required medical treatment. Many thousands of other incidents of violence and self-harm have never been reported in the media because of the secrecy that surrounds offshore processing arrangements.

As of late September 2019, 562 people remained in Nauru and in Papua New Guinea. Those found not to be genuine refugees had been repatriated, and 632 had departed for the United States under a refugee resettlement agreement negotiated with Barack Obama and implemented under his successor as president, Donald Trump.

Although conditions in those camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea are known to be appalling, the evidence suggests they are not the main reason for the decrease in the number of new asylum seekers arriving by boat. The most effective deterrent is the third pillar of Australia’s deterrence model — turnbacks of boats. During the 2013 federal election, the Coalition parties campaigned on their leader Tony Abbott’s “stop the boats” policy, which involved bringing several government agencies under the direct control of the Australian military. After winning the election in September 2013, Abbott initiated the military-led Operation Sovereign Borders, which intercepted at least thirty-six boats with 852 passengers and turned them back to Indonesia, Sri Lanka or Vietnam. Precise statistics are hard to obtain as the Australian government has resisted releasing information about “on-water” operations. On 6 August 2015, immigration minister Peter Dutton announced that twelve months had passed since the last successful people smuggling operation.

Many other asylum seeker journeys may have been deterred at the point of their departure in the countries of origin or of transit. According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, since 2013 at least 2525 people have been stopped from boarding boats to Australia as a result of cooperation between Australian authorities and their counterparts in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and other neighbouring countries, which disrupted seventy-eight people smuggling operations.

UN agencies have criticised turnback and disruption operations on several occasions on the grounds that they may violate fundamental human rights bestowed under refugee and human rights law, as well as the law of the sea. One of the most embarrassing episodes came in June 2015 when media reports revealed that Australian officers had paid six Indonesian fishermen approximately US$30,000 to take asylum seekers back to Indonesia, thus themselves engaging in people smuggling by encouraging clandestine border crossing.

Estimating exactly how much Australian governments have spent on deterrence is no simple task, with many different government agencies having been involved over many years. What is clear, however, is that the hardline policies have been extremely costly. Figures provided to Senate estimates in early 2018 revealed that, in 2016–17 alone, the Australian government spent $4.06 billion, including $1.57 billion for onshore compliance and detention, $1.08 billion for the “offshore management” of “irregular maritime arrivals” and $1.06 billion on border enforcement. To detain a single person in offshore processing facilities in Nauru or Papua New Guinea was costing the Australian government $573,000 a year.

Australia also faces less tangible costs, including the negative impact of the deterrence policy on its relations with its neighbours and a decline in reputation globally. Pushing back boats to Indonesia without the consent of the Indonesian government not only damaged Australia’s relationship with Jakarta but also cemented Australia’s reputation as a regional bully. Paying Cambodia $30 million to accept seven of the refugees Australia refused to resettle in its own territory established Australia’s image as a neocolonial overlord diverting its responsibilities to a poor country with a weak justice system and inadequate human rights protection.

Australia’s reputation has suffered beyond the region, too. No other country has used its connections with small developing nations — in this case, Nauru and Cambodia — to offload its asylum seeker burden. On several occasions the United Nations has criticised Australia for its cruel and inhumane offshore detention practices and for the turnbacks that have put the lives of the passengers at risk. But the criticism has fallen on deaf ears in Canberra; in fact prime minister Tony Abbott responded in 2015 by saying that Australians were “sick of being lectured to by the United Nations.”

Besides the damage done to Australia’s international relations, the lack of transparency in the implementation of the hardline policies of successive governments comes at a significant cost to Australian democracy. Designed as military operations and executed beyond the borders of its own territory, Australia’s deterrence policies are shrouded in secrecy, shielding the government from any meaningful accountability. The number of intercepted boats, the limitations of fast-track assessments of asylum claims at sea, and the conditions in the detention centres remain largely concealed from the public.

More alarming, however, are the restraints on whistleblowers introduced in 2015 under the controversial Australian Border Force Act, which have prevented people from speaking out against injustices done to the asylum seekers, for fear of imprisonment or of losing their jobs. It wasn’t until October 2016 that the government amended the legislation to exempt doctors, nurses, psychologists and other health professionals from prison terms of up to two years if they spoke out about the conditions in immigration detention.

Much of the human cost of Australia’s deterrence model is carried by the asylum seekers immobilised in detention centres or caught in transit countries that haven’t ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and so offer no proper protection. With little or no assistance and no right to earn their living in those countries, asylum seekers and refugees who have been intercepted and returned to Indonesia linger in desperate conditions. Those barred from resettling in Australia, no matter how genuine their refugee claims, face homelessness and destitution in circumstances that give rise to self-harm and depression. They are left with no resolution to their recognised claim for protection.

Many researchers have pointed out that measures to counter people smuggling rarely succeed; instead, they divert the cross-border movements of asylum seekers and migrants, often making their journeys longer and riskier. From this point of view it is not surprising that the number of asylum seekers in Australia has actually increased recently. Instead of arriving by boat, however, asylum seekers are arriving by plane. Figures released by shadow immigration minister Kristina Keneally show that the number of people landing at Australian airports and applying for asylum rocketed to nearly 28,000 in 2017–18 — up from 18,290 in 2016–17 and 9554 in 2015–16.

While the asylum seekers who came to Australia by boat were usually from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Vietnam, most of the newcomers hail from China and Malaysia. Unlike earlier asylum seekers, they are able to apply for tourist or student visas and board flights to Australia. They also face much higher rejection rates than pre-2013 asylum seekers whose claims were processed in Australia.

Given the slow processing of asylum applications, newcomers run the risk of exploitation, slavery and sexual servitude. Although only one in six applicants are successful in their claims for asylum, many remain in Australia on bridging visas while they exhaust the appeals process, which can take years. During those years they work on farms, in restaurants and in the sex industry, often underpaid and overworked. And, of course, their vulnerability is even greater during the current pandemic.

The new people smugglers are no longer Indonesian fishermen who ferry asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia, but the middlemen who lure farmers and labourers from Malaysia and China, promise them work and apply for asylum on their behalf, thus exploiting Australia’s self-inflicted visa-processing backlog.

Having demonised the most visible yet least influential participants in people smuggling operations, Australian policymakers have overlooked both the inherent flexibility of the smuggling networks and the enormous costs of human suffering. The inhumane treatment of asylum seekers under Australia’s deterrence model has sent out a message, but clearly to the wrong people. •

The post Sending a message to the wrong people appeared first on Inside Story.

The trailer for the ABC’s new drama series Stateless is a succession of emotional surges, crosscutting scenes of distress, exultation, hysterical altercation and exuberant celebration. From the outset, it has been sold as a series built on great emotional intensity — a familiar strategy of the national broadcaster, which seems convinced that high drama is a drawcard.

No doubt there is a case for intensity in a series based on the story of Cornelia Rau, the German-born Australian citizen wrongfully incarcerated in Baxter detention centre for four months in late 2004 and early 2005. Rau’s story, recounted in meticulous detail by Robert Manne in the Monthly later in 2005, is strange and compelling, and continues to resonate in the national consciousness as a symptom of the disturbing political culture that took hold in the immigration department during the Howard years.

Rau was in her early thirties, and had been involved in Kenja, a Sydney sect run by a couple who preached a doctrine called “Energy Conversion,” when she began to experience psychotic episodes. Over the next five years, she led a chaotic existence punctuated by enforced hospitalisation. In 2003, she began attempting to escape the country by claiming to be a German backpacker and seeking a European passport. Found wandering on a remote road in Cape York the following year, she was questioned by Queensland police and turned over to the department as an illegal immigrant.

Interwoven with her story in Stateless are the experiences of an Afghan refugee, Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), who has lost all but one member of his family, and a newly appointed guard, Cam Sandford (Jai Courtney), who has taken on this well-paid work in order to keep his young family in a spacious home with a swimming pool. Yvonne Strahovski as Sofie Werner, the Rau figure, brings star power, along with Marta Dusseldorp as Werner’s sister, Asher Keddie as the director of the detention centre, and Cate Blanchett and Dominic West as the couple running the Kenja cult.

With such a strong cast, expectations run high. And these actors certainly help anchor the sprawling storylines by bringing vividness and presence. Yet there is little opportunity for them to give their characters psychological depth. Blanchett and West perfectly capture the behaviour of the cult leaders, but we get no sense of what might underlie it. It’s as if their scenes with Strahovski are a string of “moments” designed to show off the actors rather than explore the dangerous tensions arising as a vulnerable subject comes under the influence of a creepy mesmerist.

Sophie is being drawn into a psychodrama here, which is probably an accurate rendition of what happened. But psychodrama has a cheapening effect when it’s allowed to leak across to the wider story. As the camera lingers over faces in close-up, giving us protracted reaction shots during every tense exchange, the dramatic texture becomes relentlessly expressive and overly explicit.

Little room is left for irony or implication. When skilled actors try to create it — as Keddie does when her character attempts to hold to some kind of human rationality in the face of a departmental boss focused on “controlling the narrative” — they are undermined. The scripting and filming techniques have their own ways of exercising narrative control, and are designed to create the shortest route to the next showdown. As the conflicted Sandford, Courtney is likewise steered into scenes of angry confrontation and teary meltdown.

Perhaps my response to Stateless was exacerbated by having been subjected to repeated screenings of the trailer during promotion breaks in last month’s Four Corners special on the bushfires, one of the most powerful pieces of television I’ve seen. A protracted replay of a father and daughter, caught in an ember storm, trying to contain their panic as they battled to save their home and their lives, was intercut with clips of stagey hysteria and grief.

In real life, the most rational and controlled aspects of human behaviour often come to the fore in the midst of extreme experience. Emotional responses of terror, anguish or grief are not synchronous in the way some dramaturges like to pretend: they may occur a day, a week or even years later.

American essayist Leslie Jamison has written insightfully about dramatic empathy as “emotional theft.” While she resists censoriousness, she nevertheless finds “something troubling about a certain sort of fixation on pain.” Especially so, perhaps, when the pain is being experienced by people whose situation and experience are remote from our own. In the case of those held under cruel detention policies, can an invitation to empathy really be honest or meaningful?

As Ameer, Fayssal Bazzi carries an impossible burden of pathos. What do we know about this man other than that his life and his family have been destroyed? Bazzi works to give the character a more moderated register of behaviour and reaction. Called in for an interview that will decide his destiny, he behaves with impeccable courtesy and apparent composure, but under the table, one of his feet trembles. It’s the kind of subtle detail the series generally lacks, but it is spoiled by the camera zooming in for the inevitable close-up of the tremor.

Some of the supporting cast in the detention centre are former detainees. Collectively, they communicate something of the ambience as they experienced it. These places were not settings for personal dramas. Most of the time they were places of dismal monotony, filled with people thwarted for years on end in their quest for a longed-for change of destiny.

When the breakdowns came they were not in a form any camera would want to capture in close-up. On the testimony of psychiatrists eventually admitted to Baxter, some detainees were so deeply traumatised that they could no longer walk, and resorted to crawling to the toilet. Some refused to venture out into the daylight. Some had screaming fits. Self-harm was rife.

Manne’s summary of the psychiatric reports is grim reading. The truth is, few people would want to watch a dramatisation of what life in an immigration detention facility really was, and is, like. Rau herself was more than just volatile and unstable; at times she was in a state of severe psychosis. Strahovski’s performance shields us from the more confronting aspects of her condition, allowing us to “empathise” with a character who comes across as a free spirit caught in a trap.

“Mental illness should never be sentimentalised,” Manne says. “It is frightening and uncharming.” All the more so in the case of detainees stripped of hope and dignity. Although the story arcs for the main characters in this series don’t distort the harsher realities they faced, the overall rendition is governed by the conventions of sentimentality.

No doubt the intentions of those who created the series were ethical and responsible. Cate Blanchett, whose company Dirty Films was a production partner with Matchbox Pictures and Screen Australia, also had a hand in the script. Her stated concern with “the erosion of empathy” and determination not simply to preach to the converted has driven the project from the outset. But perhaps creating a dramatisation that is both widely engaging and true was always going to be impossible. •

The post Getting too close appeared first on Inside Story.

As I wrote last week, it seemed safe to take that statement at face value and expect Germany to accept between 1000 and 1500 of the children who have arrived in Greece with other refugees in recent weeks. With the participating countries including heavyweight France, I assumed that up to 2500 of the children currently in dangerously overcrowded camps on Lesvos and other islands would be evacuated. Germany’s share might be well below the 5000 demanded by the Greens in the resolution debated on 4 March in the Bundestag, and below the ten unaccompanied minors for every 500,000 EU residents suggested by Luxembourg’s foreign minister Jean Asselborn. But it would be a start.

My assumption was wrong. On 12 March, the EU home affairs commissioner, Swedish Social Democrat Ylva Johansson, announced in Athens that seven EU member states had agreed to take 1600 children between them. According to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany will take up to 400, France at least 300, and the remainder will be divided among Portugal, Finland, Luxembourg, Croatia, Ireland and Bulgaria. At the same time, perhaps in an attempt to indicate how the overcrowding really ought to be tackled, the European Union offered €2000 each for up to 5000 asylum seekers on the Greek islands who voluntarily return home.

Given that there are well over 40,000 asylum seekers on the Greek islands, among them thousands of minors, the offer to accommodate a paltry 1600 children is pitiful. Their relocation will do little to solve the problems on Lesvos, Samos, Chios and Kos. This failure on the part of the so-called coalition of the willing also bodes ill for future agreements to settle people rescued in the central Mediterranean by privately funded organisations such as Sea-Watch and Mission Lifeline.

At the same time, officially at least, the European Union remains unconcerned by the mounting evidence that Greece has been violating the human rights of people who have crossed the Turkish–Greek border since 28 February. It now appears that those who were beaten up and sent back to Turkey were the lucky ones. Others have been detained at what the New York Times calls a “secret extrajudicial location.” According to the German current affairs program Monitor, some of these detainees have been deprived of legal representation, summarily tried, and sentenced to up to four years’ prison.

Monitor’s report was broadcast last Thursday. Since then, Europeans have largely stopped paying attention to anything but the coronavirus pandemic. Thus far, the virus seems not to have spread to the camps at Europe’s borders (or to those in Idlib, for that matter). But it’s probably only a matter of time. Last week, the first Covid-19 case was reported on Lesvos. Given conditions in Moria and other camps on the Aegean islands, an outbreak of the disease would be disastrous.

The situation is grim, but some of the defenders of Europe’s values haven’t given up. I mention just two. The German charity Mission Lifeline has conducted search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. On 8 March, it launched an appeal to fund a charter plane to bring refugee children and their carers from the Greek islands to Germany. Within just a few days, more than the necessary €55,000 had been donated. While it seems unlikely that the German government will allow such a flight to go ahead, the campaign continues to draw attention to the situation in Moria and elsewhere.

Some members of the European Parliament have been highly critical of the European Commission’s backing of the Greek government’s approach. One critic is the chair of LIBE, the parliament’s committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, Juan Fernando López Aguilar, a constitutional lawyer and former Spanish justice minister. At a time when everybody else seemed preoccupied with the coronavirus, López Aguilar wrote an article for the Spanish edition of the Huffington Post about the “anti-European virus of insolidarity” that is devouring the European Union. He described Ursula von der Leyen’s talk about the Greek ασπίδα, or shield, supposedly protecting Europe, as “singularly outrageous” because of its complicity with the fear-mongering of the far right.

“Greece does not need rhetorical ‘solidarity,’” López Aguilar wrote. “It is one thing to support Greece and quite another to uncritically and unconditionally support whatever the Greek authorities do — or the Greek neo-Nazis, who, drunk with xenophobic violence, try to repel the ‘avalanche.’”

Many European commentators have rightly said that the democracies of Europe will be tested by the virus that is currently afflicting many thousands of their people. But Europe would do well to worry as much about the long-term damage caused by the “virus of insolidarity.” •

The post That other virus appeared first on Inside Story.

Her nomination by the European Council in July last year seemed less about her personal qualities and expertise than about the hostility of influential council members, including French president Emmanuel Macron, towards Weber and/or Timmermans. Last week, however, von der Leyen demonstrated that her previous assignment, as German defence minister, had prepared her well for the top job in Brussels. Only fatigues, helmet and flak jacket were missing when she fronted the press to declare Europe’s support for Greece’s treat response to refugees arriving from Turkey. The tone was befitting a general’s calm assessment of a grave threat.

“We… have seen how tense and how difficult the situation is,” she told journalists. “The Greek authorities are facing a very difficult task in containing the situation… I am fully committed to mobilising all the necessary operational support to the Greek authorities.” Flanked — and dwarfed — by Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenković, European Council president Charles Michel and the president of the European parliament, David Sassoli, she was nevertheless obviously in charge when she decreed: “We will hold the line and our unity will prevail.” She ended her brief statement by thanking “Greece for being our European ασπίδα in these times.”

Her statement assumed that Europe needs a Greek ασπίδα, or shield, because Greece is defending Europe’s borders. Just a few days earlier, on 28 February, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had announced that Turkey would no longer prevent asylum seekers from crossing into neighbouring Greece or Bulgaria. Thousands of them, many of them Afghans and Iranians who don’t enjoy the limited protection available to Syrian refugees in Turkey, immediately rushed to the Turkish–Greek border, some of them on board free buses provided by the Turkish authorities to ferry migrants from Istanbul.

The Greeks responded by closing their border and deploying additional military units and border police to guard it. Greek security forces then repelled prospective intruders by firing tear gas canisters and stun grenades. According to a report in the German magazine Spiegel, a twenty-two-year-old Syrian man died after being hit by a bullet. Turkish sources claim he wasn’t the only casualty. All those who had managed to cross the land border but had been picked up by the Greek police were immediately returned to Turkey, often after being beaten up by police or border guards. Greece also announced that it would accept no new asylum applications.

Von der Leyen’s use of the term ασπίδα may have been meant as a reference to Operation Aspida, which was launched in 2012 by the government of Antonis Samaras, Mitsotakis’s predecessor as leader of Greece’s conservative New Democracy party. Then, too, Greece’s European partners expected it to control a section of the EU’s external border: a 200-kilometre stretch mostly marked by the river Evros, which divides Greek West Thrace from Turkish East Thrace. Operation Aspida involved the construction of a barbed wire fence and the deployment of an additional 1800 border guards to keep out refugees and other irregularised migrants. It was accompanied by Operation Xenios Zeus, which was aimed at detecting — and then detaining — migrants living without a visa in Greek cities. Both operations were terminated when left-wing Alexis Tsipras replaced Samaras as prime minister in 2015.

I suspect Mitsotakis and his cabinet associate the term ασπίδα not only with the securitisation of the border eight years ago but also with an earlier effort to keep Asian invaders out of Europe, 2500 years ago. “Who doesn’t understand that this is a normal Turkish invasion?” Adonis Georgiadis, vice-president of New Democracy and minister for development in the current government, tweeted last week. As far as invasions from an Asian neighbour are concerned, perhaps none is better remembered — in Greece and elsewhere — than that of the Persians in 480 BCE. Then, a small Greek force led by King Leonidas of Sparta held up the vastly superior Persian army at the pass of Thermopylae. While their famous last stand only delayed the Persian advance, it allowed the Greek forces to regroup; the following year the Persians were decisively beaten and had to withdraw.

The Greek far right has frequently drawn on the history of Leonidas’s last stand to argue that all “illegal immigrants” need to be deported. The Golden Dawn, the fascist party that until last year held eighteen seats in Greece’s parliament, used to gather regularly at Thermopylae. References to Thermopylae are also used by the far right outside Greece. Last week, for example, a contributor to the white supremacist website VDare wrote: “Like their ancestors at Thermopylae, Greeks are trying to repel an Asiatic invasion… Western Civilisation began with ancient Greece. And it might end with the Third Hellenic Republic if the West doesn’t fight back.”

The river Evros is one of the sites where a replay of the battle of Thermopylae is now being imagined. The other is the Aegean Sea, or rather those of the Greek islands that lie only a few kilometres from the Turkish mainland. There, the heroics of the defenders of Greece against the imagined invasion include burning down facilities operated by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and the Swiss charity One Happy Family, assaults on journalists and aid workers, and attempts to prevent rubber dinghies carrying irregularised migrants from reaching Greek shores.

But it would be unfair to lay the blame for Greece’s hostile response to asylum seekers squarely at the feet of the far right. At the time of Operation Aspida, Human Rights Watch and other non-government organisations accused Samaras’s New Democracy government of violating the human rights of people seeking Europe’s protection, and of forcing desperate people to resort to using riskier routes, thus contributing to a higher number of border-related deaths. Similar accusations can now be levelled at the Mitsotakis government. It has been responsible for pushbacks (which are illegal under international law) and for endangering the lives of people trying to reach Greece by boat.

According to a recent New York Times report, Greece is also maintaining extrajudicial detention centres. It wants to deport to their countries of origin asylum seekers who arrived after 28 February and are being detained on board a Greek navy ship — without formally assessing whether they are owed protection. Police have done little to curb the activities of Greek vigilantes and far-right activists from France and Germany, who have taken it upon themselves to repel or expel asylum seekers and the people helping them.

Von der Leyen did not visit One Happy Family’s torched community centre on Lesvos, and only observed first-hand Greece’s ασπίδα in operation at the river Evros. Yet even there, it should have been obvious to her that the Greeks have been using tear gas and stun grenades to repel desperate migrants, including families with small children. She would certainly have been briefed about Greece’s decision to suspend its refugee determination procedures. But in an attempt to “hold the line,” she offered only praise for the Greek government’s hardline approach, and ignored its flouting of European human rights and refugee law. She presented as a visiting commander-in-chief, inspecting her troops at the southeastern limits of Europe, thereby distinguishing herself from her avuncular predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker. (To be fair, von der Leyen had not sought to become Juncker’s successor; the job she had eyed was that of NATO secretary-general.)

After 28 February, asylum seekers also tried to reach Greek islands just a few kilometres off the Turkish west coast. According to local media reports, 977 people succeeded within the space of twenty-four hours on the first weekend of March alone. Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Kos and some smaller islands were often the first European port of call for Syrian refugees during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16. It was opposite the island of Kos that Alan Kurdi and his family boarded a small inflatable boat in the early hours of 2 September 2015; for many readers internationally, the photo of three-year-old Alan’s dead body on a Turkish beach would have epitomised the crisis.

Although the number of arrivals dropped sharply in early 2016 after the Balkan route was closed, conditions on the islands went from bad to worse. By the end of last year, the Moria camp on Lesvos, for example, which had been built for 3100 people, accommodated more than 20,000. “The suffering is palpable, the hopelessness is insidious, the feeling of abandonment is all-consuming,” wrote Annie Chapman, an English volunteer doctor working in Moria, in the Guardian in early February. She was particularly concerned about the situation of the most vulnerable camp residents: “Guardians work hard to keep the most vulnerable safe, but… monitoring and care is stretched, and problems continue to spiral. With finite space and an infinite number of increasingly vulnerable people arriving, many minors and women are living alone outside the [secure] sections, at risk of abuse, violence, and systemic failings.”

The conditions have been appalling not least because Moria and other camps have been hopelessly overcrowded. And that’s because the Greek authorities have been slow in processing asylum seekers, and because until very recently they refused to transfer people from Lesvos and other islands to the mainland. Conditions have also been poor because Greece didn’t take full responsibility for the asylum seekers crossing its borders and instead left their care to private agencies, individual volunteers from elsewhere in Europe, and local people.

At the height of the crisis of 2015–16, Greek islanders often welcomed new arrivals — so much so that Lesvos fisherman Stratis Valamios and eighty-six-year-old Lesvos islander Emilia Kamvysi were among the favourites to win the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. Pundits assumed the extraordinary hospitality of the islanders would have to be acknowledged. But the arrival numbers kept growing and, with the Greek government failing to transfer people to the mainland, many islanders began to resent their presence. The islanders’ anger was initially directed at the authorities, but its target has shifted to the unwanted foreigners themselves. The Greek government saw no need to defuse the situation on the islands. It was demanding that other EU member states accommodate some of its asylum seekers and probably calculated that images of suffering children were aiding its cause.

Elsewhere in Europe, the appalling conditions on Lesvos have been a symbol of the failure of Europe’s asylum seeker policy for at least the past two years. In Germany, in particular, civil society groups have demanded that asylum seekers be evacuated from the islands and, if necessary, accommodated in Germany. Two years ago in Hamburg, for example, a coalition of civil society groups calling itself Hamburg hat Platz (Hamburg has space) began demanding that the state government agree to the resettlement of 1000 additional refugees from Greece.

Städte Sicherer Häfen (Safe Harbour Cities), a 140-strong network of German towns and cities formed last year in response to Italy’s refusal to let migrants rescued in the Mediterranean disembark, was also ready to welcome asylum seekers and refugees, including people accommodated in Moria and other overcrowded camps in Greece. Network members have been willing to accommodate asylum seekers over and above those assigned to them by Germany’s federal and state governments under a quota system.

These calls became louder towards the end of last year. Just before Christmas, Robert Habeck, the co-leader of the Greens, gave a much-quoted interview to the Sunday paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Asked what he thought of the Greek prime minister’s repeated call that other European countries relieve Greece’s burden, Habeck said, “First, get the kids out. Around 4000 children crowd on the islands. Lots of girls, lots of fragile little people. Our humanity demands that we help quickly.” His sentiments were widely echoed, although it was not clear whether he meant unaccompanied minors or children more generally.

Among those backing Habeck’s call was Heribert Prantl, a senior journalist with the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung. He called the German government’s inaction “criminal” and likened the children on Lesvos to the infant Jesus, pointing out that the latter too had not been a Christian. Although the government rejected Habeck’s call, its timing (which meant that the children in Moria became associated with Mary’s child in Bethlehem) generated significant momentum, shifting the German debate. The issue was no longer whether to assist Greece and accommodate some of the asylum seekers stranded there, but when to evacuate vulnerable children.

The images of asylum seekers being tear gassed at the Greek land border focused the attention of critical European publics on several linked issues: Europe’s failure to develop a new common asylum system that could replace the existing Dublin regulations; the humanitarian crisis in Idlib that prompted Erdoğan to blackmail the European Union by unleashing a wave of irregularised migrants in its direction; the fact that Turkey is currently hosting more asylum seekers and refugees than any other country; the shortcomings and potential collapse of the refugee deal between the European Union and Turkey; and the intolerable conditions in Greek refugee camps.

In Germany, the spectacle of stun grenades being lobbed in the direction of unarmed men, women and children sparked demonstrations and pledges by mayors and state premiers to accommodate asylum seekers from Greece. The day after the first images of violence at the Turkish–Greek border appeared on German television screens, spontaneous demonstrations and vigils in support of a more generous German policy were held in nineteen German cities. More such rallies occurred over the following days. On 7 March, for example, some 5000 people took to the streets in Hamburg, and 4000 in Berlin.

Predictably, representatives of the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany, or AfD, called for sanctions against Turkey, categorically rejected calls to admit children from Greece (calling them, borrowing a term used by Donald Trump and the Australian government, “anchor children”) and suspected a plot that would allow the German government to let in yet more people of the wrong colour and religion. They also showed their solidarity with Greece (the same country, by the way, whose people were accused not so long ago by AfD politicians of being lazy and undeserving of a bailout by fellow eurozone countries).

Perhaps surprisingly, however, many ordinary Germans remain open to the idea of resettling refugees from Turkey or Greece. In a reputable survey conducted three days after Erdoğan’s announcement, 57 per cent of respondents concurred with the following statement: “The refugees ought to be allowed to cross the border into Greece, and afterwards should be divided among the EU member states.” And 48 per cent thought that “Countries such as Germany and France should take in refugees, even if other EU member states are opposed to that.”

Last week in parliament, the Greens put forward a resolution calling for the admission of 5000 children and other vulnerable asylum seekers from Greece, an issue over which the governing coalition has been divided. Most Social Democrats want Germany to admit a sizeable number of asylum seekers from Greece. They agree that states and local councils prepared to take in extra people should be encouraged and enabled to do so. Speaking in his capacity as interior minister of Lower Saxony, prominent Social Democrat Boris Pistorius pleaded with the federal government to allow the states to go it alone and lead a coalition of the willing within the European Union.

The Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, have been saying that there must be no repeat of 2015: of the mass influx and the ensuing debate that divided the country and damaged the party’s brand. But they too were divided. Of the two main contenders for the party leadership, one, the conservative Friedrich Merz, opposes Germany taking in any asylum seekers whatsoever from Greece, whereas the other, the North Rhine-Westfalian premier Armin Laschet, who is considered to be a loyal Merkel supporter, advocates a more generous approach. The issue has also created unusual alliances: at a recent meeting of the parliamentary party, it was Merkel’s bête noire, interior minister Horst Seehofer, who defended her record and objected when it was suggested that Germans did not want any more refugees. Merkel herself has remained largely silent on the issue.

In the end, with the exception of eight members of the governing coalition who either abstained or voted against the government, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats toed the government line: that a German initiative could only happen as part of an EU initiative. Last Sunday, though, the Koalitionsausschuss — a committee comprising the leaders of the three governing parties together with Merkel and her deputy, Social Democratic finance minister Olaf Scholz — agreed that Germany would, after all, go ahead and accommodate between 1000 and 1500 children from Greece on the basis that a handful of other EU governments signed up to a joint initiative. By then, that condition had already been met, with France, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg and Croatia indicating they were willing to help out.

Given the size of the problem, though, the capacity of countries such as Germany and the willingness of municipalities to help, the evacuation of perhaps no more than 2500 children and other particularly vulnerable asylum seekers from Greece would be largely symbolic. Besides, it remains to be seen whether the promises will be kept. It wouldn’t be the first pledge by EU member states to resettle refugees and asylum seekers, or fund programs to assist them, to be left unfulfilled.

“We will hold the line and our unity will prevail,” Ursula von der Leyen said last week in Greece. “Now is the time for concerted action and cool heads and acting based on our values.” Given the uncompromising attitudes of Hungary and other Eastern European EU member states, a joint European approach that respects the rights of asylum seekers and other irregularised migrants — an approach that is indeed guided by their rights — is unrealistic. “Our unity” therefore means unanimous support for the response summed up by von der Leyen in Greece: a show of solidarity with Greece, a commitment to sealing the European Union’s external borders for asylum seekers, and — publicly at least — a shying away from criticising the Greek government’s flagrant violations of EU human rights and refugee law.

This is not an approach that would uphold the values considered intrinsic to the European project, enshrined in Article 2 of the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon:

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.

In 2015, at the height of the last large-scale influx of asylum seekers, von der Leyen was one of the staunchest defenders of Angela Merkel’s decision not to close the German border. She strongly supported the sentiments encapsulated in Merkel’s famous statement, “Wir schaffen das” (we are able to do this). Perhaps she adopted the persona of Europe’s commander-in-chief last week because she sensed that this was the only way she could speak for all EU member states. If so, then von der Leyen made the mistake of identifying the smallest common denominator and thus mirroring the views of the likes of Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who are obsessed with “illegal immigration.” The current leadership of von der Leyen’s party, Germany’s Christian Democrats, may also have made the mistake of assuming that a simple majority would not be sufficient when it comes to deciding to take in additional asylum seekers and refugees, and that nothing short of unanimity would be required for such a momentous decision.

Von der Leyen made another mistake by focusing exclusively on the member states’ national governments. More so than most, she should know that an alternative approach is available, one in which European cities and regions are empowered to respond to situations such as those unfolding on Lesvos, thereby upholding the values spelled out in Article 2 of the Lisbon treaty. That’s to do with her family history. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was also a prominent Christian Democrat. Six years after his return from Brussels, where he had headed the Directorate-General for Competition, Albrecht became the premier of Lower Saxony. Today he is perhaps best remembered for his unfortunate commitment to building a nuclear waste facility in his state.

But Albrecht should also be remembered for his decision, on 24 November 1978, to invite 1000 Indochinese “boat people” to settle in Lower Saxony. This was well above the number allocated to Lower Saxony by the federal government. In fact, in the previous three-and-a-half years, since the end of the Vietnam war, West Germany as a whole had taken in a total of only 1300 Vietnamese refugees. Albrecht and his state government subsequently decided to accommodate further contingents of “boat people.” He also prompted fellow state premiers to follow his example, was a supporter of the charity operating the Cap Anamur, which carried out search-and-rescue missions in the South China Sea, and lobbied conservative politicians in Europe in support of a European rescue mission for “boat people.”

If the German government is concerned about the backlash against the arrival of a sizeable number of asylum seekers in, say, Saxony, it could take up the offers of the eight German states and 140 cities and towns that so far have pledged to go it alone if a national consensus couldn’t be reached. They include, for example, the state government of Berlin, which has said that it has the capacity to take in 2000 people from Greece, including 150 unaccompanied minors, immediately.

German cities are not the only ones offering a safe harbour for asylum seekers and refugees. A network similar to Städte Sicherer Häfen, the Association Nationale des Villes et Territoires Accueillants (National Association of Welcoming Cities and Territories), exists in France. At the European level, sixty municipalities are part of the European Network of Solidarity Cities. It includes, among others, Amsterdam and Milan, Barcelona and Gdansk, Strasbourg and Munich. Incidentally, it also includes Athens and Thessaloniki, the two largest cities in Greece.

Ursula von der Leyen’s performance in Greece last week and the subsequent arguments over the evacuation of children from the Aegean islands suggest that Europe is in a bad way. “Respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights” don’t seem to count for much. But things are not entirely dire: an alternative Europe — as evident in Athens and Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin — is slowly emerging. But that’s no comfort for those stuck in Moria, wedged between Greek and Turkish border guards at the river Evros, or forgotten in all the other camps at or beyond Europe’s borders that never make it onto the evening news. •

The post In defence of Europe appeared first on Inside Story.

Because of immigration, Australia is one of the youngest developed nations on the planet. Our median age of only thirty-seven is significantly lower than the OECD average of well over forty. If immigration is maintained at around current levels, Australia will maintain that youth advantage even though our population will continue to age, particularly over the next twenty years.

The fact that migrants to Australia come from many different countries is also a good thing. And — Cronulla riots notwithstanding — we are a socially cohesive society. New arrivals have been remarkably successful in so many ways.

But is it enough for the prime minister simply to keep saying we are the world’s most successful multicultural nation? In the face of rising global anti-immigration sentiment, can Australia sit back and assume we will be immune to xenophobic forces? The rise of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups should be a warning sign, but will our government take it seriously? Remember how, when the head of Australia’s home affairs department, Mike Pezzullo, gave a speech just before the Christchurch massacre, he didn’t list right-wing extremism among the seven major threats facing Australia.

Australia became the world’s most successful multicultural nation not by accident or good luck but because we have followed the right set of policy principles since the second world war. Australia’s leaders need to understand those principles and continue to stress their importance to the public.

Since prime minister Ben Chifley and immigration minister Arthur Calwell launched Australia’s postwar migration program, Australia has used immigration to build the nation, manage demographic transitions and strengthen the economy. Over the intervening seventy years, political leaders have explained their immigration policy directions in a broad demographic, economic and social context.

The next intergenerational report, due next year, gives the government an opportunity to again talk about immigration in terms of our long-term future. It must use that chance to produce a much more sophisticated analysis than the “population plan” it issued earlier this year, which was essentially a marketing exercise. With the creation of a new population unit in Treasury, it’s to be hoped we will see more realistic assumptions about population growth and net overseas migration than those used in this year’s federal budget.

It would be good if the government also explained the basis of those assumptions so we can all understand the direction of policy. And it should resume setting migration program targets rather than using a ceiling, which is a surreptitious way of enabling home affairs minister Peter Dutton to cut the migration program without having to find associated budget savings.

Our approach to immigration has descended into tactical responses to perceived political problems, the latest crisis or administrative bungles — and there have certainly been a lot of those lately. Or, worse still, immigration has been used to whip up fears about African gangs, an invasion by “boat people” and the spectre of open borders. The government has become obsessed with keeping a relatively small number of people on Manus and Nauru, and a family of four on Christmas Island, and restricting other boat arrivals to temporary protection visas, all for purely political advantage.

Given that the government’s turn-back policy remains in place, there is no evidence these actions are contributing in any way to “stopping the boats.” The financial and human costs of indefinite detention, and of indefinitely keeping people on temporary protection visas here in Australia, have been massive — and even the political benefits are questionable.

The debate about the medivac legislation should not even be taking place. The people in offshore detention should have been resettled years ago, just as in a previous era prime minister John Howard and immigration minister Philip Ruddock managed to resettle people without boat arrivals resuming.

But the biggest immigration policy challenge we face is wage theft and the exploitation of migrant workers. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear about wage theft more generally. And we all know immigrants are worst affected by wage theft and worker exploitation.

The government’s recent initiatives will only make this worse. The new regional visas and the Designated Area Migration Agreements, which give the employer almost total control over a migrant’s future, will increase the level of exploitation. The state/territory-sponsored provisional visa will require its holder to live in regional Australia and work in a skilled occupation that earns a minimum of $53,900 per annum. While that pay level may be realistic in Sydney and Melbourne, it is very hard to get in regional Australia.

Many of these provisional visa holders risk being exploited by employers because of their vulnerable situation, or remaining in immigration limbo until their five-year visa expires. They will then have to go home or become overstayers after possibly five to ten years of working and paying taxes in Australia.

The government also downplays the labour scams that bring tens of thousands of people to Australia on visitor visas with the intention of applying for asylum.

In combination, these policies will see the development of a permanent and growing underclass of exploited migrant workers. While such an underclass has been a feature in the United States, Europe, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Australian governments of the past have tried very hard to avoid its development here.

No more, though. The current government seems quite happy to allow these scams to flourish despite its strong border-protection rhetoric.

From an immigration policy perspective, this is the one to watch. Will government take substantive action against wage theft in general, and the exploitation of migrant workers in particular? Or will Australia get a permanent underclass of its own?

Then there’s the problem of dodgy private vocational and employment training colleges. Given that governments have introduced increasingly extensive legislative and administrative arrangements to deal with this problem since the 1980s, you would think it was behind us. Not so, it appears. The Australian Skills Quality Agency registered hundreds of private VET colleges in the period 2014–17 and then, from 2018, had to cancel the registrations of hundreds of them. And yet we have seen a resurgence of media revelations in recent weeks.

This latest bout started in around 2013, when the immigration department decided it would progressively devolve responsibility for checking key student visa requirements to individual educational institutions. The result was a tremendous increase in overseas student numbers. Many had entered on the basis of undertaking a higher education course and then transferred to private VET colleges. Now we have tens of thousands of overseas students and temporary graduates in Australia with questionable qualifications from private providers that have had their registration cancelled.

The federal government, state/territory governments, skills-assessing bodies and employers will find it very hard to work out which overseas student has a genuine VET qualification and which has a qualification of little merit. The impact on the reputation of Australia’s international education industry, our third-largest export industry, will be severe, as will the impact on the students themselves and on honest VET providers.

Although Australia has long had a relatively tight policy on family reunions, parliament has consistently voted against giving governments the power to limit the number of spouse and dependent child visas. Yet the current government has decided to ignore the will of parliament and limit the number of these visas anyway.

The backlog of partner visa applications is now well over 80,000, with a two-year average processing time following an application fee of almost $8000.

Essentially the government is saying that if you marry someone from overseas, the two of you should settle in some other country. Amazingly, Australia’s migrant communities are not calling out the government. But it is time for the auditor-general’s office to investigate this abuse of power. And at the same time, it might also look into the set-aside rate for partner visas — the percentage of appeals that are successful — which has climbed to 59 per cent. Not only is the department taking forever to process partner visas at an exorbitant cost, but it can’t even get the decision-making right.

A go-slow approach also applies in citizenship processing. The government has never pointed to any research that suggests delaying access to citizenship is good public policy — that’s because there is no such research. The fact that Pauline Hanson wants the government to delay access to citizenship even more says everything you need to know about this policy.

The auditor-general has made it abundantly clear that citizenship applications have actually become easier to process as more are being lodged decision-ready. A large and growing portion of Australia’s migrants have been in Australia as temporary residents, and that means authorities hold more information about them than ever before.

And if the government says it can do character and security checks on applicants for the new Global Talent Initiative within weeks, there is absolutely no good reason for citizenship applications to take a year to process.

The auditor-general found that the delays in processing citizenship applications are largely due to applications sitting for long periods without the appointment of a processing officer. The government needs to remember that helping new migrants to become citizens as quickly as possible has been a core part of Australia’s success as a multicultural nation. Allowing new migrants to declare their loyalty to Australia is central to social cohesion. Menzies understood that. Holt understood it. Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating understood it.

It is important, of course, to help new migrants learn English and secure employment — but you don’t do that by depriving them of access to citizenship. You do that by funding English-language courses and delivering them in the right way and in the right circumstances.

The government also needs to look at better ways of helping new migrants secure employment than the currently failing Job Network system. The system has been a costly disaster — but its biggest failing is with new migrants. In particular, Job Network providers will never find it profitable to help humanitarian entrants to secure employment.

Finally, I want to come to an issue that may sound a bit arcane but will affect migrant communities in a very significant way. This is the privatisation of Australia’s global visa-processing platform.

The platform used to process visa applications is central to the management of immigration. Put simply, we can’t manage immigration without it. The plan for the next version to be developed and owned — yes, owned — by a private company means the government will effectively be beholden to an external, private organisation.

How will that company make money? In the first instance, all application fees will rise by $35. But it won’t stop there. Further increases will be as inevitable as increases in health insurance premiums. But the most serious issues will arise if the private company is allowed to introduce a premium service stream — one where the applicant pays a much larger fee for faster processing and — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — better outcomes. In these circumstances, the private company won’t be able to make extra money if it can’t convince applicants of a likely better outcome from the premium stream.

The private company will also have access to some of the most sensitive data about the private lives of Australia’s immigrants, and their Australian sponsors, an absolute treasure trove that can be used for marketing purposes.

It’s amazing that any government that cares about strong borders, immigration integrity and maintaining confidence in immigration would be taking the risk of privatising the global visa-processing platform. •

This article is based on Abul Rizvi’s speech, “Current Challenges in Immigration Policy,” to the NSW Multicultural Communities Council earlier this week.

The post Australia’s multicultural advantage appeared first on Inside Story.

Following his easy victory five months ago, these might seem surprising questions. After a high-profile battle with Labor’s Ali French, and with the opposition and GetUp! throwing all their kitchen sinks at him, Dutton secured a 3 per cent swing to retain the seat with a healthy 4.6 per cent margin.

The Sydney Morning Herald and Age’s Peter Hartcher certainly believes it was a triumph for the incumbent, devoting a chunk of a recent article to agreeing that GetUp! was Dutton’s secret weapon in May.

Now, I’m quite a GetUp! sceptic. A report in March that a “series of powerful political campaigns” featuring GetUp! and unions would be targeting far-right Fraser Anning in the upcoming election sent a shiver down my spine. Exposure like that was exactly what the little-known senator craved. (In the end, despite their assistance, he got only 1.3 per cent of the vote and didn’t come close to getting a seat.)

In fact, I’m generally doubtful of claims made on behalf of on-the-ground campaigns, particularly by the parties. Somehow it always turns out that the winner ran a sublime campaign and the loser couldn’t organise a proverbial in a brewery.

But, for whatever reason, Dickson actually did underperform for the Coalition at this year’s election. The seat swung to the Coalition by less than the statewide figure of 4.3 per cent, and by less than all but one of the electorates it shares borders with. Blair swung to the Coalition by 6.9 per cent, Lilley by 5.0, Longman by 4.1 and Petrie by 6.8. The fifth, Brisbane, moved to Labor by 1.1 per cent. And that was the second relatively poor result in a row for Dutton, after a big fat 5.1 per cent shift to Labor in 2016 (compared with a Queensland swing of 2.9 per cent the same way).

And, remember, GetUp! was involved in the 2016 Dickson campaign as well.

The upshot is that Dutton’s two-party-preferred vote is now 54.6 per cent, against his party’s whopping state share of 58.4 per cent. On paper he’s safe as long as the Queensland vote remains sky-high, but a uniform swing in the state of 4.3 per cent, which would still leave the Coalition on a healthy statewide vote of 54.1, would see the minister out on his ear.

Those relative seat and state votes are illustrated by the tweeted graph below, which compares the Coalition two-party-preferred votes in Dickson and Queensland since the electorate was created in 1993. The former Queensland copper won it from Labor’s Cheryl Kernot in 2001, after which the lines converged; that improvement in the solid line relative to the dotted one is what we’d expect as a new member becomes known in the electorate and generates a personal vote. But the lines diverged again after 2013.

Another way to get a handle on how an MP is travelling in his or her electorate is to subtract a party’s Senate vote from the House vote in that electorate to give an approximate measure of an MP’s relative personal vote. A very popular local MP — someone a significant number vote for despite not supporting the party — would register a big gap. This table shows that calculation for all sitting Queensland LNP members in 2019. Dutton sits third from the bottom.

This measure has the drawback of depending partly on which minor parties and independents are running. But it adds to the evidence suggesting Dutton did poorly in May.

There are several possible explanations for these two recent below-par performances. One is that Dutton has simply become unpopular in Dickson; perhaps his energetic narrowcasting to the Coalition base is a turn-off for the broader constituency. Another is that (leaving aside redistributions, which are accounted for in the graph) the demographics of the electorate have changed and it is no longer as reliably Coalition-leaning as it was. That would explain the graph movement, but not the personal votes table. Either hypothesis, if valid, would not bode well for his future chances of success.

The cheerier scenario for him is that, despite his and Hartcher’s chortling, there were special circumstances in 2016 and 2019, namely that Labor (and, yes, maybe GetUp!) ran good campaigns and/or the Coalition ran bad ones. In 2016 the candidate was former high-profile state minister Linda Lavarch; she would have brought a personal vote. Lavarch ran for preselection this time but missed out to Ali France, who made a big media splash and was assisted by oafish comments from the sitting member.

This matters, because if these explanations were one-offs they won’t necessarily apply at future outings. By 2022 Dutton might have become more skilful at differentiating rabid Sky News consumers from semi-engaged voters. But Labor would be wise to run France again in 2022, if she’ll do it. If not her, then Lavarch.

But wait, help is also on the way for Peter from an unexpected quarter. In June I wrote about Labor’s bold but disastrous strategy of taking the fight up to the government on “border protection,” with the swashbuckling shadow home affairs minister Kristina Keneally determined to drag the issue back onto the front pages. Under Bill Shorten and his lethargic immigration shadow minister it was pretty much a non-issue, and whenever Dutton and the government attempted to whip up emotion it looked gratuitous, obvious — and nasty.

Only this week Keneally has tweeted that “airplane people” are “taking jobs away from Australians.” You see what she did there — two can play this game, Peter!

Ultimately this will assist the government. After all, when push comes to shove, who are you going to trust to keep those awful foreigners out?

And with his opposite number adopting his inflammatory language, it humanises Dutton. Perhaps he’s not so horrible after all. So add Keneally’s appointment to the positive side of the ledger for his re-election chances. •

The post Is Peter Dutton in trouble in Dickson? appeared first on Inside Story.

Although the AfD attracted only one in eight German electors, it won 27 per cent of votes in the East German state of Saxony, narrowly beating the Christian Democrats’ 26.9 per cent. This remarkable result brought Saxony’s next state election, still two years away, into sharp focus.

Some commentators portrayed the state election — which was eventually scheduled for 1 September this year — as potentially the most significant state-level vote since reunification; others called it a Schicksalswahl, an election that would determine Germany’s fate. A Bundestag in which a far-right newcomer had become the largest opposition party was one thing; a state parliament in which the AfD was the dominant party would be quite another. Would the AfD once more outperform the established parties? Might it even be able to form government? Or would Saxony become ungovernable?

The rise of the AfD, which has been around for just six years but is represented in the national Bundestag and all sixteen state parliaments, is widely interpreted as the most obvious sign of a Rechtsruck, a lurch to the right, in German society. As I’ll explain, I don’t subscribe to that view. What’s beyond doubt, however, is that the AfD has undergone its own Rechtsruck. From a party of Eurosceptics with a neoliberal agenda, it has morphed into a far-right party whose leaders promote an aggressive nationalism, deny that humans are responsible for climate change, and bitterly oppose Germany’s accommodating of significant numbers of refugees and asylum seekers.

The radicalisation of the AfD’s program didn’t scare off voters; on the contrary, it attracted a higher percentage of the vote. But the party’s support has been unevenly distributed. In the 2017 federal election, for example, it scored well below 10 per cent in the four northwest German states of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Bremen and Hamburg. In Saxony, where it performed best, the results were also mixed: in Leipzig 2, one of two electorates in Saxony’s largest city, it came only third, behind the left-wing Die Linke, which topped the vote, and the Christian Democrats. At the other end of the spectrum, in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in Saxony’s southeast, the AfD’s candidate scored 37.4 per cent, the party’s best individual result nationally.

Most of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge’s 245,000 inhabitants live in small towns, the largest of which are Pirna, the shire’s administrative centre, and Freital. Both have populations of just below 40,000 and are within easy reach of Dresden. But the shire also includes small villages, some of which can’t easily be reached by public transport. It extends over 1654 square kilometres, approximately the combined total size of the city-states of Hamburg and Berlin.

Like other parts of the former German Democratic Republic, the southeast of Saxony was hit hard by the massive changes to the economy after 1989. The industrial bases of towns like Freital, Pirna, Sebnitz and Heidenau mostly disappeared, leaving industries that employ only a fraction of the workforce. Unemployment skyrocketed and the population declined, with young people — and young women, in particular — leaving for West Germany. In 2002 and 2013, Pirna and other communities along the Elbe and its tributaries were also hit hard by floods.

In economic terms, though, the shire has recovered well. Saxony’s unemployment rate is 5.4 per cent — lower, for example, than in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, or in the city-state of Hamburg. With 4.2 per cent, the shire of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge has the lowest unemployment rate in all of Saxony.

For many communities here, the growth of tourism has been a key ingredient of economic recovery. Both Saxon Switzerland — the mountains along the Elbe between Pirna and the Czech border — and the Ore Mountains are a hiker’s paradise, and the latter are also a popular skiing destination. The shire has also benefited from the fact that nearby Dresden — less than a half-hour’s train ride away from some population centres — has been booming.

Most of the tourists are Germans, with another significant proportion from the neighbouring Czech Republic. But international tourism is playing its part. The tourism industry has also been responsible for labour migration; hotels and restaurants regularly fill vacancies by recruiting staff from across the Czech–German border.

To try to understand the local mood and get a sense of how the 1 September election would unfold in this part of the state, I visited Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge frequently over the months leading up to Sunday’s vote, speaking to local members of parliament, mayors and other local politicians and representatives of civil-society organisations. By mid August, while the forthcoming state elections were featuring prominently in the national media, the campaign still didn’t seem to be in full swing in the shire. Was this perhaps evidence of a political culture that was different from the one I had grown up with in West Germany?

Sunday 18 August 2019

With only a fortnight of campaigning still to go, the local newspaper, the Sächsische Zeitung, is dominated by matters other than the election. No large election rallies are scheduled in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, and only one public forum involving the main candidates in each of the four state electorates that cover the shire. This series of forums has been organised by the Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, the state body responsible for civic education. On 28 June, admittedly very early in the campaign, only sixty people had turned up for the forum in state electorate #49, which covers the town of Dippoldiswalde and the Eastern Ore Mountains.

Outside Pirna and Freital, comparatively few election posters are on display. Almost all of the ones that show local candidates or party leaders depict the faces of men, simply because most candidates in Saxony, and most of the parties’ state leaders, are men. Of the twenty-four candidates representing the six parties predicted to get over the 5 per cent threshold in the shire’s four state electorates — Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Greens, Die Linke, Free Democrats and AfD — only nine are women. Only the Greens and Die Linke are led by a team of one man and one woman; the leaders of the other four parties are men.

In Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in particular, politics is men’s business. The Pirna town council, for example, has twenty-seven members, just three of whom are women. Only one of the nineteen towns in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge has a female mayor. Surely the peculiar politics in the shire have something to do with the fact that women play only a marginal role.

The politician whose image is most conspicuous in public spaces is forty-four-year-old Michael Kretschmer, the state premier. From 2002 until 2017, he was a member of the Bundestag; from 2009 until 2017 he also served as deputy leader of the Christian Democrats in federal parliament. The support he enjoyed in 2013 in the electorate of Görlitz, in Saxony’s east — 49.6 per cent of the primary vote, 30 per cent more than the runner-up from Die Linke — seemed rock-solid. But in 2017 he narrowly lost his seat to an AfD candidate. Less than a month later, Saxony’s premier, Stanislaw Tillich, resigned to make way for him. Since then, he has tried hard to convince people in Saxony that he is willing to listen, and that a vote for the AfD is not an effective means of protest.

On the question of how to deal with the AfD, Saxony’s Christian Democrats are divided. A minority of state MPs wouldn’t be opposed to forming a minority government that is tolerated by the far-right party. Kretschmer has ruled out such an option. But the matter is complicated. The vote compass developed by the Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung allows voters not just to see how closely their own views align with those of each political party but also to compare the positions held by the parties. According to the compass, the Christian Democrats and the AfD have a lot in common (about as much as, for example, the Social Democrats have in common with the Greens). The common ground between the Christian Democrats and their current state and national coalition partner, the Social Democrats, is far smaller.

Kretschmer and his supporters are also ruling out a coalition with Die Linke. They are willing to contemplate a deal with the Greens (which may be the only option left to them), but it is hard to see how they could agree on the phasing out of coalmining, for example, or the detention of “deportable” asylum seekers. The vote compass also detects very few synergies between Christian Democrats and Greens (as few as between the Social Democrats and the AfD), a problem both Kretschmer and the leaders of the Greens have acknowledged.

Among the parties that have put up posters across the shire is the neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD. Back in 2004, the NPD won 9.2 per cent of the statewide vote — by far the party’s best result in any state election since 1990. It was represented in Saxony’s parliament until 2013, when it missed the 5 per cent threshold by only 0.1 per cent. The NPD has had a strong presence in the shire, but at the local elections in May it performed well only where the AfD did not run candidates.

The AfD and NPD are not the only parties whose slogans are designed to blame foreigners, including refugees, for society’s ills. The Free Democrats are just more subtle. As one of their posters reads, dog whistle–style: “Drogen, Clans, Extremismus — Hier nicht!” (Drugs, clans, extremism — not here!)

Monday 19 August 2019

The election forum for state electorate #48 is held in a small performance space in Freital. About 150 people have come to listen to six local candidates, among them the sitting member and prominent Christian Democrat, Roland Wöller, interior minister in the state government.

Some of the candidates seem poorly prepared. The Social Democrats’ Daniela Forberg, for example, seems sometimes to be hastily consulting her party’s election program when she responds to questions. Others resort to oversimplifications and misrepresentations in the expectation that they won’t be held to account. Discussing the controversial issue of whether police officers should be identifiable, Wöller conveys the impression that the Greens and Die Linke would like the police to sport name badges, when all they have suggested is that police officers should be identifiable by means of a number that can be cited if a complaint is lodged.

Germany’s asylum policies elicit the strongest response from the audience. Should asylum seekers whose protection claims are unsuccessful be immediately deported, the moderator wants to know. Neither Wöller nor Forberg, whose parties have been responsible for asylum seeker policy at the national level, point out that it would be against longstanding government policy to deport people to war zones. Only Die Linke’s candidate does justice to the complexity of the issue.

The most uncomfortable question comes towards the end, from a man who introduces himself as a local businessman. He says that when crossing a nearby square he noticed a man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with these words: “Schwarz ist die Nacht, in der wir euch kriegen / Weiß sind die Männer, die für Deutschland siegen / Rot ist das Blut auf dem Asphalt” (Black is the night when we’ll get you / White are the men who are victorious for Germany / Red is the blood on the road). These are the lyrics of a song, “Schwarz ist die Nacht,” recorded by Frontalkraft, an East German neo-Nazi rock band. The questioner didn’t say anything to the man with the t-shirt because he was not confident that other people nearby would support him if the situation got ugly. What would you do, he asks the six panellists. And “should I perhaps not encourage my non-German employees to learn German, lest they then be able to read such texts?”

The answers are evasive and unsatisfactory. None of the panellists wants to say that the presence of neo-Nazis is a major problem, and none wants to admit that neo-Nazi symbols, statements and attitudes are tolerated, if not condoned, by more than a few isolated (and, as one candidate ventured, “sick”) individuals.

Freital has had an image problem at least since 2015, when it became the scene of militant protests against a former hotel housing asylum seekers at the height of the “refugee crisis.” The town has also been associated with the Gruppe Freital, a far-right terrorist group formed in that year. Key members of the group were arrested in 2016, and two years later eight of them were convicted and given long prison sentences.

At the height of the protests against asylum seekers, Freital was also the scene of counter-protests — often carried out by people from Leipzig and Dresden, though, if not from places further afield. Many local citizens claimed that they were caught in the middle. Freital’s image as a hotbed of neo-Nazis has meant that journalists from West Germany regularly visit the town; too often the reports they file reinforce its image but do little to understand its problems. But the image, of course, is not without foundation.

Unlike in Pirna, whose mayor has gone out of his way to promote an image of a town that welcomes strangers and encourages asylum seeker support groups and anti-fascist initiatives, Freital’s local administration claims that the town has been victimised and its people misrepresented. But in Pirna, as in Freital, the AfD and politicians sympathising with its positions have enjoyed strong support at the ballot box. The Pirna mayor’s decision to take a stance might have had an impact on what can be said in public, but so far it doesn’t seem to have swayed people’s opinions.

Tuesday 20 August 2019

Public broadcaster MDR has published the results of a survey of which issues will be most decisive in influencing the voting decisions of electors in Saxony. It was no surprise that 24 per cent nominated “climate change and the protection of the environment.” Thanks to Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future, reinforced by last year’s exceptionally hot and dry European summer, climate change has been the dominant issue in public debate in Germany this year. One result is the meteoric rise of the Greens, who outpolled the Social Democrats in the recent European elections, with some observers speculating that Robert Habeck, the charismatic co-leader of the Greens, rather than the leader of the Christian Democrats, might succeed Merkel as chancellor after the next national elections.

It is less obvious why another 24 per cent of surveyed voters nominated “refugees, immigration, asylum policy.” For a start, most issues to do with migration are federal rather than state matters. Also, this year has seen a further decline in the number of asylum seekers reaching Germany. In the first seven months of 2019, according to the latest statistics, Germany received 86,300 new applications for asylum — a far cry from 2015 and 2016, when the combined total was more than 1.1 million new applications. The shire currently accommodates 574 people with a pending asylum application, as well as 569 whose application has been rejected, and 807 refugees who have been granted protection. Only one in thirty-eight residents of the shire doesn’t hold a German passport, making Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge one of the shires with the lowest percentage of foreigners in the country.

At lunchtime, I come across a comparatively rare sight: a party campaigning in Pirna’s pedestrian mall. On a stall drumming up support for the Greens are one of the party’s local politicians and five members from Mönchengladbach, a city in the Rhineland, more than 600 kilometres west of here. They have come to Pirna and Freital for five days to support fellow Greens. They report that the experience of engaging with prospective voters is very different from back home. “We don’t normally get shouted at when campaigning,” I’m told. “People tend to be more civil back home.” No wonder then that none of the parties is doorknocking voters here.

Greens membership is low here compared with West Germany, and anybody offering to put leaflets in letterboxes or let themselves be abused in the local mall would be welcome. On the other hand, West German advice, help and attention comes with the burden of a twenty-nine-year post-reunification relationship in which West Germans knew what was best and took some pleasure in pointing out how ignorant, reactionary and behind the times their brothers and sisters in “Dunkeldeutschland,” or Dark Germany, were.

Tonight, about 200 people have come to listen to the six local candidates in state electorate #50, which includes Pirna, at a Landeszentrale-hosted forum. But the best-known local candidate, at least among people outside Pirna, has not been invited because her party isn’t likely to win more than 5 per cent of the vote. Frauke Petry won electorate #158, Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in 2017 for the AfD; at the time, she was her party’s co-leader. Immediately after the election, she quit the AfD to set up the Blue Party. The AfD had moved too far to the right, she said. The Blue Party has had no electoral success so far, and Petry has not been able to persuade more than a handful of federal and state parliamentarians to leave the AfD and join her.

Petry’s nemesis was Jan Zwerg, the chairman of her local branch. He is now the general secretary of the AfD in Saxony, and the AfD’s candidate in state electorate #50. Zwerg is associated with the AfD’s right-wing faction, the so-called Flügel (wing), whose most prominent figure is Björn Höcke. Outside Germany, Höcke is perhaps best known for calling the Berlin Holocaust memorial a “Denkmal der Schande” (monument of shame). The Flügel has been investigated by Germany’s federal intelligence agency for advocating positions that violate Germany’s constitution. Saxony is a Flügel stronghold.

The standard of the debate is not high, although an improvement on yesterday’s in Freital. The questions from the audience appear designed to confirm divisions rather than elicit new information. Given the male-only panel, it seems fitting that all questions come from men. As in Freital, men also make up the majority of the audience, most of whom are over sixty.

Both here and in Freital, the audience learns little about the candidates themselves. Tonight, though, there are three exceptions. Zwerg exudes self-confidence bordering on arrogance, and on one occasion can’t be bothered answering a question put to him by the moderator. The Greens candidate is plainly out of his depth; when asked about the AfD’s proposal to build new nuclear power stations in Saxony, he obviously doesn’t know what to say.

The third exception is the sitting member, thirty-five-year-old Oliver Wehner of the Christian Democrats. When asked with whom he would consider forming a coalition after the elections, he rules out the AfD. Imagining a situation in which he and Zwerg have to negotiate the government’s policy, he explains: “And then he [Zwerg] says, for him it is important that Germans and foreigners are treated differently when they go to see a doctor. I would have an issue with that. And then, if Herr Zwerg becomes interior minister in Saxony, I might read in the paper that people have been shot at the border, then I would have my second problem.”

At this point, Wehner can’t continue because many in the audience protest vociferously. Perhaps trying to defuse the situation, the moderator says he can “understand” that people are annoyed by what Wehner has said.

Wehner’s stance is unusual. It might have something to do with the fact that he was once responsible for the former hardware store used to accommodate asylum seekers in Heidenau in August 2015, which became the focal point of violent protests. But it also makes sense for him to rule out collaborating with Zwerg from a purely strategic point of view: voters who agree with the AfD won’t vote for the Christian Democrats just because they claim they can understand people’s frustration and anger, even if it is directed against asylum seekers. Prospective Greens voters, on the other hand, might be persuaded by conservative politicians who distance themselves from the far right.

In Pirna and in Freital, politicians of all persuasions have bemoaned the fact that society has been divided. All have expressed the hope that relationships can be mended. It is true that the question of how to respond to asylum seekers has divided families, workplaces and society at large. The yearning for unity is palpable, but it’s hard to see how expressing empathy for irrational fears will solve the issue.

Wednesday 21 August 2019

I return to Freital for what is probably the best-attended campaign event in the shire. The audience is younger, bigger and more diverse, and they have come to see Robert Habeck, co-leader of the Greens. Unlike any other German politician, he has genuine rock star appeal.

Rather than giving speeches, Habeck and Wolfram Günther, co-leader of Saxony’s Greens, engage with the audience by responding to questions. Most are critical of the Greens’ policies, but Habeck and Günther take their time in answering them and don’t shy away from issues that seem overly complex. The audience — including those who would probably never vote for the Greens — show their appreciation by being patient and respectful. Here it seems possible to have a conversation that does more than buttress pre-existing views.

Habeck stresses his belief that it is essential to debate issues with one another. Here again, West Germans are at an advantage. Broadly speaking, Saxony’s postwar political culture (including civic education) was first shaped by the communists, whose hegemony remained undisputed until 1989, and then by the Christian Democrats, whose hegemony was not challenged until 2017. There was little room for debate. West Germans like Habeck, who were already adults when the Berlin Wall fell, also lived through two periods in the 1970s and 1980s in which society was bitterly divided: first over the use of nuclear energy and then over the stationing of American cruise missiles. For East Germans, on the other hand, the controversy over Germany’s response to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers is the first that prompted everyone to take sides. But the schism — within families, communities and workplaces — hasn’t been overcome by a discussion engaging both sides of the divide.

Habeck is asked about possible coalitions after the elections. He recounts his involvement in three sets of negotiations: twice in his home state of Schleswig-Holstein in the north of Germany, and once at the federal level after the 2017 election. The latter talks (between Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens) ended when the leader of the Free Democrats walked out. According to Habeck, these negotiations failed because there was no genuine willingness to be innovative and find common ground. Habeck was also involved in negotiating the current coalition between the same three parties in Schleswig-Holstein, and has only good things to say about his fellow negotiators. He would know, however, that deeply conservative Christian Democrats like Michael Kretschmer have very little in common with Christian Democrats like Schleswig-Holstein’s decidedly liberal premier Daniel Günther.

In a final statement, Habeck comments on the AfD without mentioning it by name. He refers to Brexit as a salutary lesson about the viability of populist positions. He then makes the only reference I have heard during the campaign to the fact that the election in Saxony takes place exactly eighty years after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the beginning of the second world war, imploring the audience “not to vote for a party that has an unbroken relationship to fascism.”

Sunday 1 September 2019

It’s ten days later now, and the results are in. The most extreme scenarios — that the AfD would come first; that Michael Kretschmer’s position would be weakened to the extent that he would be replaced by a Christian Democrat willing to make a deal with the AfD; that Saxony would become ungovernable; or that the Social Democrats would lose so badly that they would leave the coalition in Berlin — have not come to pass. In Saxony, the Social Democrats fared less well than ever before in a state election in the Federal Republic; but the result in today’s other state election, in the East German state of Brandenburg, was much better for the Social Democrats, which remains the strongest party there and is likely to lead the next coalition government (presumably with the Greens and Die Linke).

In Saxony, the Christian Democrats won 32.1 per cent of the vote and the AfD came second with 27.5 per cent. They were followed by Die Linke with 10.4 per cent, the Greens with 8.6 per cent and the Social Democrats with 7.7 per cent. The Free Democrats failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold and will not be represented in the next state parliament. The most likely outcome will be a coalition between Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens.

In Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, the Christian Democrats retained two of the four electorates. In both cases, they were probably helped by the strong showing of two independents. Oliver Wehner, the Christian Democrat who tried to tell a Pirna audience why it would be unconscionable for him to collaborate with the AfD, lost his seat. Frauke Petry scored a paltry 805 votes.

The results are noteworthy for several reasons. First, the number of people who voted was significantly higher than at the 2014 election, with the AfD as the main beneficiary. Second, both in Brandenburg and in Saxony, some people seemed to have voted strategically. Given the real prospect that the AfD would become the strongest party, a sizeable number of followers of the other parties probably voted for the party that had the best chance of beating the AfD: in Saxony, this strategic voting strengthened the Christian Democrats; in Brandenburg the Social Democrats were the beneficiaries.

Third, immigration was the key issue for 34 per cent of AfD voters but for only 2 per cent of those who voted for Social Democrats or Christian Democrats. Fourth, the main losers weren’t the Social Democrats but Die Linke, which was once the undisputed second-largest political force in the state, and is now just one of three minor parties. And, finally, about a third of electors voted out of a sense of disappointment and two-thirds from conviction. For AfD voters, though, disappointment was the more important factor.

No doubt talk about a Rechtsruck, a lurching to the right, will intensify over the next few days. It is true that the AfD trebled its vote in Saxony. It is also true that more than a quarter of electors cast their vote for a party that advocates extremist positions and whose most significant faction, the Flügel, is under observation by the federal intelligence agency.

But let’s put things into perspective. The rise of the AfD has also prompted the rise of a powerful counter-movement. It has politicised people who consider themselves liberals or even conservatives, particularly in West Germany. It has prompted numerous innovative civil-society initiatives to strengthen democracy. It has contributed to the electoral successes of the Greens. I would even argue that the much-acclaimed Willkommenskultur, the culture of welcoming refugees in 2015, was itself also already a reaction against the xenophobia advocated by the AfD and the Pegida movement.

It’s also important to remember that Germany has moved to the left politically over the past thirty years, becoming a more tolerant society whose majority has embraced the fact that this is a country of immigration. In the early 1990s, during a previous “refugee crisis,” when hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the former Yugoslavia sought refuge in Germany, Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Free Democrats and respectable media outlets such as Der Spiegel fanned fears of migrants and advocated positions that today would not be acceptable outside the AfD.

The Rechtsruck thesis also suggests that those who now vote for the AfD changed their views in recent years. Numerous surveys show this not to have been the case. Sentiments, attitudes and opinions have barely changed; what has changed dramatically is the range of views that can acceptably be voiced publicly (although “publicly” often means within the echo chambers provided by Facebook and other social media). That, of course, is a cause for concern. But the experience of the past four years suggests that German democracy, by and large — in the West more so than in the East — is remarkably resilient. It’s important to reflect on the events of 1 September 1939 and on its causes — but not because the past is about to return. •

The post The significance of 1 September appeared first on Inside Story.

The man whose followers call him Il Capitano (the captain) has been able to position himself as the strongman of Italian politics and the de facto leader of the European far right. He has effectively sidelined both prime minister Guiseppe Conte and Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the Five Star Movement, the nominally senior partner in Italy’s governing coalition.

Salvini is well-known for his racism and for trying to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Italy. His policies and practices have been controversial not least because they appear to contravene Italian and European law, though so far neither Italian nor European courts have issued rulings against him. But it was only a vote in the Italian senate that stopped him from facing criminal charges for directing the coast guard vessel Diciotti not to dock at an Italian port with rescued migrants on board.

Neither Di Maio nor Conte, nor Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Partito Democratico, the largest opposition party, have had Salvini’s measure. Even Pope Francis wields less influence among Italy’s Catholics than Salvini, who claims to be a devout Christian and often fondles a rosary in public but has dismissed many of the Pope’s views, particularly concerning the human rights of migrants. According to an analysis published recently by the Guardian, it was former Trump strategist Steve Bannon who in 2016 advised Salvini to go after the Pope.

But Salvini might have met his match: thirty-one-year-old Carola Rackete, a German woman who, in Italy, is referred to as La Capitana.

Unlike Salvini, who failed to complete his university studies in history, worked briefly as a journalist, and has otherwise been a full-time politician for most of his adult life, Rackete is a ship’s captain by training. She has a degree in nautical science from Jade University, and worked for several years as an officer on German and British research ships in the Arctic and Antarctic, on cruise ships and on a Greenpeace vessel.

Rackete joined the German activist group Sea-Watch in 2016. The organisation had been established the previous year to keep the European Union accountable by patrolling the Mediterranean and, if necessary, rescuing migrants at sea. Rackete briefly captained the organisation’s Sea-Watch 2 in 2016, and in June 2019 was put in charge of the Sea-Watch 3, a fifty-metre Netherlands-registered vessel built as a supply ship for Brazilian oil platforms.

Over the past two years, Sea-Watch has clashed with Libyan, Maltese and Italian authorities. On two occasions in 2017, dozens of people died because the Libyan coast guard thwarted attempts by the crews of Sea-Watch 2 and Sea-Watch 3 to rescue them. Between June and October 2018, Maltese authorities prevented the Sea-Watch 3 from leaving the port of Valetta because, they claimed, the ship had not been properly registered. In January and May 2019, the Italian authorities tried to prevent the Sea-Watch 3 from disembarking people it had rescued; in both these instances, though, they were eventually landed in Italy to be taken to other EU countries for the processing of their asylum claims.

On 12 June this year, the Sea-Watch 3, under Rackete’s command, rescued fifty-three people in international waters off the Libyan coast. Two days later, the Italian government issued a security decree making it an offence for non-government organisations to disembark rescued migrants in Italy, and provided for hefty fines for noncompliance. Rackete rejected Libya’s offer to let the Sea-Watch 3 disembark its passengers at a Libyan port, because migrants are exposed to torture, rape, forced labour and extortion in that country. She also rejected suggestions by European politicians that she head for a Tunisian port, because, like Italy, Tunisia had closed its ports to migrants rescued in the Mediterranean and has no refugee determination process.

Sea-Watch 3 nevertheless aimed for the Italian island of Lampedusa to disembark its passengers. But while he allowed the medical evacuation of some of them, Salvini prohibited the ship from entering Italian waters. He accused Rackete and her crew of being the “accomplices of traffickers and smugglers” and running a “pirate ship.” For two weeks, the vessel remained in international waters in deference to the Italian government’s order, but on 26 June Rackete declared a “state of necessity” — a provision in international law describing circumstances that preclude the unlawfulness of an otherwise internationally unlawful act — and took the ship to within a couple of miles of Lampedusa.

Three days later, with people on board becoming increasingly restless and the situation threatening to spiral out of control, Rackete decided that she had no choice but to dock at Lampedusa. As the Sea-Watch 3 approached the quay, a much smaller Italian customs vessel tried to block it. A minor collision ensued, with no injuries, and Rackete completed her manoeuvre. Video footage of the incident suggests that Rackete did not deliberately endanger those on board the Italian ship and that it was more likely that the latter’s recklessness led to the accident.

When the German captain left her ship, she was arrested by Italian police and later charged with resistance, violence against a warship, and people smuggling, and put under house arrest. On 2 July, a judge in Agrigento, Sicily, ordered her release after throwing out two of the charges. Another judicial hearing is scheduled for 17 July.

Since her release, Rackete has been holed up at a secret location in Italy. That’s not because she wants to avoid the publicity surrounding her case but because she has reason to fear for her safety. She has been subjected to online abuse and has received death threats. In Germany, former police officer and serial video blogger Tim Kellner published a YouTube video attacking Rackete and her family, which to date has been viewed more than 320,000 times. Most of the more than 3700 comments posted so far applaud Kellner and are informed by hatred. Some contain threats. For example, “Grillgucker” wrote: “A bullet between the eyes would solve the problem.” Others referred to her as Assel (woodlouse) or Zecke (tick), or to her and her supporters as Volksverräter, the term used in Nazi Germany for traitors.

In Italy too Rackete has been threatened with rape and murder, for which Salvini can take part of the blame. He has used social media to attack her, calling her a criminal and claiming that she committed an act of war. Referring to the crew of the Italian customs vessel, Salvini said she had tried to kill five members of the Italian military.

If Salvini’s tone has become more strident, I suspect that’s because twice in the past week he has suffered a defeat. First Rackete was able to defy his order and dock in Lampedusa. Then two of the charges against her were dismissed and she was released from house arrest. Salvini has also attacked Alessandra Vella, the Agrigento judge, claiming her decision was politically motivated, shameful, scandalous and dangerous, and suggesting that Vella resign from her position and seek a career in politics. After her decision, Vella too has been subjected to abuse and death threats. Salvini has also threatened to push for “judicial reform.”

In other, forthcoming court cases Salvini’s own policies and conduct will be closely examined. Last week, Rackete’s Italian lawyer Alessandro Gamberini announced she would launch a libel lawsuit against the minister. At least outwardly, Salvini remained unconcerned about that prospect, writing on Twitter, “She breaks the law and attacks Italian military ships, and then sues me. The mafia doesn’t frighten me, so why should I be afraid of a rich and spoiled German communist.” But now Gamberini has upped the ante: in the fourteen-page statement prepared for the court, he not only claimed that Salvini broke the law on twenty-two occasions, he also asked the court to order the closure of Salvini’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

But a case before the European Court of Human Rights might provide a bigger headache for Salvini. It concerns one of the incidents in 2017 in which the Libyan coast guard prevented a Sea-Watch ship from rescuing migrants. Seventeen survivors are now suing the Italian government for abetting the Libyan coast guard in their return to Libya, where they were exposed to extreme forms of violence.

If the court finds against Italy, the case might have similar ramifications as the Hirsi case, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2012 that Italy had breached its international legal obligations when returning migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean to Libya under a deal negotiated between the Gaddafi and Berlusconi governments. Italy had been taken to court by a group of Somalis and Eritreans rescued by the Italian navy only to be handed over to the Libyans.

In its ruling, the court found that “the Italian border control operation of ‘push-back’ on the high seas, coupled with the absence of an individual, fair and effective procedure to screen asylum-seekers, constitutes a serious breach of the prohibition of collective expulsion of aliens and consequently of the principle of non-refoulement.” This judgement was behind the decision by the European Union and Italy to use the Libyan coast guard for pull-backs. But it is conceivable that the court will find the pull-backs contravene international law no less than the Italian push-backs of 2009.

There are two more reasons why Salvini has been under the pump. First, the absurdity of Italy’s Libyan solution has again been put into sharp relief. This week, the Italian government announced that it wants to work even more closely with the Libyan coast guard. But Salvini’s argument that the Libyans could rescue and look after migrants trying to reach Europe sounds increasingly hollow. In the early hours of 3 July, a government-run migrant detention centre in the Libyan capital Tripoli was bombed, presumably by the forces of general Khalifa Haftar, who has been waging war against the government in Tripoli. At least forty-four of the detainees died when two missiles struck the centre, and more than 130 were severely injured. According to reports, the centre’s guards shot at detainees who were trying to escape after the first missile hit.

Salvini is also vulnerable as an indirect result of the fact that Italian and European support for militias aligned with the Libyan government has made it more difficult for people smugglers to sell places on small boats leaving from Libya. Why pay money to smugglers when the boat is likely to be intercepted by the Libyan coast guard and its passengers returned to Libya? Smugglers have therefore offered an alternative option: larger ships take people from the North African coast to an area within easy reach of Italy, and there they are transferred to dinghies or other smaller vessels that take them directly to Lampedusa or Sicily.

As a result, seventeen small boats, carrying more than 300 migrants, landed in Lampedusa alone during the two-week stand-off between Sea-Watch 3 and the Italian government. Salvini doesn’t want to talk about them because they make a mockery of his claim that he has been able to seal Italy’s maritime borders to migrants arriving by boat.

Carola Rackete and Sea-Watch have suffered much abuse in recent days, as has the Pope, who used a mass on Monday to speak out on behalf of migrants. But Rackete has also been hailed as a heroine, both in Italy and in her native Germany, and Sea-Watch has received much support, including from unexpected quarters.

Within twenty-four hours of Rackete’s arrest, a campaign launched by two German television presenters had netted more than €1 million in donations, mostly from people in Germany, but a sizeable amount also from Italians. In fact, Sea-Watch has received so much extra funding that the organisation has decided it can afford to share some of it with other organisations running private search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

Predictably, politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany have praised Salvini’s stance and condemned the Sea-Watch captain. Equally predictably, Rackete has been applauded by politicians from the Left and the Greens. Perhaps less predictably, among the first to defend her were the two most popular German politicians, federal president Frank-Walter Steinmeier and foreign minister Heiko Maas. They were followed by the European Union’s budget and human resources minister, and prominent Christian Democrat, Günther Oettinger, and by development minister Gerd Müller of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, the Christian Democrats’ sister party.

Remarkably, Müller has called not only for a resumption of European search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, but also for an evacuation of refugees from Libya in a joint EU–UN operation. On 8 July he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that “the people in the [Libyan] camps of misery have the choice of dying in the camps through violence or hunger, to die of thirst in the desert on the way back or to drown in the Mediterranean.” While Angela Merkel hasn’t yet commented on Rackete — or Müller’s proposal, for that matter — a government spokesperson has strongly condemned the criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions. Even Merkel’s bête noire, hardline interior minister Horst Seehofer, wrote to Salvini to ask for the reopening of Italy’s maritime borders.

Sea-Watch’s and Rackete’s responses to the rhetorical support they have received from the federal government have been lukewarm. They have pointed out that Germany has also provided funding and logistical support to the Libyan government, and that more than words are needed.

The German print and electronic media have largely rallied behind Rackete, and have often been critical of the Italian government and the European Union. Numerous newspapers have published long feature articles about the deaths in the Mediterranean and the tussle between Salvini and Sea-Watch. Last Saturday, Germany’s premier news magazine Spiegel ran a cover story about Rackete. Most of the articles in the German media have avoided portraying the conflict in national terms, even though Salvini has tried to make much of the fact that Rackete is German.

Across Germany on the weekend, tens of thousands took to the streets in around ninety separate protests against Rackete’s arrest, the criminalisation of rescue missions in the Mediterranean and the German government’s complicity in migrant deaths. In Hamburg, about 4000 people marched under the slogan “Free Carola,” although the organisers had expected a crowd of only 1500. In Berlin, 6000 turned out for the same cause.

While European governments took their time to agree on the distribution of the people rescued by the Sea-Watch 3, there has been no shortage of offers to accommodate them. In Italy, archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Torino said that his archdiocese was willing to take care of the migrants from the Sea-Watch 3. In Germany, several towns and cities have offered to accommodate migrants rescued in the Mediterranean — over and above those asylum seekers assigned to them by the federal and state governments. Thirteen local councils have formed the Bündnis Städte Sicherer Hafen (Alliance of Safe Haven Cities). Among them is Rottenburg, a town of about 40,000 in Baden-Württemberg in Germany’s affluent and conservative southwest.

Christian Democrat Stephan Neher has been Rottenburg’s mayor for more than ten years. “We want to act globally and take advantage of globalisation,” he said soon after the Sea-Watch 3 announced that it had rescued fifty-three people. “Therefore, we also have to bear its negative consequences. Anyway, accommodating fifty-three refugees in Rottenburg would be a piece of cake.” He even offered to send a bus to Italy to pick them up. Neher’s stance seems to have attracted a lot of local support: this week, he told the German weekly Zeit that when he walks through his town, he is often stopped, because Rottenburg residents want to know when the refugees will arrive and how many of them the town is “allowed” to host.

What explains the magnitude of support for Sea-Watch in Germany? Carola Rackete is part of the answer. For a start, she is comparatively young. Since the emergence of Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, young people and their concerns are being taken seriously. To give one other example: the Social Democrats are currently looking for a new party leader, and the most obvious candidate is thirty-year-old Young Socialists chairperson Kevin Kühnert.

For those who have long campaigned for an about-turn in Europe’s approach to forced migration, Rackete is an activist with the necessary street cred. She is principled and determined and, sporting dreadlocks and appearing barefooted in a television interview, she looks every bit like somebody who might otherwise live in a treehouse in the occupied Hambach Forest protesting against open-cut coalmining or demonstrating against the deportation of asylum seekers or disrupting a gathering of Neo-Nazis. No doubt her appearance also helps explain the vitriol reserved for her by far-right trolls.

Moderates who are concerned about German, Italian and European asylum seeker policies but who would never join potentially violent protests can also embrace her because she does not come across as a radical. Contrary to what Salvini has claimed, she is no communist.

Rackete does not let herself be provoked by Salvini. In interviews, she is calm and her words are measured. Talking to German television station ZDF, she declined to comment on Salvini’s attacks on her. “I find it inappropriate to insult others,” she explained. “I like to work with facts. And anyway, as a captain you shouldn’t get excited. At least not in front of others.” In interviews, she presents as a captain: as somebody who is responsible for her crew and for the migrants rescued by them, and who takes that responsibility seriously.

Rackete is also highly articulate and clearly knows what she is talking about: about her ship, the international law of the sea, Europeans’ moral responsibilities, and conditions faced by migrants in Libya. At the same time she claims that she prefers her actions to do the talking for her.

Her arguments are convincing. She is not calling for Europeans’ pity but insists that Sea-Watch is standing up for the rights of forced migrants. A recent article in the online edition of the Bremen daily Weser-Kurier was illustrated by an image of Rackete with a quote from her: “There is a right to be rescued. It’s all about the principle of human rights.”

Commentators in Italy and Germany have likened Rackete to Sophocles’s Antigone: the woman who defies the law of Thebes by deciding to bury her brother Polynices. When brought before Creon, the King of Thebes, Antigone justifies her action by claiming that divine law trumps state law. Rackete too has claimed that she has obeyed one set of laws (namely international law) only to fall foul of another set of laws. But here the parallels end. For Sophocles, Antigone (rather than Polynices) is the key tragic figure of his play. Rackete would probably point out that the real issue is the drowning of migrants rather than her violation of Italian law, and that the conflict between the two sets of laws could be solved if domestic law were adapted to conform with international legal standards.

Finally, Rackete stood up to powerful, unscrupulous and objectionable Matteo Salvini, and did not let him bully her into submission. That explains why her case has attracted more support than that of Pia Klemp, a young woman who captained Sea-Watch 3 (and, before that, the Iuventa, a ship belonging to non-government organisation Jugend Rettet). Like Rackete, Klemp has been charged with people smuggling offences in Italy and, according to her Italian lawyer, she could face “up to twenty years in prison and horrendous fines.” Unlike Rackete, Klemp has been portrayed as Salvini’s victim rather than as an opponent who got the better of him.

The drama around the Sea-Watch 3 has also resonated with Germans for reasons that are unrelated to the attributes of particular individuals. (I discussed some of them in Inside Story a year ago, so I’ll focus on other aspects here.) Over the past decade in particular, the idea has slowly taken hold that non-German residents of Germany enjoy the same rights as citizens. To use the words of Angela Merkel, who ought to be credited with insisting on this idea even when it was unfashionable, “The values and rights of our Basic Law are valid for everyone in this country.”

Once it is accepted that the first line of the constitution’s Article 1, “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (human dignity is inviolable) applies to everybody in Germany, then it makes little sense to deny this right to people outside Germany’s borders. An increasing number of Germans believe that the obligation to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean has nothing to do with their particular motivation for migrating or degree of suffering; rather, it’s to do with their being human. This conviction prompts people to attend rallies, donate money for organisations like Sea-Watch, and demand that their local communities commit to accommodating additional refugees.

Also in the mix is a commitment to Europe. When the Spiegel put an image of Carola Rackete on its cover last week, it did so with the headline “Captain Europe.” This should be read as more than a reference to the Captain America superhero movies. Those yearning for another, better Europe in which solidarity is not a hollow term focus on what happens at its borders, because it is there that the idea of Europe has been most severely compromised. As the following episode shows, this is not always made as explicit as it was on the Spiegel cover.

One of the German cities whose council has passed a resolution condemning Italian and European policies is Hildesheim in Lower Saxony. Because it’s the town where I was born, I was interested to find out about the debate surrounding this resolution.

Hildesheim’s councillors voted in August 2018 on a resolution jointly submitted by Social Democrats, Greens and the Left titled “Facilitate and support rescue at sea — fight against the dying in the Mediterranean — accommodate people in distress.” Although the Christian Democrats opposed the resolution on the grounds that these issues were none of the city council’s concern, one Christian Democrat rose to speak in its favour. According to the minutes, “It is true that the council cannot solve all of the world’s problems, such as the persecution of the Rohingya or the poverty of the elderly, and has to concern itself with the problems it has been entrusted with. However, the obstruction of rescue ships is a scandal which needs to be identified also by the Council of Hildesheim.”

This explanation is at once baffling and compelling: baffling because the persecution of Rohingya, on the face of it, is as much an event outside the council’s remit as the deaths at Europe’s borders; compelling because the councillor’s obvious reasoning is that the scandal is European-made, and that implies an obligation to speak up as a European.

The German support for rescue missions in the Mediterranean may also be informed by the experience of the Willkommenskultur (or culture of hospitality) of 2015–16, when many Germans rose to the challenge of accommodating a record number of asylum seekers rather than revert to the fear, if not panic, evoked by a comparable situation in the early 1990s. But I suspect that the safe haven initiatives by German cities and the recognition that human rights don’t end at national borders will prove more significant than the much-discussed Willkommenskultur.

While Carola Rackete is still in hiding, Sea-Watch is sending a new crew to Lampedusa. It is hoping that Italian authorities will release its ship soon, and that it can then return to the waters off the North African coast.

Meanwhile, three other non-government organisations are active in the Mediterranean. Earlier this month, the German organisation Sea-Eye’s ship Alan Kurdi handed over sixty-five rescued migrants to the Maltese authorities; the day after leaving Malta, it then rescued another forty-four migrants and is now looking for a harbour where it can disembark them. Alex, a yacht belonging to the Italian organisation Mediterranea Saving Humans, also defied Salvini’s orders and last week disembarked forty-one migrants in Lampedusa. And the Barcelona-based organisation Proactiva Open Arms is still active but has been threatened by Spanish authorities with fines of up to €900,000 if it continues its rescue mission.

The EU is once again talking about distributing migrants rescued in the Mediterranean among some member states without having to haggle over the quotas each time. But so far these talks, like many similar talks on previous occasions, haven’t had any tangible outcomes.

Gerd Müller’s idea of evacuating migrants from Libya has met with silence both in Brussels and in Berlin. But it may be less far-fetched than it seems. Germany, for one, has been resettling some migrants deported from Libya to Niger: according to unofficial figures, 276 Eritreans and Somalis were resettled in mid October and early December 2018, for example. Thus there is a precedent for another kind of “Libyan solution.”

In the meantime, conditions in Libya could hardly get worse, and the European border in the Mediterranean remains the deadliest border in the world, accounting this year for about half of the world’s border-related deaths. In the first ten days of July, the International Organization for Migration counted eighty-three border deaths in the Mediterranean, while there were seventy-eight in all of June.

When Carola Rackete described the seventeen days it took to find a solution for the people her crew had rescued, she drew attention to the fact that there was a lot of talking — in Rome, in Berlin and in Brussels — but no action. By acting, she exposed the emptiness of the talking. Even Matteo Salvini, who likes to portray himself as a can-do politician but, like Donald Trump, spends most of his time campaigning, was shown to be spouting mere rhetoric. •

The post The remarkable deeds of Captain Rackete appeared first on Inside Story.

A good starting point is the extraordinary blow-out — to almost 230,000 — in the number of people living in Australia on bridging visas. These visas are issued when the department can’t keep up with demand in substantive visa categories, and reflect long processing times and a ballooning of certain categories of arrivals.

The record number of Chinese, Malaysian, Indian and now Vietnamese visitors seeking asylum is in particular need of scrutiny. People smugglers are flying vulnerable people in on visitor visas and then applying for asylum on their behalf in order to secure work rights. They are then made available to Australian employers, effectively as indentured labour. This is happening every day through major airports, yet home affairs minister Peter Dutton and his department continue to gaze out to sea.

Without an efficient visa system with high levels of integrity, any debate about improving the broader design of immigration policy is pointless.

Here, the questions Labor needs to pose are obvious. When will the multitude of visa-processing backlogs — not to mention the lengthening queue at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal — be reined in? When will government crack down on the people running the asylum scams out of Malaysia and China? How will all this be done given the projected decline in funding for visa processing? And how can the proposed privatisation of visa processing possibly help deal with this disaster?

The opposition also needs to expose the misleading population plan Scott Morrison issued in March this year. The plan talked of cutting permanent migration and sending more provisional migrants to the bush to “bust congestion.” Yet, just a few weeks later, the 2019 budget papers assumed a massive increase in population, fed by higher net migration and fertility.

The bulk of this population increase would need be driven by long-term temporary migration. The number of temporary entrants living in Australia would need to grow well beyond the current level of around two million to between three-and-a-half and four million in ten years. Inevitably, they will mainly settle in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

The government hasn’t explained how these extra migrants will be recruited and processed, or how faster population growth in the major cities will bust congestion. Will its infrastructure plans be big enough to accommodate the forecast surge in population? Have state premiers signed on to this massive population increase in major cities?

It’s more likely that a weakening labour market will bring a large fall in immigration, leaving the prime minister’s jobs creation and budget surplus plan in tatters. The jobs and small business department is already forecasting a 350,000 jobs shortfall in the growth of net employment, indicating that more people will need to take up second and third jobs for the prime minister’s promise to be met.

The list of problems goes on:

• It’s now clear that pure politics lay behind the government’s failure to take up New Zealand’s resettlement offer for refugees on Manus and Nauru. The opposition should intensify pressure on the government to resolve the predicament of the remaining refugees. The dubious and highly expensive single-source contracts for running the two offshore detention centres must also stop.

• On the mainland, most people in the legacy caseload of boat arrivals are living on temporary visas, their future uncertain. In the past both Coalition and Labor governments have regularised the status of people on such visas. Yet Peter Dutton appears to have no plans at all for their future.

• The department has been unilaterally limiting the number of spouse visas, despite the fact that parliament has twice voted (in 1989 and again in 1996–97) to deny it that power. Home affairs must be made to obey the law and process spouse visa applications according to the Migration Act.

• Home affairs must also adopt the Auditor-General’s recommendations on its tardy processing of citizenship applications. Did it have an unwritten policy of delaying granting citizenship to young people to prevent them voting in the recent election?

• The department needs to deal with the mounting risk to the reputation of our international education industry that comes from outsourcing student visa processing, especially in the higher-risk cases recently highlighted by the ABC’s Four Corners.

• The government needs to be pressured to act on the recommendations of its own taskforce on migrant worker exploitation. The problem will only worsen if the labour market weakens or if government proceeds with its risky new provisional visas.

Ham-fisted changes to temporary and permanent employer-sponsored migration have done little to reduce the risk of exploitation or protect lower-skilled Australian workers. Yet they have made it harder for Australian businesses to attract high-skilled workers from overseas. The costs and delays associated with processing these visas have deeply concerned employers and reputable migration agents.

Home affairs faces extraordinary challenges over the next three years, most of them a result of the decisions made by Peter Dutton and his departmental secretary, Mike Pezzullo. Survey data reveal that staff morale is declining rapidly, and the visa processing figures alone show that the department is increasingly dysfunctional. Labor’s challenge will be to show that the minister and his secretary are not the people to lead the department out of this mess. •

The post Department of dysfunction appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s the fact that Keneally is a rising star and a great forensic media performer whose success is largely measured in quantums of limelight.

The plan, apparently, is for her to apply a relentless blowtorch to minister Peter Dutton, particularly on the big increase in asylum seekers arriving by plane on his watch. As the opposition leader gushed on Monday, “Peter Dutton will know he’s alive each and every day with Kristina Keneally as the shadow minister.”

After taking government in 2013 the Coalition had a rude awakening. They stopped the boats in no uncertain fashion, after Kevin Rudd’s disastrous policy fiddles had produced an escalation in arrivals, but they got barely any credit from voters. It was almost as if this wasn’t the defining Australian political issue of the twenty-first century after all, and that people were more interested in bread-and-butter economic matters.

Now, it’s true that when immigration, refugees and unauthorised maritime arrivals are pushed to the front of voters’ minds, it’s good politically for the Coalition and bad for Labor, regardless of who is in government. That can never be changed. But while Australians much prefer the Coalition on the issue — going right back to John Howard in 2001 — they are also aware that these same politicians can be tempted to be too clever, to manipulate it, to play them for mugs: like Howard and the “children overboard” in 2001. Voters can be cynical.

The problem for Dutton as minister has been that whenever he’s tried to conjure up a gratuitous piece of scare-mongering, like the claim that refugees will take your hospital bed, it’s been too obvious. People know they’re being had.

Now Labor will do his work for him, ensuring that immigration, and asylum seekers in particular, is regularly on the front pages.

But wait, there’s more: the crafty shadow minister is doing a bit of “triangulating,” internalising and tweeting this slice of Dutton-speak about keeping Australians “safe” from the unwashed hordes:

@AlboMP’s decision to introduce a Shadow Home Affairs portfolio sends a clear message that Labor will ensure Australians are kept safe. Labor fully supports offshore processing, boat turnbacks where safe to do so, and regional resettlement.

Wait, isn’t it supposed to be all about preventing drownings these days?

Labor trying to out-tough the government on “border protection” is like the Coalition promising to be the party of protecting penalty rates. If people are really going to cast their vote on that issue, there’s only one choice.

More recently, Keneally seems to be saying she’ll be making the case for a bigger immigration program. That too, from opposition, is a political disaster waiting to happen.

Bill Shorten’s biggest mistake was loading himself up with big, comprehensive policies, seeming to take to heart from facile urgings to “rediscover the reformist zeal of the Hawke–Keating years.” (Facile because Hawke and Keating were in government, not in opposition, and also because very few of those great reforms celebrated today were taken to elections first.)

But Shorten handled immigration and related matters reasonably well. Shadow minister Shane Neumann was a missing-in-action man, and when he did speak you could see why. But that was preferable to swashbuckling in this sensitive area.

Albanese, judging from his positioning in past Labor leadership stoushes, always seemed one of the smart ones when it came to understanding the dynamics of electoral politics. (He backed Kim Beazley against Mark Latham in 2003, Beazley against Kevin Rudd in 2006, and Rudd against Julia Gillard — both times.) Not for him the Latham–Gillard fantasies of out-Howarding Howard.

But this appalling decision will come back to bite him and his team. Keneally is totally the wrong person for the job — unless making asylum seekers an election issue is the aim. •

The post The Keneally blunder appeared first on Inside Story.

No Friend but the Mountains was smuggled out of Manus Island in the form of tweets, text messages, emails and phone videos, and translated into English by Sydney University’s Omid Tofighian. Boochani writes in Farsi, a language with poetic resonance, and his translator finds his prose “rich with cultural, historical and political frames of reference and allusions.” The English text is interspersed with lyrical fragments of poetry that heighten the narrative and distil elements into dreamlike visions and compelling cries from the heart.

Australian poet and political activist Aileen Palmer’s translation of Ho Chi Minh’s prison diary — 115 poems written during those two wartime years — was commissioned by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Hanoi and published in 1962. It was republished in the United States in the early 1970s and reprinted many times over the next two decades. Uncle Ho, as he is known to Vietnamese people, was committed to an independent Vietnam free of its French colonisers. He wrote the poems when he was a prisoner of Chiang Kai-shek’s police after having been picked up on suspicion of espionage, though he was actually on his way from Indochina to confer with Chiang about forming a common front against the Japanese. The verses trace his journey as he is marched from jail to jail in South China, often in leg irons, over more than a year.

Behrouz Boochani overcame what seem like insurmountable difficulties to get his writing out of the prison on Manus, using a smuggled mobile phone while always under threat of surveillance. Ho Chi Minh could be more open: he wrote his prison diary in a notebook using Chinese calligraphy so as not to raise suspicion among his Chinese guards by writing in Vietnamese or French, languages they did not understand.

Palmer’s publishers provided her with a literal, word-for-word translation of the Chinese into English and asked her to provide a poetic rendering of the quatrains and Tang poems. An accomplished linguist, she had published translations of poems from French, German, Spanish and Russian, but was uncomfortable about being presented as the work’s “translator” since, she said, she was not familiar with the “music” of the original language.

Ho’s concise nuggets of verse depict the daily struggles of prison life. But poetry for him, as for Boochani, also offered a form of transcendence. In “Moonlight,” he finds comfort in glimpses of the natural world:

For prisoners, there is no alcohol nor flowers,
But the night is so lovely, how can we celebrate it?
I go to the air-hole and stare up at the moon,
And through the air-hole the moon smiles at the poet.

Boochani writes of the Manusian full moon as “practising colour-blending… like a watercolour painting”:

An assembly of sorcerous colours /
Yellow, orange and red /
Talismans… /
Offerings… /
Gifts from each night.

Thematically, Boochani’s and Ho’s poems are in many ways similar despite their different settings and styles. They cover not only the daily privations of prison life but also the despair at not knowing when it will end, the wasting of time that cannot be recovered and, above all, the injustice of their imprisonment. Ho asks:

What crime have I committed, I keep on asking?
The crime of being devoted to my people.

Boochani’s title refers to the vast mountains of his native Kurdistan, and he thrusts back into his past to counter the horror of the nights on Manus: “Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains… Do the Kurds have any friends other than the mountains?”

Earlier, in a delirious sleep on the deck of the pitching boat from Indonesia, he escaped to those mountains of his homeland:

Grand mountain peaks covered with snow, full of ice, abounding in cold /
I am there /
I am an eagle /
I am flying over the mountainous terrain /
Over mountains covering mountains /
There is no ocean in sight /

In “Autumn Night,” Ho also travels to his homeland in his imagination:

In front of the gate, the guard stands with his rifle.
Above, untidy clouds are carrying away the moon.
The bed-bugs are swarming around like army tanks on manoeuvres,
While the mosquitoes form squadrons, attacking like fighter-planes.
My heart travels a thousand li toward my native land.
My dream intertwines with sadness like a skein of a thousand threads.
Innocent, I have now endured a whole year in prison.
Using my tears for ink, I turn my thoughts into verses.

Aileen Palmer’s mother, Nettie Palmer, had published two small volumes of published verse before turning to journalism during the first world war. She made the shift partly to help support her family but also out of a feeling that the world was too awful a place for writing poetry. Aileen, on the other hand, always saw herself as a “poet of conscience,” and her belief in the power of language and poetry to bring about change helped her reconcile her work as a political activist with her desire to write. As she wrote in an unpublished poem:

Words are small worlds, balloons to travel in outer-space, or just between
your ignorance and mine; to unravel this latent strength we hold, unseen…

She published poems about García Lorca and other Spanish civil war poets, and about nuclear testing on Maralinga; she translated the political poems of Louis Aragon and Nicolas Guillen. She also wrote of the educated political prisoners in the French prisons in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) who taught illiterate peasants to read and write. Her powerful poem “Lines Painted on the Wall of a Death-Cell,” published in her 1964 collection World Without Strangers?, finishes with:

Unlettered are my people, bound
Like buffaloes to an empire’s yoke,
But, though men lay me deep in ground,
Perhaps you’ll know at last I spoke.

In another country in another time, Behrouz Boochani discovered lines of Persian poetry, written by previous detainees, on the walls of the tiny room he was to share with three other refugees on Manus Island.

Ho Chi Minh was around fifty when he was imprisoned in 1942. Behrouz Boochani turned thirty on Christmas Island in July 2013, the month the Rudd government announced it would reinforce Australia’s borders by turning back asylum seekers arriving by boat. Those who were already detained were transferred to detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, and a thousand of them are still detained indefinitely. Boochani has received literary awards for No Friend but the Mountains, has published articles in newspapers and journals, and has co-directed a film and collaborated on a play during nearly six years of incarceration.

Boochani’s narrative ends on a note of despair with the killing of his friend Reza Barati, “the Gentle Giant,” in 2014. But in a statement at the end of the essay that completes the book, he writes, “We need to continue resisting, we need respect to become stronger and fiercer. This will take time, but I’ll continue challenging the system and I will win in the end.”

Ho Chi Minh became president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and died in 1969, a revered figure in the country he liberated from colonial rule. In “Word-Play II,” one of the poems in Prison Diaries, he writes:

People who come out of prison can build up the country.
Misfortune is a test of people’s fidelity.
Those who protest at injustice are people of true merit.
When the prison-doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out. •

The post Languages of resistance appeared first on Inside Story.

Jacinta Carroll, head of the Counter Terrorism Policy Centre at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, acknowledged that the numbers are correct, but said they “don’t tell us much that is helpful.” The figure of twenty-two “represents less than 0.01 per cent of the about 180,000 Australians of Lebanese background, according to the ABS,” she wrote. “That this group is over-represented among terrorism offenders — and supporters — is concerning. But it’s not surprising given the global trend of Islamist extremism, which has identity politics at its core.”

Following Peter Dutton’s comments, many second- and third-generation Lebanese were left wondering how many generations must pass before a person “belongs” in Australia rather being treated as a representative of a migrant group. Writer Ruby Hamad pointed to “a political climate where populist parties are gaining favour on the back of a vehemently anti-Muslim platform.” If citizenship is to mean anything, it should mean that “third generation Australians are not referred to as migrant grandchildren.” She argued that the level of invective was “worse than it has ever been” and that “in all of my family’s close to four decades [in Australia], I have never felt so hated or feared or fearful.”

The Lebanese Muslim Association’s Mostafa Rachwani took a similar line. “No one ever wants to talk about the deeply rooted racism Fraser’s migrants had to face,” he wrote, or “the aggressively uninviting society these communities arrived to… [or] the residual effects of having to battle these issues for so long.” He argued that violence and hostility — including having your religion “demonised in the media” — stripped communities of their humanity and self-worth, and that this “dehumanisation” was reflected in some people’s desire to engage in gang violence or fight abroad.

Dutton’s framing of the special admission of several thousand civil war–affected Lebanese more than forty years ago left the impression that the wrong people had been selected. If he were still alive, Malcolm Fraser would undoubtedly disagree. “If there was a failure of government in those early months it was in resettlement programs and planning,” he observed in 2009 in Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, co-written with Margaret Simons. “The proper approach to problems of integration is to find out what the problems were and what can be done about them, rather than to conclude that ‘bad’ people have been allowed in, or that it was wrong to show compassion.”

To understand the thinking at the time, sociologist Mehal Krayem and I looked at the two cabinet submissions made at the height of the exodus from Lebanon, and at other official documents from the time, as well as Fraser’s memoir. These sources provide a nuanced view of the government’s response to a complex and evolving humanitarian situation.

In a cabinet submission dated 17 September 1976, immigration and ethnic affairs minister Michael MacKellar sought cabinet approval to relax requirements for Lebanese “who had suffered hardship and who had relatives in Australia.” MacKellar wanted extra staff and resources to process the growing number of applications from Lebanese who had fled to Cyprus as the humanitarian situation worsened in Lebanon. In a second submission, a little over two months later, he sought cabinet approval to discontinue after 31 December 1976 the relaxed requirements for nominations lodged by Australian residents for the entry of Lebanese relatives.

In response to an approach from the local Lebanese community after civil war broke out in 1975, the Fraser government had agreed to relax the migration criteria for affected Lebanese. With no established process for accepting refugees — no dedicated branch in the department, no refugee visa category and no special settlement assistance — Australia’s practice was to admit refugees as migrants on an ad hoc basis.

Fraser had a vision of building a diversified Australian refugee and special humanitarian policy that would treat refugees and people escaping war or natural disaster — including Lebanese, Vietnamese and East Timorese — fairly and compassionately. It was agreed that relatives of Lebanese already living in Australia would be allowed entry under relaxed rules on the condition that the local community would cover their travel and settlement costs. The government would accept no responsibility for post-arrival services for this group.

Airfares and other assistance may have been within the resources of better-established members of the Lebanese community, who tended to be Christian. But the requirement put recent arrivals with limited resources, who tended to be Muslim, in a difficult position. Faced with the alternative of leaving their relatives in a war zone, they went into debt to pay airfares. Houses became overcrowded as relatives moved in. Unemployment became rife as newly arrived relatives competed in a depressed labour market.

In late March 1976 the civil conflict in Lebanon forced the evacuation of the Australian embassy in Beirut. An Australian migration officer operated out of the Dutch embassy in Damascus until the end of June, when handling of Lebanese nominations was moved to Cyprus. With long delays in processing, the Cypriot authorities were faced with “the social, economic and political problems of destitute Lebanese,” according to the September cabinet submission. They wanted clear guidelines from Australia so that they could better control entry to Cyprus.

Extra Australian immigration officers were sent to manage the escalating workload. The submission blamed the delays on the time it took to obtain medical clearances and the absence of on-the-spot security and character clearances. But the Canadians, operating within the same constraints, were issuing visas at more than twice the rate; they took five days to complete the entire process, while the Australians took up to four weeks. Meanwhile, with no end to the war in sight, the estimated 8000 Lebanese on Cyprus had to find scarce and costly accommodation.

The Lebanese showed a “high propensity” to nominate relatives for migrant entry to Australia, and the department was alarmed at projections for arrival numbers in future years. With unemployment high in Australia, it was also concerned that the mostly unskilled or semiskilled arrivals would face employment difficulties. The submission cites concerns about “problems with young people in Sydney” and the “possibility that the conflicts, tensions and divisions within Lebanon [would] be transferred to Australia.” Given the potential for health problems, “medical checks need to be maintained at a high standard and speeded up.”

Cabinet decided to continue the special operation in Nicosia until 31 December 1976 and then review it. “Normal immigration criteria should apply in respect of Lebanese migration to Australia…,” it concluded, “with the additional criterion that nominated non-dependent parents do not have to meet economic viability criteria and nominated brother and sisters of Australian residents and their dependants be approved subject to compliance with the normal health and character requirements.” Under a new requirement, only permanent residents of a year or more’s standing were eligible to nominate migrants, unless they were a spouse or a dependent child.

Cabinet reiterated that it was not the government’s responsibility to arrange or fund transport for Lebanese migrants. Action would be taken, it said, to “promote greater responsibility within the Lebanese communities for the post-arrival settlement in Australia of Lebanese migrants.”

Nine weeks later, in the November 1976 cabinet submission, MacKellar pointed out that policy on Lebanese migration had needed to adapt to changing circumstances in the conflict in Lebanon, but that it was his intention to reintroduce normal migration criteria after 31 December. The conflict in Lebanon had eased and the “quality of applicants” and the high rate of nominations was causing concern. The chief migration officer in Cyprus had reported a high rate of illiteracy, poor personal hygiene, large families and a rise to 90 per cent in the proportion of applicants who were Muslim. “Misrepresentation and deliberate attempts to conceal vital information are prolonging interviews,” he added.

But employment was still of greater concern — jobless rates were high among new arrivals, particularly in areas like Campsie, in Sydney — as was the community’s ability to provide settlement assistance. The submission points to overcrowding in housing, sponsors engaging in “large-scale borrowing from friends, banks and lending institutions to finance the travel costs of relatives,” and wives “left without adequate support in Australia by husbands who have gone overseas to locate relatives.” Children who had suffered trauma were reported not to be attending school, and schools in some areas were facing overcrowding. Leaders of the Lebanese community in Australia indicated — in the words of the submission — “that they would not oppose application of more stringent requirements for Lebanese people seeking entry to Australia.”

The key lesson for the government and the immigration department — and the essence of Fraser’s real “mistake” — was that planning and post-arrival support should have been better. In the absence of a formal refugee policy at the time, ad hoc arrangements were put in place. With no separate visa category, refugees were indistinguishable from migrants, which means we still don’t know the exact number of arrivals. And because formal refugee criteria weren’t applied, people who might have qualified under the UN Refugee Convention were classified as migrants and their special needs ignored.

A November 1976 report by the Senate foreign affairs and defence committee, Australia and the Refugee Problem, criticised the immigration department for failing to recognise the special needs of refugees. An “approved and comprehensive set of policy guidelines and the establishment of appropriate machinery” should be applied to refugee situations, it said, and quoted sociologist Jean Martin:

No matter how harsh the conditions from which we rescue refugees we cannot claim moral credit simply by permitting them to enter this country. Just as the admission of refugees for reasons of humanity involves relaxing our normal intake criteria, so also does our continuing responsibility to these refugees entail modification of normal settlement practices.

The Lebanese program lasted just nine months and ended in December 1976. The following May, MacKellar announced plans for a comprehensive refugee policy and new procedures for designating and responding to refugee situations. An interdepartmental committee would now advise him, in consultation with voluntary agencies, on Australia’s capacity to accept refugees. Voluntary agencies would be encouraged to participate in refugee resettlement and the department’s refugee unit would be strengthened. People “in refugee-type situations who do not fall strictly within the UNHCR mandate or within Convention definitions” would also be covered.

That same month, Malcolm Fraser asked cabinet to approve a major review of post-arrival programs and services, to be headed by Melbourne solicitor Frank Galbally. In March of the following year, the government established the Determination of Refugee Status Committee to process applications from people in Australia, or arriving, who wished to seek refugee status as defined by the UN Convention. Then, in May 1978, Galbally made his report to government, which changed the face of Australia’s settlement services. Many of those who came to Australia in subsequent years as refugees or under the Special Humanitarian Program were settled in smaller towns and rural cities under the Community Refugee Settlement Scheme.

Malcolm Fraser believed that the problems faced by Lebanese refugees were “the government’s responsibility as well as that of the individuals concerned.” If Australia were to absorb more migrants harmoniously, it was essential that they had real equality of opportunity.

“If particular groups feel that they and their children are condemned, whether through legal or other arrangements, to occupy the worst jobs and housing, to suffer the poorest health and education, then the societies in which they live are embarking on a path that will cost them dearly,” he said in 1981. “The less constructively a society responds to its own diversity, the less capable it becomes of doing so. Its reluctance to respond, fuelled by the fear of encouraging division, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — the erosion of national cohesion is a result not of the fact of diversity but of its denial and suppression.”

What purpose does it serve, two generations later, to demonise the Lebanese community? The number of arrivals during that period was small and terrorism scholars have found little evidence directly linking Australians charged with terrorism to those who entered the country under the Lebanese humanitarian arrangements in 1976. The only link may be membership of a community that has suffered social disadvantage as a result of unsupported settlement.

Monash University terrorism specialist Andrew Zammit suggests that social disadvantage and marginalisation have played a role in the radicalisation of Australian-Lebanese jihadis: a pattern that hasn’t been seen in other countries with large Lebanese communities. People charged and convicted of such offences in Australia have been “of low socioeconomic position, lacking high educational status or prestigious jobs.” They are “disproportionately poorly educated” compared to other Australian Muslims, and most of the radicalisation occurred after 2001. The fact that most were born or grew up in Australia suggests that “local grievances are important and could be an example of ‘relative depravation.’”

Zammit quotes Justice Anthony Whealy’s judgement on a member of the Pendennis terrorist cell in 2008:

It appears that the events of September 11, 2001 changed things radically for the offender… He himself was abused and called “Osama bin Laden” and a “terrorist” by non-Muslim workers he encountered. At a more abstract level, the offender perceived the threat in terms of all Muslim people being under attack, where the “war on terror,” as it was described, was translated by some Muslims into meaning a “war” against all Muslims.

The Canadians took many more Lebanese during that period than Australia did, processing them under similar constraints. Those who went to Canada haven’t had to suffer the indignity of being labelled a mistake by their immigration minister. Was comedian John Oliver right when he claimed that Australians have “settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper,” with much “vitriol reserved for Australians of Lebanese origin”? •

The post Malcolm Fraser’s real mistake appeared first on Inside Story.

Whispers and nervous titters rippled through the audience at the ornate Royal Automobile Club in Sydney. Triggs had just survived public attacks from Tony Abbott and other Coalition ministers over her report on the plight of child asylum seekers in detention. It had been one of the most brutal government character assassinations of a senior statutory official Australia has seen. Was Laundy about to nettle her even more?

On the contrary. He praised Triggs for her work and encouraged her to keep doing the job that Abbott and attorney-general George Brandis had reportedly tried to make her leave. “My door is always open to you,” he told her. She nodded an acknowledgement as the audience applauded.

Of course, an attack on Triggs would have made Laundy an outsider in this crowd. His fellow speakers included race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane and former Fraser government minister Fred Chaney, who launched Soutphommasane’s book I’m Not Racist But… at the same event. Mark Dreyfus, the shadow attorney-general, also spoke, and so did Penny Wright, an Australian Greens senator.

Where Laundy really has emerged as an odd man out is among his fellow conservatives since he entered parliament at the 2013 election. He stood up for Triggs in the Coalition party room in February, arguing that the real point should be to release children from detention. He threatened to cross the floor against the Abbott government’s plan to change the Racial Discrimination Act to allow hate speech; the government dropped the plan in August.

And last Friday, while Abbott was trumpeting his government’s “stop the boats” policy as Europe’s refugee crisis unfolded, Laundy publicly pleaded for Australia to take more refugees from Syria. “There but for the grace of God go any of us,” he said. His stand flew in the face of a powerful portion of the Liberal Party’s conservative base that opposes bringing in more refugees, but his electoral office was swamped with emails from the public, about 90 per cent of which supported him.

Laundy is an odd Liberal out in other ways, too. He is a small businessman in a party that once identified as the champion of small business but whose front bench is now dominated by lawyers, ex-lobbyists, political advisers and party officials. He is a liberal in a party that has shifted sharply to the right under its last two prime ministers, Abbott and John Howard. And he refuses to identify with the factions that now determine power in the Liberal Party. “I see myself as my own voice,” he says.

I met Laundy in late August in Burwood, one of the inner-western suburbs that make up his electorate of Reid. Named after Australia’s fourth prime minister, George Reid, the seat was for many years a Labor stronghold; incumbents have included former NSW premier Jack Lang and former Whitlam government minister Tom Uren. But Labor’s comfortable margin was cut when a 2010 redistribution brought in much of the neighbouring electorate of Lowe. Three years later the national anti-Labor swing made Laundy – as he later told parliament – “the first Liberal to hold this seat since it was formed” in 1922.

Yet the broader electoral geography still leaves him something of an outsider. Reid is surrounded to the south and west by the traditional western Sydney Labor seats held by opposition frontbenchers Anthony Albanese, Tony Burke, Jason Clare and Julie Owens. Once a working-class Anglo-Australian region, it is now a multicultural heartland. In Burwood alone, almost 60 per cent of citizens were born overseas, many in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and eastern Europe. Laundy reckons his seat is the second most multicultural in federal parliament, after Burke’s seat of Watson next door.

Outwardly, at least, Laundy seems a classic figure of old Australia. At forty-four, he is tall and boyish-faced, and on the day we meet he is dressed smartly in business trousers and a blue pin-striped shirt with no tie. His electoral office in Burwood Road is sparely furnished, with no sign of the lavish use of entitlements that had felled Bronwyn Bishop a couple of weeks earlier.

Laundy’s family story seems classic rags-to-riches. His paternal grandfather, Arthur, left an orphanage at the age of fifteen “with just the clothes on his back” and bought a hotel lease twelve years later. The family business, in which Craig worked for twenty-three years before entering politics, now comprises more than fifty hotels in New South Wales. Laundy still seems to identify as much as a businessman as he does a politician. “I’m a third-generation western suburbs publican,” he tells me.

He joined the Liberal Party only eighteen months before successfully contesting the 2013 election. And he reckons he is one of the first of what he calls a “Labor family on both sides” to support the Liberals, adding yet another layer of complexity to his outsider’s profile.

What attracted him to politics, and especially to the Liberal Party? “I was very frustrated with the former Labor government,” he says. “I believe in small government, low taxation and a genuine safety net. I thought that becoming an MP may be a chance to make a difference. I’d grown up in the western side of the electorate, the Labor side, and I had tentacles there through my involvement with churches, charities and sporting clubs. I have a lot of mates from my small business background who would never go into politics. They think I’m mad. So does my father!”

Laundy’s responses to social issues during his short parliamentary life have been driven by his practical business mind and family life, not by the ideology that drives some sections of the Liberal Party. His stand against the proposed change to the Racial Discrimination Act angered many on the party’s right. But, he says, it also reflected opposition to the change among his multicultural constituents.

“They believe that free speech is a right in Australia, and that rights also involve responsibilities. My pragmatic argument says that too. Pragmatic thinkers on both sides of parliament are in the minority. Ideological thinkers on both sides are in the ascendancy.”

Laundy’s support for Triggs’s call to stop incarcerating child asylum seekers also won him few fans in his party. “If there are findings of hers that allow us to run things better, we should accept them in good faith and act upon them,” he says. This hardly chimes with Abbott’s dismissal of Triggs’s report as a “political stitch-up.” Laundy also wants a more inclusive approach from government to Australia’s Muslim community, despite the Abbott government’s pursuit of a national security policy that seems to cast them as potential enemies.

“There is a marginalised Muslim minority heading to jihad,” he says. “You have to question the cause of the problem first, and I think that’s been missed. The second or third generations of Australian-born eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds have battled with education and finding jobs. That’s where susceptibility is born. We have to stop them ending up at the plane gate to Syria and Iraq. The Australian public responds negatively, and the vicious circle makes them more marginalised. The role of leadership, in government and the communities, is to step in and break the circle. It’s a long-term exercise.”

On same-sex marriage, though, Laundy is not rocking any Liberal boats. He and his wife Suzie attend Catholic churches in the electorate with their three children, and he opposes same-sex marriage on grounds of that faith. At first, he supported a conscience vote in parliament. “The conscience vote that the Liberal Party stands for is important to me,” he tells me. “I would never be a member of a party that you can’t vote against if you want.”

He was later reported to have changed his mind, and to oppose a conscience vote, on this issue at least. But since the bitter Coalition party-room debate in August, which endorsed the government’s opposition to same-sex marriage, Laundy says he once again has an “open mind” on a conscience vote. He argues that the debate has become “aggressive” on both sides, and that those who chose to vote against gay marriage could be vilified. “On the gay marriage side, I’m criticised as a bigot and a homophobe, which I’m definitely not. But I see fault on both sides.”

A few days after our meeting, Laundy escorted foreign minister Julie Bishop to Burwood Girls High School, one of Australia’s most multicultural schools, where she addressed senior students, including some from neighbouring schools. Bishop spoke about women and careers, and fielded questions from the girls about Australia’s human rights record and military involvement in the Middle East. But her visit was quickly swamped by a row over same-sex partners and censorship that erupted a few days later.

The school had planned to show Gayby Baby, a documentary about children of same-sex parents made by Maya Newell, a former student at the school. It had already been shown at the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, and at Parliament House in Sydney. Two days before the scheduled school screening on 28 August, the Daily Telegraph splashed a front-page story headed “Gay Class Uproar,” with the banner “Parents outraged as Sydney school swaps lessons for PC movie session.”

It later emerged that parents had been informed of the screening and given the option of not allowing their daughters to attend. But the furore sparked by the Murdoch tabloid was enough for NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli to order a ban on screenings of Gayby Baby at all the state’s schools during class times. (It passed unremarked that Julie Bishop’s address at the Burwood school had also happened during class hours.)

Laundy publicly supported his state Liberal colleague’s ban on the film. After talks with local parents and community leaders, he claimed “many parents” were concerned the screening in school hours “may create difficulties for their children on the basis of their family’s religious or personal beliefs.”

Beyond this issue, though, Laundy finds his inherent liberalism frequently stalled by the realities of life in politics. If frustrations with the former Labor government drove him into politics in the first place, the process of achieving change as a parliamentarian troubles him just as much, if not more. Again, he comes back to a business analogy.

“In small business it’s about outcomes, not process. My criticism of politics is that the focus is on process ahead of outcomes. In business, before I renovated hotels I talked to staff and customers and worked out what they wanted, then made a decision. In politics, cabinet makes the decision, but then hands the policy to the marginal backbench seat-holders and tells them to go out and sell it. That’s counterintuitive. After two years in politics, the pace of change and the length of time to get decisions is frustrating for me.”

The trend on both sides of politics to recruit candidates from within the party machine makes things even more frustrating for those from a broader background like Laundy’s. “They know the system from a young age and are prepared to live within it. For people like me who come from outside, it’s a big change to make.”

With a federal election due in just a year, Laundy doesn’t conceal a sense of irritation over the Abbott government’s inertia on economic reform. “I get frustrated when discussions are about do we apply a GST on tampons. You should be talking about reforming the whole tax system, as well as federation, and preparing the country for the next forty years.”

The Abbott government’s entrenched opinion poll deficit has rattled many backbenchers, especially those who may have nowhere to turn for lives outside politics if the government falls in 2016 and they lose their seats. On this score, Laundy once again could be an odd man out. He won Reid in 2013 with a 3.5 per cent swing. But if the still-marginal seat eventually swings back to Labor, he will be happy to say he tried. “I’d rather lose my seat standing for something, and standing for reform, than govern for the sake of governing,” he says. And if that happened? “I can go back to my family business job any time.” •

The post The Liberal nonconformist from Sydney’s west appeared first on Inside Story.

With the further integration of previously separate functions into the new Department of Home Affairs in late 2017, it is not surprising that concern with “national security” has come to dominate how Australians think of their “border.” The way we deal with refugees and asylum seekers is now seen as predominantly an issue of “border protection,” though it is increasingly unclear exactly what threat they pose.

Reading the Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani’s extraordinary book, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, in the context of this expanded border highlights a series of ironies. Boochani’s book, published by Picador in 2018, was written on a succession of mobile phones during his detention, now in its sixth year, on Manus Island. In relation to the Australian border, this author is definitively “offshore.” After trying to access Australian waters by boat from Indonesia, and despite having been granted refugee status, his life has been tightly constrained by Australia’s “border security.” Yet “onshore” — within Australia — his writing and other creative endeavours are having profound repercussions. Among other awards, he has recently won the prestigious Victorian Prize for Literature, and the Prize for Non-Fiction, in the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

If the border is a “continuum” then new opportunities arise for the excluded to cross it, as well as for the excluders to “manage” it. Boochani has become an impressive — though virtual — presence at literary events, academic seminars and political gatherings around the world. He figures as a creative subject and collaborator in art, theatre and photography. He has made a widely distributed film in collaboration with a Dutch-Iranian director. He also continues to feature — not just as a “source” but also as a journalist in his own right — in accounts of the continuing saga of offshore detention published in Australia.

No Friend but the Mountains is a many-faceted work synthesising a range of genres. A sustained thread of memoir — creatively fictionalised, where appropriate, through archetypes representing fellow detainees — it also incorporates poetry and elements of Kurdish mythology. What has received less consideration than its literary achievements, so far, is the book’s contribution to philosophical reflection about Australia’s policies and practices at and around the border. Some of those issues are explored by Anne McNevin in her Inside Story essay “What We Owe to the Refugees on Manus,” published in November last year. My own reflections on the philosophical aspects of Boochani’s writing have been stimulated by some significant insights in that essay.

The concept of “Manus Prison,” as developed by Boochani, extends beyond a place of incarceration outside the physical border. It points to a network of practices of oppression and containment — and a supporting framework of ideas — whose effects can be located both offshore and onshore. Thinking through that analysis yields a disturbing challenge to how Australians have come to collectively imagine recent mass movements of people. McNevin’s essay sketched a reversal of perspective — from treating refugees as objects of our condescending pity to recognising ourselves as diminished by our own policies. That reversal was foreshadowed in an imaginative fable by Boochani’s translator, Omid Tofighian, narrated in a supplementary — but integral — set of reflections incorporated in No Friend but the Mountains. In this story about “two islands,” familiar “offshore” and “onshore” perspectives change places:

The two islands are polar opposites. One island kills vision, creativity and knowledge — it imprisons thought. The other island fosters vision, creativity and knowledge — it is a land where the mind is free.

The first island is the settler-colonial state called Australia, and the prisoners are the settlers.

The second island contains Manus Prison, and knowledge resides there with the incarcerated refugees.

The impact of Boochani’s book goes beyond a shocked recognition of the manifest cruelty of Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policies. As well as being a masterly and harrowing piece of “prison literature,” this is also an exposure of how Australia’s “offshore” cruelty reflects a debilitating curtailing of imagination and empathy — a maiming of collective consciousness — “onshore.” The message to be learned is this: “Manus Prison” is us.

We certainly need to recognise the mystification that has facilitated refugee policies while being itself intensified by them. But the concept of “Manus Prison” demands that we also recognise other disturbing transitions. Should we have expected the cruelty in the treatment of refugees offshore to remain comfortably beyond the old physical borders?

Thinking of “border security” as a continuum has facilitated an acceptance of new policies that impose hardship — to the point of destitution — on the strangely labelled “legacy caseload” of asylum seekers living within Australia. These are the people who arrived by boat prior to the reopening of detention centres on Manus and Nauru. “Strong borders” rhetoric and practices have accentuated a division between them and those refugees who managed to arrive through formal channels. Many refugee families are divided along the lines of that division, though their differential treatment has no justification in international law.

The emphasis on “border security” is now entrenched in Australian politics and policy, and in the popular imagination. “Strong borders” seem to have merged with the “war on terror.” The creation of a group of people — “those who would do us harm” — no longer points beyond the border; it also operates here, among us, behind the border. Having spread to the treatment of refugees onshore, the “othering” rhetoric is now playing out in the stripping of citizenship from Australians, many of whom have spent their entire lives here, and in unexplained delays in processing the citizenship applications of others.

The rhetoric of “strong borders” and “border protection” is not confined to Australia, of course, although our current policies have played their part in a global shift in attitudes to movements of people. Yet there are some peculiarly Australian features of the fears that sustain — and are in turn sustained by — the rhetoric. Tolstoy’s dictum that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way has application also to troubled polities: to each, its own amorphous unease about borders.

In Australia, mantras of deterrence and border security have become so familiar that the harsh realities of indefinite offshore incarceration are relegated to the margins. We should be shocked by those realities. Instead, at best, they are seen as a regrettable but necessary evil — justified as means to an elusive national good. (Was the border ever really under threat from those who came without prior authorisation to seek protection?) At worst, they are subsumed into strange parodies of justice or even compassion. We are encouraged to think that it is for their own good, as well as our own, that those who seek to arrive “unauthorised” must be kept at bay. (To save others from drowning at sea, did we really have to mistreat those who survived the perilous journeys?)

When we get to hear them, the voices of refugees themselves can cut through the static, challenging us to think again. Boochani’s voice has also challenged us to think about other policies that reflect a similar pattern of thought. His philosophical reflections around the theme of “Manus Prison” include some trenchant comments on the continuities between Australia’s refugee policies and its treatment of its own Indigenous peoples. He argues that the conditions that gave rise to offshore detention should be understood, and more deeply studied, in relation to the history of post-settlement Australia. In further exploring that idea, McNevin’s essay highlights the tendency to circumscribe the dispossession and oppression of Australia’s Indigenous people as a “closed chapter” rather than to acknowledge how it reaches into the present. The horrors of dispossession are seen as aberrations in an ongoing positive narrative of progress.

In that context, there are significant parallels between the impact of No Friend but the Mountains and that of the beautifully crafted “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” in which representatives of Australia’s Indigenous peoples responded to a request to consider how the Australian Constitution might be amended to allow more meaningful “recognition” and “inclusion.” In repudiating what seemed inadequate tinkering with the wording of the Constitution, the framers of the Uluru statement offered an alternative approach that had emerged from extensive consultation with Indigenous groups across the nation. Rather than seeking greater inclusion within a Constitution shaped by the dominant majority, the historically dispossessed Indigenous minority made an alternative offer to the national imagination: to include non-Indigenous Australians in a narrative of continuous human presence on the Australian continent.

The offer came with a proviso: non-Indigenous Australia must first acknowledge the truth of past oppressive exclusions, and the ongoing effects of those exclusions. If there is to be non-tokenistic recognition, there must first be an exhaustive process of truth-telling and acknowledgement. It was a proposal of extraordinary generosity and powerful political potential; had it not been thoughtlessly dismissed by members of the government, it might have brought the nation together in meaningful reconciliation, grounded in genuine recognition. It might yet do so.

There was a powerful rhetoric at play in the reversal of perspective — of “us” and “them” — at the core of the Uluru statement. Its potential to resonate in the collective Australian consciousness can be compared with the impact of the reversal of border-thinking articulated in No Friend but the Mountains. But perhaps there is a deeper connection here than parallel rhetorical strategies. What if the ongoing tragedies of Australia’s treatment of refugees and of its Indigenous peoples are seen as, conceptually, two sides of the one coin — facets of a flawed imagining of national identity, both grounded in a failure to engage in truth-telling?

While attitudes towards refugees in Australia were hardening, historians were increasingly revealing the previously denied realities of the resistance to dispossession offered by Indigenous peoples — and of the accompanying massacres perpetrated by settlers. At the same time, evidence of the deep time of Indigenous presence on the continent — and the cultural depth of that presence — has become undeniable. What European settlement tried to displace was not an uncivilised form of humanity, doomed to extinction and incapable either of managing the land or of resisting its occupation. It was a highly developed system of knowledge and practices that had responded to environmental change over a period of 60,000 or more years. This is a great deal for the consciousness of non-Indigenous Australia to absorb.

Perhaps it is time for Australians to reflect on the relationship between those two sets of issues. On the one hand is a “whispering in the hearts” of non-Indigenous Australians, unsettled by a deep past into which Europeans claimed “uninvited” entry. On the other hand is the increasingly troubled sense of something deeply amiss in the treatment of the more recently “uninvited,” whose arrival has been so readily construed as threatening “our” borders. Exploring the interconnections of those two sources of collective unease may be a long and contentious process. That No Friend but the Mountains has offered a way into beginning that process is something that should be welcomed — as Anne McNevin expressed it so well — as “something akin to a civic gift.” •

The post Rethinking Australia’s borders appeared first on Inside Story.

The report adds to evidence assembled in 2015 by the Refugee Council of Australia, where I work, which showed that refugees were waiting an average of 215 days to receive citizenship, with most of those affected being people who had arrived by boat and had been found to be refugees here in Australia.

We heard stories of people being told they had passed their citizenship test and would be invited to attend a ceremony within a few weeks, but never being contacted again. Some people had received text messages the day before their ceremony informing them that it had been cancelled. On phoning the department, they were told that their applications were “processing” and they should not attempt to get in contact again.

When we put this evidence to the immigration minister, he told us that there had been no change in policy, which in no way discriminated against refugees.

Since then, the delays have multiplied. The latest figures, released in December through the Senate estimates process, show that former refugees are waiting an average of 682 days for citizenship. Among those who arrived by boat, this increases to 785 days. By contrast, a typical migrant on a skilled visa is waiting a still-unacceptable 383 days.

The department claims that citizenship applications from former refugees are more complex because they often don’t have the necessary documents from their home country. But these are people who have been through the rigorous refugee determinations process; it’s hard to imagine what other country-of-origin evidence would be needed. Besides, a department serious about processing citizenship applications would devote extra resources to processing complex cases.

Nor has the department explained why it has simply refused to process applications from some former refugees. The audit office investigated fifteen random applications from former refugees and found that, in all cases, “the records indicated periods of unexplained inactivity that included March–April 2015 and that extended into 2015–16.” It went on:

These periods of inactivity ranged from nine months to twenty-two months and averaged fifteen months. Seven of the records noted that the application had been “Filed Undocumented arrival drawer,” “placed into IMA tambour” or “placed in ‘Undocumented Arrivals’ cabinet.”

This mirrors the findings of Justice Mordy Bromberg in a 2016 Federal Court case launched on behalf of two former refugees. Justice Bromberg found that the department took “no steps to progress [the applicants’] applications for some 14.5 months.” While he held that such delays were “unreasonable and therefore unlawful,” the department continues to go slow on applications like these.

Citizenship has particular significance for refugee and humanitarian entrants. By definition, refugees are unable to return to their country of origin because of a well-founded fear of persecution or other forms of serious harm. Becoming an Australian citizen is often the first long-term form of protection that they have received, and is celebrated and cherished by them.

Citizenship has a further important purpose for people who came by boat. Because of a policy introduced in 2013 by Scott Morrison when he was immigration minister, applications for family reunion from people who arrived by boat are given the lowest processing priority. Given the extended backlog for humanitarian visas, family reunion is effectively impossible for these people. Only when they receive citizenship do they move further up the priority list.

According to the audit office, the absence of “externally reported key performance indicators for processing time efficiency” has meant that “transparent and meaningful information is not being provided to the parliament and other stakeholders so as to hold Home Affairs accountable for its performance.” It recommended that the department reintroduce publicly disclosed performance indicators, but the department has declined to do so.

Last week the prime minister posed for photos with former refugee Hakeem al-Araibi following his release from a Thai prison. During the photo-op, Scott Morrison told the twenty-five-year-old that he hoped to see him soon at a citizenship ceremony. “I don’t think it’s too far away,” he added.

Let’s hope not. If Hakeem had been accepted as an Australian citizen before he went to Thailand — he had been eligible since 2017 and applied for citizenship last year — his ordeal would likely never have occurred. •

The post Explaining the unexplained at Home Affairs appeared first on Inside Story.

“Labor may have just lost the election,” warns David Crowe in what we used to call the Fairfax papers. “I don’t have the certainty I had in 2001 that Labor has thrown away an election,” writes Katharine Murphy in the Guardian, not much comfort for the opposition. And over at News Corp, well good taste prevents any description of the debauched celebrations.

With Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton and other ministers channelling John Howard, government members have a discernible spring in their step. And with “moderates” like Christopher Pyne tub-thumping about keeping Australians safe from these rapists and paedophiles, who needs race-baiting demagogues anyway?

The government is adamant that the Labor-endorsed legislation will result in more boat arrivals. Despite the detail, it says, people smugglers will spin it to their advantage. There may be something to this, just a bit, although realistically it would take months to result in new boats, as the Rudd government’s 2008 changes did.

But the smugglers’ best friend as they market their goods will be the Australian government itself, which proclaims — no ifs or buts — that the opposition and crossbench will extend the medivac rules if more asylum seekers arrive, even though Labor insists it won’t.

It’s all designed for domestic consumption, but like the fanfare about reopening the Christmas Island facility it’s music to the smugglers’ ears. Perhaps most worryingly of all, home affairs minister Dutton, the man who controls the apparatus that stops boats arriving, states unequivocally that more boats will arrive.

And this all happened before the Ipsos poll, published late on Sunday, which helpfully played into the narrative by putting the parties almost neck and neck, 51–49 in Labor’s favour after preferences.

Now, Ipsos is notoriously volatile. The last two Newspolls have been 53–47 in Labor’s favour. An Essential poll in the Guardian last week showed 55–45, but with the previous fortnight being 52–48, it looked a bit rogue-ish. (Essential no longer “smooths” its results by averaging two weeks.)

As they say in the classics, it’s just one poll, there’s a margin of error, yadda yadda yadda. What makes this possible outlier different is that it coincides with medivac, and that inevitably conjures up the Tampa.

I’ve expressed my scepticism ad nauseum about the received wisdom that the Tampa, and boat arrivals in general, delivered the Howard government a third term in 2001. I know party strategists on both sides insist it did, but these same people swear the “carbon tax” was a big vote-driver in 2013.

Here’s a brief summary of the opinion poll trajectory eighteen years ago. In February and March 2001, the Labor opposition was way ahead in the polls, peaking at around 57 per cent, but by late August 2001 the Howard government had recovered to about 48 per cent. After Tampa arrived on 24 August it drew level, and then the 11 September attacks drove Coalition support skywards. The government entered the campaign in early October 10 to 12 per cent in front of Labor after preferences, but on election day was re-elected 51–49, a 2 per cent national win.

Which is about where, in my opinion, it would have ended up without either of those landmark events. Both Labor’s and the Coalition’s huge leads were illusory and unsustainable. The question “how would you vote if an election were held today?” is hopelessly hypothetical, and can be pushed one way or another by a small group of voters influenced by forces that don’t hold as much sway at an actual election — in these instances, the detested GST and then asylum seekers and terrorism. As election day approaches, voters’ responses to surveys become more realistic, and opinion poll movement during a campaign is less a case of voters responding to events than polls simply becoming better indicators of what will actually happen.

Since then, asylum seekers, refugee policy and immigration in general have hovered over our politics, threatening to intervene and turn the contest around. It’s almost as if all the Coalition has to do is bring them up and voters will salivate on cue. But usually the danger turns out to be non-existent.

When, for example, John Howard tried twice in 2007 to drag Sudanese refugees into his re-election quest, it went nowhere, partly because Labor, through its calm, reassuring shadow minister Tony Burke, refused to bite. For some reason, though, persuasive occupants of the important immigration portfolio are the exception to the Labor rule, and since the last election it’s been Queenslander Shayne Neumann. And leader Bill Shorten, as we know, is no Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard or Kim Beazley in the articulation stakes. This topic is always difficult for Labor.

As a general rule, “events” identified by the commentariat fail to show up in the next survey and are quickly forgotten.

In truth, a host of factors influence opinion polls, and for most of them there’s a long lag. The polls reflect everything that’s happened over the last months, even years. And polls are not the same as elections: most “bounces” prove to be just that, momentary and illusory, not a serious reflection of what would actually happen at a hypothetical election.

(The Howard government’s post–September 11 double-digit leads are a case in point. If an election had been held in late September 2001, I don’t believe that the government would have won with 55 or 56 per cent of the vote. Rather, it would have been around the 51 it received in November, and the polls would have reflected this as election day approached.)

Anyway, whether or not the Ipsos figure really is evidence that the Coalition’s boats campaign is biting, the political class is interpreting it that way, which influences reporting, politicians’ behaviour, and even future opinion polls. Media reports of political success tend to boost politicians’ personal ratings, which can artificially lift voting intentions. These are just surveys, though, not the real deal.

So we could be in for a wild ride. But the election in May will not be decided by asylum seekers. It will be, as most are, predominantly about hip-pocket issues, although disarray in any policy can facilitate an argument that a party isn’t ready to govern.

Even if we never hear from boats again, Labor will still be lumbered with its big, juicy economic policy target. •

The post Votes by the boatload? appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of the Sans-Papiers were from former French colonies in North Africa and had lived and worked legally in France for years. In many cases, their status had been changed by a series of laws that targeted the country’s immigrant population, laws introduced in response to rising racist and anti-immigrant sentiment and the efforts of mainstream politicians to court those sympathetic to the far-right Front National.

Refusing to retreat into the shadows as if they had something to hide, the Sans-Papiers instead made themselves extremely visible. They drew on the language of human rights and French republican citizenship in order to stake their claim to be part of France. They described themselves as economic contributors; as colonised subjects who were not in France by accident; as linguistically, culturally and religiously diverse bearers of rights whose status could not be reduced to the “papers” and bureaucratic process through which they had been criminalised.

The Church of Saint-Bernard was ultimately stormed by the French police, and many of those taking refuge were deported. But the Sans-Papiers refused to go quietly. Their church occupation exposed the deportation process for what it was: an act of violence rather than a bureaucratic process that could be rationalised away. The political claims made by the Sans-Papiers continue to find expression in the contemporary struggles of refugees in France, Europe and beyond.

Balibar’s speech was published under the title “What We Owe to the Sans-Papiers.” What was owed, he argued, in addition to the rights that were due to the Sans-Papiers, was a debt of gratitude for having invigorated the collective practice of citizenship. For Balibar, these public acts of defiance represented a courageous and generous civic gift. “They have helped us immensely,” he wrote, “with their resistance and their imagination, breathing life back into democracy.” They had compelled French society to confront the continuities between its violent colonial past and its border-policing present. They had questioned what democracy really meant if migrants and former subjects of France, whose labour had shaped the course of French history, could be so easily disregarded.

In 2018, on the other side of the world, it is worth asking similar questions. What might be owed to the refugees on Manus Island? What might be owed to those who are stuck on Nauru or in Indonesia, and to others who have made it to Australia and called on our government to make good on its claims to uphold democratic freedoms and respect human rights? In recent months, the groundswell of support for the children on Nauru who have entered a kind of catatonia has focused attention on whether refugees are owed, at a minimum, life-preserving care. That the debate has come to this — to the question of whether life-preserving care is owed — tells us something disturbing about baseline commitments to rights and freedoms among Australians.

Unsettling questions about who is entitled to basic rights and freedoms seem to be producing ever-narrower responses in countries across Europe, North America and Oceania, as displacement and migratory pressures test the limits of a shared democratic ethos. Refugees in Australia’s offshore camps speak to this moment in more ways than one. They also command attention for what they demand — as refugees and as humans — and for what they refuse to tolerate. Their demands and refusals offer the rest of us something akin to a civic gift, something that offers democratic repair, if we are willing to accept it. Let me explain what I mean.

In the closing months of 2017, Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani published a series of articles in the Guardian and the Saturday Paper. These were diary accounts of a protest on Manus Island, during which more than 600 refugees refused to leave what they described as the prison in which they had been detained for as many as four-and-a-half years. The prison — or “refugee processing centre” — had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea and was slated for closure.

The court’s ruling seemed like a win for humanitarian advocates who had long been campaigning for an end to the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and seemed like a check on the Australian government’s attempts to create jurisdictional ambiguity via its “Pacific solution.” In order to comply with the ruling, the prison gates were opened and plans were made for the prison’s gradual closure during October 2017, including the transfer of remaining inmates to an open “refugee transit centre” on the outskirts of Lorengau, the capital of Manus province.

For three weeks, the refugees remained on the decommissioned site while the compounds around them were demolished, power and water were cut, sympathetic locals delivering food were turned away by police, and immigration officials were captured on film soiling the refugees’ makeshift wells with rubbish and oil and sabotaging pipes and pumps. Weak from dehydration, starvation, sleeplessness and exposure, Boochani described conditions as “living in a hell hole” and the prison as “a war zone.”

Those conditions became only more apparent after the publication in August this year of Boochani’s book, No Friend but the Mountains. In this chronicle and critique of his five years on Manus Island, written in WhatsApp message instalments sent to his translator in Sydney, Boochani reveals the systematic humiliation and debasement of incarcerated refugees in excruciating detail.

At first glance, the refugees’ refusal to be released from the prison seemed puzzling. Why continue to endure such atrocious conditions — the very conditions that they themselves had maintained were in breach of their human rights — when alternatives were available? Sympathetic commentators emphasised the deficiencies of the “transit centre,” which was still under construction and could not guarantee adequate security, sanitation or essential mental and physical healthcare for already weak and traumatised refugees. The “open” centre, supporters argued, would leave refugees vulnerable to attack by aggrieved Manusians who had not only threatened violence should the refugees move there but had already been responsible for violent attacks on refugees. Such commentary emphasised the failure of PNG authorities to take refugees’ complaints of violence seriously and bring perpetrators to justice, and the generally underdeveloped state of healthcare, law and justice.

Immigration minister Peter Dutton refused to accept the substance of such claims and described them, in any case, as matters for the PNG government. He accused ringleaders among the refugees of pressuring others to resist, and accused Australian advocates of irresponsibly inciting the rebellion and egging the refugees on.

In his accounts of the protest, Boochani took the time to address “misperceptions” across the political spectrum about the refugees’ motivations. He dismissed Dutton’s accusations as a facile “form of degradation” that reduced refugees “to children who cannot [understand their situation or] make decisions on their own.” He also rebuked those who actively supported refugees for their focus on “peripheral” issues. While the refugees’ fear of violence on Manus was real, and while the “transit centre” was undoubtedly inadequate in all the ways mentioned, the protest, Boochani explained, was “not about… the conditions of imprisonment.” It was a call for freedom — a genuine freedom rather than an open gate that merely provided a wider perimeter within which to spend one’s days, exactly as one had before.

With credible fears for their security in Papua New Guinea, and with minuscule odds of being accepted for resettlement elsewhere, the refugees on Manus were stuck where they were, indefinitely. Whether their accommodation met the best or worst of standards made no difference to the limbo in which they were imprisoned, separated from loved ones and unable to move their lives forward. “Inflicting torture by the use of time is the best and complete explanation of this situation,” Boochani had written almost eighteen months earlier, referring to the mental pressure, self-harm and suicides caused by complete uncertainty about when or if their incarceration would end.

When the refugees occupied the decrepit prison and refused to move, they were also refusing to be enlisted in a performance of their release. They were not allowing superficial improvements in the conditions of detention to obscure what was a form of incarceration without trial. When police finally entered the prison with sticks and iron bars, beating and dragging the refugees on to buses for removal, their decampment from one prison to another was revealed for exactly what it was: an explicit and intensified moment in a broader relationship of violence and domination.

In his accounts of these events, and of prison life in general, Boochani refuses to buy into the denigration of locals with claims about their brutality and the backwardness of law, justice and healthcare in Papua New Guinea. As he notes, even before their transfer to Manus the refugees were instructed by Australian officials about the range of tropical diseases that lay in wait, and about the savage, even cannibalistic ways of the local Manusians, all as a means of inciting sufficient terror to compel the refugees to give up and go home.

Boochani also describes the overt hierarchy between Australian and Papuan prison guards, and the briefings that the Papuan subordinates received about the dangerous “terrorists” within the prison population. In this pyramid of status, he reveals the small moments of complicity between Papuan guards and prisoners — a head turned here, a cigarette smoked there — concealed from Australian overseers. It was Papuan guards who administered a “red-hot wire” to deaden the nerves of Boochani’s chronically aching tooth, a treatment he chose over the indignity and deferrals of the prison’s outsourced medical clinic, the life-threatening failings of which have since been well documented.

Boochani’s point is not to deny the Papuan guards’ involvement in the violence of the prison, or to deny the fear they inspired in the prisoners. He is candid about both. His point is to show how racialised hierarchies pit prisoner and local against each other in ways that sustain and legitimise the violence. Everyone within this system becomes implicated, including the refugees themselves. Forced to endlessly queue and compete for everything — food, water, squalid toilets, razors and medicine, dispensed cup by cup, tablet by tablet, and never in sufficient quantity — refugees also turn on each other. Boochani describes in intimate detail how some refugees take perverse pleasure in others’ humiliation, particularly when the victims are those whose self-respect has survived intact the longest. “The prison dictates,” Boochani explains, “that the prisoners accept, to some degree, that they are wretched and contemptible.” In this context, the debasement of others is an equaliser that “appeals to the oppressor in all of us.”

Boochani insists that the violence to which the refugees are subject and in which they have become implicated also afflicts the Australian people in whose name the offshore encampment of refugees persists. He challenges Australians to examine those parts of their history and those parts of their present that are founded on the debasement, dispossession and incarceration of others. He invites Australians to see the continuities between past and present, and between the diminished forms of life that spread outwards from the prison and Australia itself.

For Boochani, the conditions of possibility for offshore detention can only be understood in connection with Australia’s history of settler colonialism, on the mainland and in the Pacific. It is not simply that parallels exist between the forced removal and incarceration of refugees on Manus and the treatment of non-white others throughout the history of post-settlement Australia. As other critics have argued, a continuum exists between historical forms of resource extraction in the Pacific under colonial arrangements and the current extraction of value from offshore islands as part of a wider prison–industrial complex.

In the Pacific, colonial relations have created the conditions in which this is possible. In this economy, former colonies trade prison architecture for development aid. And in this economy, as in previous eras, racialised hierarchies rationalise those arrangements as civilising missions, development projects and humanitarian care. For Boochani, the violence that this entails cannot be contained offshore. The prisoners’ incarceration reflects a wider and more subtle form of containment. He reveals the sovereign identity of Australia and Australians, built on twin fantasies of total border control and a whitewashed history, as a cage in itself — a cage that locks its inmates into a corrosive way of life and keeps alternatives beyond the reach of confined imaginations.

Boochani’s writing has received widespread acclaim. Among the commendations, his journalism won the Amnesty International Australia Media Award in 2017 and the Anna Politkovskaya prize in 2018, awarded by Italian magazine Internazionale in honour of the Russian journalist killed in 2006. Yet the aspect of his writing that provokes a confrontation with a colonial past and present has prompted far less commentary than his general account of prison conditions. With some notable exceptions, responses to No Friend but the Mountains have emphasised the book’s rendition of the appalling treatment of refugees in the here and now as a springboard to advocate for an immediate change in Australian government policy.

Longer-standing campaigns rest on the notion that the offshore camps, among other aspects of Australia’s deterrence policies, represent an anomaly within Australian political culture. “This is not who we are as Australians, or indeed as human beings,” wrote twelve former Australians of the Year in an open letter to the federal government at the time of the Manus protests in November 2017. “We’re Better than This” was the title of a song recorded by Australian celebrities in 2014, calling on fellow nationals to rise to their better selves by ending the mandatory detention of refugee children both onshore and offshore.

These are strategic interventions that aim to end current forms of violence. Appealing to the vanity of a national “we” in a climate increasingly hostile to refugees and migrants, the slogans resist the reduction of the national narrative to expressions of border security and sovereign defence. But by failing to come to grips with the histories of violence and removal that have policed the national “we” in racially exclusive ways, they also have a pernicious effect. They reproduce an account of who “we” really are that necessitates either outright denial of alternative stories or the relegation of those stories to closed chapters of the past — exceptions in an otherwise progressive national tale.

The notion of offshore detention as an exception to the rule has a similar effect. It means we find it harder to anticipate the next expression of an us–them divide in which it is made to makes sense for some people to suffer grave forms of violence and loss that would never be tolerated for others. The very fact of being able to make those distinctions — between what is acceptable for us and what is acceptable for them — is who “we” are, and Boochani asks us to admit it.

His challenge comes not out of spite but out of recognition that any aspirations towards equality and freedom require nothing less. Any chance of avoiding future rounds of violence against those deemed not-one-of-us involves coming to terms with our capacity for inhumanity, whether it comes in the form of direct violence or bureaucratic inertia. Boochani’s book, together with his journalism, is an invitation to consider the corrosive effects of denial on ourselves as much as on others, and to consider the restorative potential of an honest confrontation with ourselves.

No Friend but the Mountains is written in a poetic form. Part of what it captures is how language is used to conceal and to rationalise the violence in Manus prison. From the numbers used in place of names to identify refugees, to the generic categories that mark refugees as administrative problems — “irregular maritime arrivals,” “transferees” and so on — language makes some people less human than others and some forms of violence less recognisable as violence.

In correspondence with his translator, Boochani notes that he resists this kind of language in his journalism where he can, and in his literature entirely. He refuses to refer to the “Australian Border Force” or “offshore processing centres” or “asylum seekers,” for example, referring instead to guards, prisons, prisoners and refugees. His choice of words expresses a reality that has not been legible in the same way in masses of reports, both pro and con the plight of refugees. Those reports have failed to move guards, governments and publics beyond piecemeal policy changes to a point of confrontation with the systemic violence in which we are all implicated.

In the opening chapter of No Friend but the Mountains, Boochani gives a poetic account of his week-long odyssey on a rotting boat, en route from Indonesia to Australia. The boat was crammed with people, with their sweat, their vomit and their stench. The journey elicited acts of care and selflessness from some on board, and survival-driven selfishness from others. The boat sank and left its passengers to the whims of the sea and of passing fishing crew, who knew that to rescue might invite their own prosecution, perhaps as people smugglers. In the midst of all this, Boochani describes “a colossal encounter” with himself:

a colossal encounter — where the essence of my being could manifest — where I could interrogate my soul — so that I could lay myself bare:

Is this human being who he thinks he is?

Does this human being reflect the same theories that he holds?

Does this human being embody courage? 

Readers of Boochani’s book cannot avoid a colossal encounter with the reality of violence that is offshore detention. Boochani’s challenge is for us to engage with that encounter by shifting our gaze from refugees as objects of pity onto ourselves as part of collectives that are implicated in and diminished by violence done to others. The book’s poetics give occasion to grapple with what connects the violence on Manus with broader cultures of denial and historical amnesia.

To read this book, from that perspective, is to become undone in the sense of having to rethink the very idea of ourselves. It is also to become aware of the breadth of human resources with which we can be remade by doing the work of decolonisation and democratic repair. Ending offshore detention is urgent and essential, but it is also only a beginning. •

The post What we owe the refugees on Manus appeared first on Inside Story.

“It’s amazing,” reflects Adnan, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Everyone goes to the town centre and smokes and drinks coffee until four in the morning. Aleppo has basically returned to normal — except for the buildings, that is.” He adds the qualification with a grimace.

“You know,” says Aliya, “my family thought about emigrating to Canada because of the conflict but decided against it. Alone, without our family, friends or our city, we would die silently from within.” Her words echo the sentiments of another Iraqi, whose background is Jewish. “My parents still live in Iraq,” she had told me. “It’s tough, but they can’t bear to leave. Each year during the invasion when they were forced out of the country, we would have a reunion, drink a toast, and say ‘next year in Baghdad,’” turning the traditional Passover toast on its head.

Adnan, Aliya and I survey the neat line of prefabricated houses with small gardens and children’s play equipment, which have been erected to house refugees in this prosperous Berlin suburb. “In Syria, this would be impossible,” says Adnan. “The government wouldn’t allow it. For refugees there is only terror and tents, if that, and mud.”

This camp accommodates around 600 of the nearly 1.2 million refugees Germany has received since the onslaught on opposition strongholds by Syria’s Assad regime and the ongoing turmoil in Iraq. If the boxy white houses are somewhat uniform, they are at least clean, comfortable and well insulated. Each has its own cooking facilities and access to a common playground, a colourful nursery for infants, and a homework room packed with beanbags, pictures and games for older children.

Communal cooking facilities allow for socialising within the camp and for inviting German neighbours and local residents to meet refugees and asylum seekers not only from Syria and Iraq but also from Afghanistan, parts of Central Asia, Mali and Chad.

“We were very worried when the Berlin government gave us this land,” says the camp manager, a young German man with a degree in history and politics. “It is in a very conservative area that voted for the right-wing nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party at the last elections. But surprisingly there haven’t been any complaints. I went to a local residents’ meeting recently and heard that people were surprised, with all the refugees in Germany, how nothing much had changed. Some of them have even started visiting us here and giving extra German-language lessons as volunteers.”

Apart from a few mothers doing some washing, having German lessons or minding toddlers, the camp is largely empty. I ask where everyone is. “All the children are in local schools,” I am told, “and many of the men and woman have jobs.” Despite the fact that the area is fenced off and there’s an attendant at the gate, this is no prison. People can come and go, friends can visit, and it is legal to earn an income outside the camp.

The care, commitment and consideration of the young camp manager — who had bent rules and massaged budgets in order to build a stable sense of community and engagement with locals — also suggests a deeper resolve. “They still feel it, even now and even this generation,” a French aid worker now living in Berlin had told me earlier. “In progressive Berlin, the German past casts a long shadow.”

As if hearing this comment, the manager looks up at the ornate and grandly oppressive brick building, with its columns and triumphal archways, in whose grounds the refugees now live. “This used to be the headquarters of the imperial army under the Kaisers,” he says. “Then it belonged to the general staff during the Third Reich and housed an SS unit. I like the fact that this building, with this past, is now a place to welcome refugees.”

Yet the commitment to a more humane way of managing complex problems goes further than an appreciation for historical irony. In what Australians might see as a moment of jaw-dropping enlightenment, the German Institute for Foreign Affairs in Bonn funded the camp manager to go to Iraq to assist with the humanitarian response to the Mosul offensive. This was in order, as the camp manager says in flawless, accentless English, “to develop empathy and to understand better the context from which many of our refugees come.”

He spent three months managing refugee camps in Northern Iraq, and that was followed up with a visit to Berlin by the Iraqi doctor to assist in developing cross-cultural understanding in the camp and with the wider community. “It amazes them when I say I’ve been there,” he says, “and helps with social cohesion here.”

Not that the camp is a paradise. Refugees sharing accommodation at close quarters don’t always get on, and not everyone has a job in vibrant but economically straitened Berlin. For those who do, the work is often informal and at times illegal. Many are still traumatised from the experience of war and forced migration, and some struggle to adapt to a new country and to learn its language. There are only two social workers in the camp, and they manage everything from supporting psychologically damaged parents and children to guiding refugees through the complexities of the German welfare system. Some refugees have been referred to the police for involvement in criminal activities, and there have been child protection concerns.

With growing anti-immigrant sentiment and consequent budget cuts, the camp has funding for only another six months. More refugees are being deported to Afghanistan and other places now deemed safe, and there are demands to close the facility. Meanwhile, the pressure for “integration” has intensified since the time when Germans lined the streets outside train stations and applauded newly arrived refugees fleeing conflict, and a local football team, Hertha Berlin, flew flags at its matches saying “Refugees Welcome.”

“For some, integration means not speaking Arabic, wearing headdress or being Muslim,” says the camp manager. “But for us, we just try to teach people enough German to get by and to have an understanding of how things work here.”

Acknowledging a perceived political reality that a more open policy doesn’t have wide popular support, Robert Manne and others have argued for what he sees as a more pragmatic but still sympathetic approach to refugees in Australia. But although there are signs of a gradual shift in public opinion, it seems unlikely that the major parties will significantly relax their policies. At the very least, the German example shows that for those currently incarcerated, a simple, humane and much cheaper alternative is within reach.

As I checked into my Berlin hotel, the receptionist takes a look at my passport. “Australia,” she observes, and I brace myself for the usual conversation about hot weather and kangaroos. But she continues: “If we treated refugees like you do, they’d call us Nazis.”

There are certainly deeply concerning echoes in Australia’s treatment of refugees — which is also linked to the lingering influence of the frontier wars and the White Australia policy. But if the past can be a prison, it can also suggest alternatives. Many who are anxious about refugees and their impact on Australia might be surprised — like their conservative German counterparts — when “nothing much” about their daily lives changes. •

The post Past meets present in a Berlin refugee camp appeared first on Inside Story.

This is bad legislation, but Labor should swallow hard and pass it anyway. Why? Because this is an emergency. Only after the political deadlock in Canberra is broken can resettlement in New Zealand begin, and the process itself will not happen overnight. New Zealand will need to do its own security and health checks on prospective candidates, and it will need to set up the reception services, counselling, accommodation and other supports needed to help refugees settle and rebuild their lives.

If work started tomorrow, perhaps some refugee families could get to New Zealand before Christmas. Too much time has already been wasted and too many lives lost or damaged. There must be no more delays.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves, though, that this would end the emergency. New Zealand’s longstanding offer would assist 150 refugees per year. According to the latest Senate estimates, there are 652 people on Nauru, including fifty-two children. Of those, 541 are refugees, twenty-three have had their claims for protection rejected and eighty-eight are still having their status determined. There are another 626 men on Manus, of whom 495 are refugees.

That adds up to 1036 refugees on Manus and Nauru who need a permanent resolution to their plight. Even if the United States and New Zealand each resettle 150 annually (which seems unlikely with Donald Trump in the White House), the problem would drag on for at least another three and a half years.

Don’t forget that there are also about 600 people from Manus and Nauru on “temporary transfers” to Australia for medical reasons — a third of them children. Even though home affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo says that “the law states quite clearly that when their period of treatment is concluded they’re expected to return,” it seems unlikely that they will be sent back to the Pacific. As Pezzullo also told Senate estimates, most who come to Australia are “immediately joined to High Court proceedings, which prevent their removal.”

This is where the government’s demand that Labor support an all-or-nothing travel ban gets particularly messy.

If a law is passed that permanently bans the refugees from entering Australia, then what happens to the 600 who are already here on “temporary transfers”? Technically they are “unlawful noncitizens.” Since there is no visa category under which they could enter Australia, they are effectively in what the department calls an “alternative place of detention.” Are they to live in this limbo status indefinitely, banned from entering the country in which they already reside?

Understandably, the current focus of the public and political debate is on getting the last fifty-two children off Nauru. As treasurer Josh Frydenberg told Radio National Breakfast, “We have got 200 children off Nauru. They are coming off without the press release and the grandstanding.”

But bringing children to Australia for medical treatment does not resolve their longer-term futures — and it is the lack of a future, as much as anything, that is making them and their parents sick. In fact, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, argues that bringing children and families to Australia adds to the health problems of the remaining adults:

The movement of only children and their families would do nothing to address the predicament of others with urgent medical needs, a number of whom were also children when they were forcibly sent to Nauru over five years ago. Equally, the desperate situation of refugees and asylum-seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru is now such that evacuation of only some individuals would heighten the despair and exacerbate severe mental health risks of those left behind.

When UNHCR’s medical experts gathered evidence on the ground in 2016, they found cumulative rates of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder among refugees in both Manus and Nauru to be over 80 per cent, “the highest recorded in the medical literature to date.” Things have only got worse since then, and they could still deteriorate further. That is why Labor should vote for flawed legislation based on a flawed premise.

Josh Frydenberg claimed that allowing resettlement in New Zealand without banning refugees’ subsequent entry to Australia would “put up the white flag to people smugglers.” This is the same tired argument rolled out for years by Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison that resettlement in New Zealand would open a “back door” to Australia and send a green light to people smugglers to restart their trade.

There are several reasons why this claim doesn’t stack up.

First, the so-called “back door” is really a long, slow road. The resettled refugees would have to live in New Zealand for five years before they could acquire citizenship. Only then would they be able to get the New Zealand passport that enables them to enter and live in Australia with a visa granted on arrival.

Second, the Trans-Tasman Travel Agreement doesn’t grant New Zealanders an automatic right to enter Australia in any case. If there is good reason to prevent these refugees from ever setting foot in this country, it can be organised without special legislation. Numerous New Zealanders can never cross our border because they have been kicked out of Australia on character grounds under section 501 of the Migration Act, banning them for life. Their personal details are on the Movement Alert List, so if they turned up at an Australian airport they would be denied a visa and refused entry; in fact, they would be prevented from even boarding the plane in New Zealand. The Australian government could list all the refugees on Manus and Nauru on that movement alert list if it chose to, on the basis that their presence in Australia “might constitute a risk to the Australian community.”

Third, if resettlement in Australia creates a perverse incentive to restart the trade, then so does resettlement in New Zealand and the United States, even without the ultimate prospect of subsequent entry into Australia under Trans-Tasman rules. After all, Mike Pezzullo says that the possibility of smugglers targeting New Zealand separately from Australia is a “live risk.” So even if New Zealand might be second prize (no offence to our friends across the Tasman), it is a second prize that desperate and vulnerable people will risk their lives on a leaky boat to win.

Finally, and most importantly, the backdoor argument ignores the fact that the key deterrence to the smuggling trade is not the prospect of being detained offshore but the naval interception and turnbacks that prevent boats from arriving in the first place. The racket only works if smugglers can land their passengers in the destination they are selling. As long as naval turnbacks are in place, keeping refugees on Manus and Nauru as a deterrent is pointless cruelty.

The current impasse is all about domestic political advantage and not about logic, evidence or reason, let alone sovereign rights or saving lives at sea. Labor should nevertheless pass the flawed legislation and end the deadlock. It will add to the mess that it will have to clean up if it wins government — but this is, after all, a mess it helped to create. It was a recycled Kevin Rudd who declared in July 2013, “From now on any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees.” His was a policy that would inevitably lead to hundreds of people being trapped in misery with no place to go. As Manus detainee Behrouz Boochani writes in his remarkable book No Friend but the Mountains, Australia has created a system that reduces humans to the level of animals, and makes them “accept, to some degree, that they are wretched and contemptible.”

Cleaning up the mess requires passing, and then eventually amending, the lifetime ban that the Coalition has set as the price of giving 150 refugees the chance of a future in New Zealand. This is a risk, because who knows who will hold the crossbench seats in a future House or Senate. Ultimately, though, some of the refugees from Manus and Nauru will have to be allowed to settle in Australia. After all, we have been down this road before, at the end of the round of offshore processing that began with the Tampa. The second incarnation of offshore processing is in its final phase. When government backbenchers break ranks and publicly voice their concern about refugee children, just as they did under John Howard, it’s clear the end is near.

Public opinion is also starting to shift. A growing number of voters now appear to accept that this is Australia’s problem to fix. I doubt whether any amount of political spin from the major parties will swamp that growing understanding. It is clear that permanent settlement in Papua New Guinea or Nauru is not a realistic option, that the expensive Cambodia experiment was a dismal failure and that the deal with the United States will only help a limited number of people. There is little prospect of any other nation gallantly offering to take these refugees off our hands. According to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Peter Dutton says that countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Canada have already been approached and were not interested.

In other words, this is our emergency and our responsibility. Labor can’t wait for the federal election in May to start dealing with it. •

The post Why Labor should break the refugee deadlock appeared first on Inside Story.

“Her family is in Iraq but she been here for more than five years,” a family friend told me. “She is sick on medical and no help from hospital. They give her tablets but these make her crazy. If she raises voice at hospital, no one help us. Always cry, no one help her. No one help us.”

As a correspondent for Islands Business magazine, I’m a regular reporter at the annual leaders meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum. This year, though, I hadn’t been confident that I’d be given accreditation for the regional summit. I’m a longstanding critic of Australia’s multibillion-dollar offshore processing regime, and host nation Nauru has long been sensitive to criticism of its support for Australia’s refugee policy.

As of May 2018, 821 recognised refugees were living on Nauru, including more than 110 children, alongside asylum seekers who have been refused refugee status. Since it got under way in 2001 — with a hiatus during the first government of Kevin Rudd — the offshore detention program has cost Australian taxpayers billions of dollars. The beneficiaries have been corporations like Broadspectrum, Wilson Security, IHMS and Canstruct. The toll on the asylum seekers has been immeasurable.

But the program has also left hidden scars on the communities that host the refugees. “I was a child when the asylum seekers came,” one young Nauruan man told me during the Forum. “I was really pleased. I thought I could learn something about another culture. Now, I hate them. They are always attacking my country, criticising my leaders. I wish they would leave.”

Successive Australian and Nauruan governments have responded to criticism of indefinite mandatory detention by taking aim at the messenger and withholding vital information. When he was immigration minister, Scott Morrison was notorious for his lack of transparency, refusing to comment about “on-water” matters as he implemented the Abbott government’s policy of “stopping the boats.”

Nauru’s president Baron Waqa has argued that media organisations, human rights groups and UN agencies have relied on second-hand “fake news” about his country. But the Nauru government itself has limited the capacity of journalists to travel to the island for first-hand reporting. Nauru requires journalists to pay a US$5000 visa application fee, non-refundable if the request is refused — a significant disincentive for anyone wanting to look beyond government spin.

In line with standard practice for the regional summit, Nauru waived visa fees for accredited journalists at this year’s Forum leaders meeting. But it limited the number who could attend and introduced unprecedented restrictions on the stories they could cover outside the formal Forum agenda. The government attributed the rules to the complex logistics of hosting a large number of delegates in a small island nation, but it’s well known that President Waqa and his justice minister, David Adeang, have been angered by foreign media reporting of their alleged corruption. Their dislike of Australia’s national broadcaster, banned from the meeting, seems particularly intense.

That ban was also a significant blow for broadcasters from the islands region, which often relay news from Radio Australia and Radio New Zealand rather than send one of their own journalists to regional meetings. (My small gesture of solidarity was to comment from Nauru for ABC current affairs, Radio Australia and Radio New Zealand.) Other Australian media that critically report on refugees, local corruption or domestic opposition to the Waqa government, including the Guardian and SBS, also applied for accreditation but didn’t make the cut.

The Forum media contingent thus included reporters from the Murdoch press (the Telegraph and the Australian) alongside a larger New Zealand press pack. They were joined by a small team of Pacific journalists coordinated by the Pacific Islands News Association, from island nations including Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, Papua New Guinea and the Cook Islands, together with a few media from Tahiti, Japan and Finland.

Speaking to Pacific journalists before the Forum, Nauru’s health, education and land management minister, Charmaine Scotty, expressed frustration over “fake news” and the international reporting of the plight of asylum seekers on the island. For Scotty, the problem lies with the media rather than in government secrecy.

“If media is going to be reliable and going to be printing the facts, we are happy for them to come to Nauru,” she said. “The reason we have put this new policy in is because of the fake news. Before Trump made fake news popular, Nauru experienced that. We already had fake news, so we understood what fake news was all about.”

Unfavourable overseas reporting risks making the Nauruan people afraid of the refugees, she went on. “All this hyped-up news about the refugees calling Nauru hell on earth and all these kind of things. Nobody wants their country to be called that in the international media. This was making the transition between the locals and the visitors very hard.”

The government issued media guidelines that went far beyond the normal practice for previous regional summits. The restrictions included the following:

You are only authorised to report on or take photos of the Pacific Islands Forum. Any other subjects must be approved by the Republic of Nauru.

You must not travel to or visit restricted areas, for the safety and security of residents.

No photo or video may be taken on Nauru of any resident on Nauru who is an asylum seeker to protect their personal safety…

Refrain from interviewing Canstruct and other contractor staff as they have signed confidentiality agreements.

In true Pacific manner — on the principle that it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission — most journalists attending the Forum worked around these “guidelines.”

Meanwhile, Nauru’s chief spin doctor, Lyall Mercer, was introducing the Murdoch press to refugees, resulting in a front-page story in the Australian, complete with full-face photo of mother and child. Other journalists, such as a team from Tahiti’s TNTV, ventured into the camps to produce compelling interviews with distressed refugees.

Deriding the image of refugees living behind barbed wire, President Waqa was eager to stress that they were “living and working happily amongst the community.” During the day, it was possible to meet refugees in the streets, and I had a number of intense discussions arising from casual meetings.

But Nauru police had obviously been warned to monitor the conduct of journalists, all of whom sported a bright yellow badge and lanyard. After TVNZ journalist Barbara Dreaver was spotted talking to a refugee outside a restaurant, she was detained by police. Her phone and camera were taken for three or four hours, with technicians brought in to search for compromising material. On her release, her accreditation was briefly withdrawn, though it was later returned after negotiations.

As I was taking photos in the island’s Yaren district, I was approached by a young Iranian man. The twenty-six-year-old, who has been living on the island for five years, was eager to show me his workplace. “I didn’t want to just sit in the camp,” he said. “I need to do something, so I got a job. I like my boss from Nauru. I don’t want to end up crazy like the others.”

At this point, he made a maniacal face, distorting his features and holding up both hands with claw-like clenched fingers. His cartoonish gesture reminded me of the famous Diane Arbus photo “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park.” Unlike many refugees I met, he seemed resigned to the lengthy process that might lead to resettlement: “Some people go to America but Donald Trump doesn’t like Iran, so I cannot go.”

“Would you like to stay in Nauru?” I asked.

“Of course not!” he replied, in a tone that suggested I was mad. “Australia, good. New Zealand, good. Anywhere, good. I would like to go somewhere where I can meet a girl. Here, if we go with a girl, the Nauruans hit us.”

Management of the overseas media has become a preoccupation for some Pacific island governments. They are turning to public relations companies and spin doctors to promote their views.

Health minister Charmaine Scotty acknowledged that her government found it hard to respond to media queries. “Because of all the media coming in, it’s like a tidal wave that just drops and washes over you. So we’ve needed to get our act together and be more resilient and proactive in this area.” That’s why the government has contracted a PR agency to work with it, she said. “It’s helping teach our people in the media for them to be able to respond quickly to things and not take things at island time.”

Nauru uses the Brisbane-based public relations company Mercer PR. Founded by former journalist Lyall Mercer, who was omnipresent at the Forum, the company’s clients have included the Hillsong Church and the Queensland Liberal National Party. According to the company’s website, it assists clients “to manage their public messages, achieve real outcomes and develop proactive media strategies. We also assist our clients to minimise adverse publicity.”

On this last criterion, the Nauru government should be asking for its money back. Through Mercer PR, it has long disputed reports of refugees in distress and incidents of self-harm, rape or attempted suicide. Just before the Forum, President Waqa angered human rights groups by claiming that children were being “pushed” into self-harm by their families and refugee advocates. “It’s the way of working the system,” he said, “probably short-circuiting it, just to get to Australia.”

Such claims were dismissed out of hand by the refugees I spoke to, with one Somali man stating angrily, “Children growing crazy. They tried to suicide. No future.”

Facing obstruction on the broader issue of resettlement, international human rights groups have ramped up pressure in relation to children. The Refugee Council of Australia has launched a Kids off Nauru campaign, prioritising the relocation of vulnerable children as a first step.

According to a report released by the council during the Forum leaders’ meeting, “Australia’s policy has traumatised children so much that they are giving up eating and trying to kill themselves. Australian courts are increasingly forced to step in so that people can get the medical treatment they urgently need, as the Australian government repeatedly ignores doctors’ advice and does everything it can to avoid people being transferred to Australia, including sending them to Taiwan and Papua New Guinea.”

Refugee advocates are encouraging Nauru and Australia to take up New Zealand’s offer of 150 places for resettlement, but both governments are reluctant to budge, partly to avoid derailing the current US resettlement initiative.

“If Australia refuses to change course, it must not stand in the way of others who are willing to offer these people the protection they so desperately need,” says Amnesty International’s Pacific representative, Roshika Deo. “New Zealand’s prime minister this week reaffirmed a longstanding offer to take in 150 refugees per year from Manus Island and Nauru — Australia must facilitate, and not obstruct, this process.”

Pressure like this has not swayed the Australian government or its Nauruan counterpart. As she talked to journalists, Charmaine Scotty shifted blame towards the families of distressed children: “This child abuse that is happening — where are the parents? What is happening to the care of the children?” She called for UN agencies to upgrade their presence beyond a joint, locally staffed office in order to obtain accurate information on the ground.

Pacific governments have legitimate criticisms of some overseas journalists, who parachute into regional meetings without knowing the local agenda. It is a constant complaint in the islands that Australian and New Zealand media organisations do not invest in the region. Most media groups don’t allocate the travel budgets (let alone fund the overseas bureaus) that could benefit domestic audiences as well as the wider islands region.

But Waqa’s denial of the problems has been undercut by reality. As was highlighted by the release of notes kept by Roman Quaedvlieg, the former head of the Australian Border Force, Australian officials often despair at the challenges of operating in Nauru. Quaedvlieg’s notes from 2015 were released in the Australian parliament while the Forum was meeting, during the bitter battle with his former boss, home affairs minister Peter Dutton. The former Border Force head describes a case of self-immolation on Nauru, crumbling medical infrastructure and lack of staff training at the processing centre. (He recalls asking a young Nauruan liaison officer about drugs in the camp, at which point the man “asked me what I wanted and how much.”)

Quaedvlieg’s somewhat patronising take on Nauru masks the larger problem: the original sin lies in Canberra, not Yaren. Five years ago, reporting on Australian policy in Nauru, I wrote that “the legitimate focus on the plight of refugees on Nauru has overshadowed the impact Australian policies have had on the host nation, a closely integrated society of just 11,000 people.”

When I talked to Nauruan officials during this month’s Forum, the pressures on the economy, environment and livelihoods of Nauruan citizens are all the more apparent. While these officials seek to deal with the challenges, the presence of hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees in Nauru is placing an extra burden on the island’s water, energy and food security.

Berilyn Jeremiah, Nauru’s commerce, industry and environment secretary, said that climate variability and natural disasters are already affecting the country. “Nauru is susceptible to droughts which, in the past, have had significant impacts on health, food security and the economy, as it can put a strain on our national budget,” she said. “Drought periods can also increase the risk of fires, and for a country that is very remote, losing critical infrastructure and services such as power, water, schools and hospitals can be disastrous.”

Improved water security is vital, she said. “Food insecurity is also a major risk for Nauru, given our dependence on imported foods and our geographical isolation. Most agricultural activity is carried out by individual households and is constrained by limited availability of suitable land and water.”

Nauru has developed a twenty-year master plan for water security but lacks the resources to implement it. The environment department is seeking to increase the number of desalination plants, but they are costly to run and difficult to maintain. In the meantime, water tankers carry water to local communities on a regular schedule.

A heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels means that the cost of power generation in Nauru is also very high. Only 3 per cent of Nauru’s electricity is provided by renewable energy — a very modest share compared to other small island states in the region. An ambitious Nauru Energy Road Map seeks to increase renewable sources to 50 per cent by 2020.

Nauru also has some of the poorest health indicators for non-communicable diseases in the Pacific islands. A decade ago, according to the country’s new strategy to tackle the health crisis, it ranked second to Afghanistan in the age-standardised mortality rate for these diseases.

Dr John Auto, a Solomon Islander who coordinates public health programs for Nauru’s health ministry, declined to talk about refugee health but described the many programs the government is mounting to address obesity, diabetes and a junk food epidemic. Nutrition is a central element of the country’s current action plan on non-communicable diseases.

Recent surveys have highlighted the difficulty of growing fruit and vegetables, and the high cost of importing nutritious, fresh food aboard Nauru Airlines planes. “We have WHO standards like ‘are there servings of fruit and vegetable in the diet?’” Auto said. “But 95 per cent of Nauruans in that survey reported not having the recommended amount of vegetables and fruits.”

Nauru certainly needs resources to respond to these challenges. Beyond targeted aid and money channelled through Australian corporations like Canstruct, the Nauru government raises significant revenue by charging Australian taxpayers a monthly visa fee for hosting the refugees and asylum seekers. But these financial benefits — worth millions of dollars — must be balanced against the structural damage to Nauru’s economy and society as the refugee regime drags on.

We’ve seen this all before. In 2001, when offshore processing was first established by the Howard government, Australia pledged that asylum seekers would be processed within six months or “as soon as reasonably possible.” These timelines were implausible then and remain implausible today.

When Labor prime minister Julia Gillard revived the Pacific solution in 2012, it was clearly foreseeable that the same script would play out. Most asylum seekers would quickly be granted refugee status, but third countries would be reluctant to take them for resettlement. Medical research has shown that people’s mental and physical health then deteriorates under indefinite mandatory detention, leading to psychological crises and self-harm.

Governments in Canberra have long hoped that a third country would rescue Australia from this brutal and futile policy, but options are limited. Third countries welcoming refugees want to take the best and the brightest, professional people with good skills and qualifications and young people with good prospects for education and a healthy life. As the numbers are whittled down, Nauru will be left with people who have been refused refugee status, have complex medical problems, are in divided families or have received adverse security rulings.

The Obama administration’s bilateral agreement to resettle up to 1250 refugees from Manus and Nauru was begrudgingly affirmed by Donald Trump in his notorious phone conversation with Malcolm Turnbull early last year (although a leaked transcript of their conversation revealed that President Trump was bemused as to why Australia would not take people who had been granted refugee status and security clearances).

US interior secretary Ryan Zinke, who led the American delegation to this year’s Forum dialogue in Nauru, confirmed that the Trump administration would continue taking refugees from Nauru and Manus Island, but stressed in no uncertain terms that this would be a lengthy process. “We honour our commitments,” he said, “but the [security] vetting process has been frustratingly slow, especially from countries with no database, where the records are unclear.”

As Malcolm Turnbull emphasised to President Trump during their phone call, the United States doesn’t have to take the full number of 1250 refugees: “Every individual is subject to your vetting. You can decide to take them or to not take them after vetting. You can decide to take 1000 or one hundred. It is entirely up to you. The obligation is to only go through the process.” Going through the process — or just going through the motions — will continue to distort the economy and social structure of Nauru.

As chief secretary of the government of former Nauruan president René Harris, Mathew Batsiua played a crucial role in establishing the offshore processing program in Nauru. Today, he is a leading opponent of the Waqa government. (Just days after we spoke, Batsiua’s lawyers won a permanent stay on serious criminal charges relating to a 2015 protest outside the Nauru parliament.)

As a former MP and justice minister, Batsiua continues to support the offshore processing program as a contribution to a regional solution to the international refugee crisis. But he now argues that the mismanagement of the program is causing long-term problems for Nauru’s economy.

“Nauru goes into these arrangements with the view that it’s a transit country, so everything is temporary,” Batsiua told me. “The quicker people move on, the better for them, the better for everybody. They can move on with their lives, because we are dealing with human beings. It’s something we’ll try to deal with as best we can.

“But I’m talking about Nauru’s ongoing viability as an economy. When the numbers dwindle, and they will, the government hasn’t paid any attention to our local industry. All the industries that were thriving when they took over — the rehab, the phosphate mining, the fisheries — they are all struggling. In the phosphate industry, the number of buyers has gone down, certainly the tonnage has gone right down, there’s a lack of capital equipment and they’ve had to retrench people.”

Batsiua believes that the government has overwhelmingly focused on the refugee processing centre and “gloried in the revenues derived from that, at the expense of investing in our permanent industries.”

But there’s one fundamental difference between Pacific solutions Mark I (2001–07) and Mark II (2012–ongoing), and that is the fact that Nauru signed the 1951 Refugee Convention in 2011. As a party to the convention, it is obliged to provide sanctuary for refugees, assist their wellbeing and not return them to unsafe countries. As the program winds down, the danger is that future governments in Canberra may justify walking away from the remaining complex cases because Nauru is a sovereign country with its own obligations under international law.

For the young Iraqi woman, the young Iranian man, the traumatised children and the other asylum seekers and refugees on the island, as well as the people of Nauru, this shameful business cannot end too quickly. After the looming Australian elections, will an incoming Labor government have the courage to develop new policies? •

The post The island making everyone crazy appeared first on Inside Story.

After a firestorm of images and audio of distressed, wailing children, Trump told a cabinet meeting, “My wife, our first lady, is down now at the border because it really bothered her to be looking at this and seeing it, as it bothered me, as it bothered everybody at this table. We’re all bothered by it.” “Bothered” is as close as this president gets to compassion, so it was a significant backdown.

Part of what has made him so diabolical as a political opponent and as president is how he thrives on outrage and capitalises on the horrified reaction of the press. This time the horror cut through to create a united reaction across the political spectrum. Even Trump’s base, usually baying unwaveringly for blood, paused in confusion. For once, a normal standard of decency applied again.

Cruelty can make for pretty powerful political capital. But it must be wielded subtly and cautiously. Like anything in politics, it all comes down to the messaging. The US administration cocked up its PR in all sorts of ways, making every kind of beginner’s mistake. (Hot tip: don’t wear a jacket emblazoned with “I really don’t care, do you?” to visit children in detention.) Just ask our government. After all, we’ve been perfecting the language of deterrence for decades now.

The very point is the cruelty, and it’s important to keep reiterating it. Many people will go along with that; in fact, they’ll be comforted by it. It’s all done in the name of deterrence. But there’s a small, unspoken caveat. The government must have plausible deniability. It needs to keep a safe distance from the facts, or at least from the effects of the policy on innocent people (a safe distance being the thousands of kilometres between the mainland and Nauru). The main thing to remember is that you should never, personally, directly, mention any kids.

This month will mark five years of detention for 134 refugee children who have been waiting, with no end in sight, on Nauru. Forty of them have been detained for their entire lives.

Try to name one of them. Conjure up a picture, even. You can’t. For good reason. Our governments have known for years that they can never capitalise on cruelty to children, at least not with Australian voters. And that’s because images of children tend to cut through all the careful messaging to provoke an immediate response.

“Because children are vulnerable and blameless — the purest victims — depictions of their suffering have an extraordinarily visceral impact,” writes the academic and essayist Susie Linfield in her book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. “And so they should. It is not naivete or sentimentality to be moved, pierced or outraged by such images.”

The Trump administration challenged the image of a distraught toddler on the 2 July cover of Time magazine, photoshopped with an impassive Trump under the headline, “Welcome to America.” But it came too late: finally there was a galvanising image of an America that no one, not even Trump’s trolls, could bear.

It’s obvious, yes, and not new: think Nick Ut’s image from 1972 of a naked nine-year-old fleeing an American army napalm attack. Or the late Chris Hondros’s shot of a blood-spattered Iraqi girl, Samar Hassan, just after her parents had been killed. Or Kevin Carter’s photograph of an emaciated Sudanese child, her head resting on the earth, as a vulture stands by.

Kids cut through. Images of vulnerable children seem to be the one deal-breaker when it comes to the power of deterrence policy. Think of any point when there’s been a momentary pause in public sentiment, a moment where people pay attention again. Think of that photo of Alan Kurdi, who drowned off the Greek coast, an image that can be credited with more sympathetic policy settings in Canada and Germany. Think of the Let Them Stay campaign launched in 2015 by Fairfax and GetUp! using images of children and babies set to be sent back to Nauru. They were named, they were given stories, and by the end of the campaign an Essential Poll found 40 per cent of people in favour of letting asylum seekers stay, an enormous lurch from the 30 per cent that pro–asylum seeker sentiment had hovered around for a decade.

Of course, public opinion never stands still. And countries from all over the world are watching Australia’s messaging when it comes to border protection, their governments keen to sample the playbook. But in a political environment in which empathy is derided as weakness, where trolling is a sport and border protection policy is characterised as “not taking the foot off the throat of this threat,” it’s worth trying to learn something from this brief moment. There’s still merit in reminding people of their humanity. Some things still cut through, some things still count. •

The post Cutting through appeared first on Inside Story.

That arrangement would have seen the first 800 unauthorised maritime arrivals sent to Malaysia, where they would be registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, and live in the community, provided with health and education (paid for by Australia) and local work rights while they waited for the outcome of their refugee applications.

The “swap” part involved Australia resettling 4000 certified (but different) refugees from Malaysia. Many tens of thousands of registered refugees (and many more undocumented) live in Malaysia, most of them Rohingyas from Myanmar. The 4000 would have been part of the almost 14,000 Australia resettled annually at that time.

The logic behind the plan was that, in theory, no asylum seeker would want to be part of that first group of 800 and so none would get on a boat for Australia. But the arrangement sank because, in 2011, the High Court ruled it unlawful, and the Coalition and Greens refused to facilitate legislation to make it lawful.

“I doubt it would have worked,” Abbott told the Samuel Griffiths Society in 2016. “Still, letting it stand would have been an acknowledgement of the government of the day’s mandate to do the best it could, by its own lights, to meet our nation’s challenges.”

Not exactly root-and-branch self-criticism, but an acknowledgement.

It’s worth recalling all this because if something is to be done for the approximately 800 people still stuck on Nauru and Manus, policy-makers will need to again think outside the square. The status quo is morally indefensible.

Abbott was right: the Malaysia arrangement probably wouldn’t have succeeded. For one thing, those entitlements in Malaysia (multi-ethnic, multi-religious, GDP per capita many times that of Indonesia and Cambodia) might themselves have proved a “pull factor” for those already in Indonesia or Malaysia.

As well, the people smugglers could have just loaded up the first 800 spots with freebies, or even paid asylum seekers to take the trip. The business thrives on misrepresentation of Australian policy; otherwise why would people still be trying to get here (and they are) when all that awaits them is misery and isolation in the Pacific?

But we’ll never know; the plan was scuppered, the boat arrivals accelerated, and more people drowned.

Where are we today? The boats have more or less stopped, or at least are not getting past the “turnbacks.” That’s a good thing for those who might otherwise have died on that journey, but the flipside in the Pacific, the human misery, must be ended.

Even if the people in question are not “genuine” asylum seekers but rather “economic refugees” attempting to gain residency for themselves and their family in a high-income country by the back door, it is hardly an indicator of poor character, even if it involves telling fibs. (It could even suggest a degree of get-up-and-go, which is the sort of thing that makes “good” migrants.)

The Howard government had slowed unauthorised arrivals to a trickle, and the uptick began when the Rudd government in 2008 did precisely what it said it would at the previous year’s election: end offshore processing while keeping mandatory detention. It turned out to be arguably its biggest policy failure.

Although no one in the Coalition would publicly admit it, part of the reason it refused to help out legislatively in 2011 and 2012 was that it feared the plan might work, and rob it of what it saw as a vital tool in its political armoury.

Abbott became prime minister and the boats did indeed “stop” (though there is evidence the decline started with Kevin Rudd’s July 2013 policy change). What didn’t stop was Abbott’s declining popularity, which suggested that “boats” might not be the electoral game-changer the political class assumes it to be.

Yet the Coalition, and a large section of its hardcore supporters, remains utterly obsessed with the issue. Down to DNA level, it forms a crucial part of the identity of the Liberal Party, to the extent that the mere fact of being a tough immigration minister can propel an MP into leadership contention. (See first Scott Morrison and now Peter Dutton.) The self-appointed “base” demands the nasty language; the more cruelty the better.

But the Greens have the worst policy. They see no difficult issues, just base political considerations preventing Australia from doing what it should: resettle anyone who can scrape together the money for a package that takes them by plane to Jakarta and then by boat to Australia, and can be assessed as a refugee.

Then there’s that reliable stand-by, the “regional solution,” the most common version of which would involve processing asylum seekers in Indonesia — in other words, simply cutting out the last, dangerous, leg of the journey. So getting to Indonesia would be enough to guarantee Australian residency, provided refugee status is proved.

Wonderful for Garuda airlines if put in place, but pretty soon our annual quota (17,555 in 2015–16) would be gobbled up monthly, even weekly. And faced with an overloaded UNHCR bureaucracy in Java, aspiring residents would still have the option of jumping on a leaky boat headed south.

Labor remains terrified of the issue, with murmurings of dissent emerging from time to time, including in the past fortnight. Probably the bulk of the membership, and quite a few MPs, favour a Greens-style approach.

According to recent reports, Labor’s national conference, which was threatening to be a headache for Bill Shorten on asylum seekers, has been postponed until December. If Malcolm Turnbull calls an election before then, the 28 July by-election date shenanigans will have helped Labor no end.

Thanks to Rudd Labor’s disaster, Coalition “rebels” on asylum seeker policy now number just one: Russell Broadbent.

For those who (like me) believe that denial of residency is a legitimate tool to break the business model, but that inflicting cruelty absolutely is not, the options seem limited.

How about this: bring all the detainees on Manus and Nauru, whether found to be refugees or not (and excluding those assessed a security risk), to Australia, give them permanent residency and assist them to get on with their lives. Boat turnbacks should continue, even escalated, certainly in the short term as the boat operators test the new waters.

Yes it would be a risk, but all public policy involves trade-offs.

Let’s increase our refugee intake further, in part to ameliorate the damage already inflicted on our reputation overseas. And policy-makers should put on their lateral thinking caps, as the Gillard government did. Inflicting misery should be ruled out as a tool of deterrence.

(Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, is no great friend of Australia; that particular plan is unlikely to be revived.)

There is no chance of the Coalition doing anything like this. But a new government might. ●

The post Beyond the morally indefensible status quo appeared first on Inside Story.

In 1991, it was little more than a trading post, with around 7000 of the pastoral Turkana people living nearby. Twelve months later, its population had more than tripled with the arrival of 16,000 Sudanese children — the “Lost Boys” as they became known — and 200 adults. They were soon joined by thousands of people from Ethiopia, following the collapse of the government there.

Over the next decade, tens of thousands more refugees from the two countries arrived, along with people fleeing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa. By 2006, the camp housed 90,000 people; even one poor soul from Namibia, thousands of kilometres away, had ended up there. Kakuma town, separated from the camp by a wide, dry riverbed, had grown too, and now had 65,000 residents.

When I visited two years later, on assignment for Inside Story, the refugee population had fallen to 50,000. Some camp inhabitants had been resettled in the West, including in Australia. And around 35,000 South Sudanese had returned home to Sudan, where the decades-long war with the north was finally over and an independence vote had been promised.

Long emergency: Kakuma town and camp, in remote northwest Kenya. Google Maps

The camp still covered a vast thirty-six square kilometres, and the easiest way to see it was by bicycle. My guide was a South Sudanese refugee named Philip Ngor Bol, one of the camp “mobilisers” whose job was to ride around encouraging their compatriots to return home. I followed him on the back of a “boda-boda” bicycle taxi ridden by a young Turkana man who made his living transporting refugees and their goods.

I soon realised the camp was unlike others I’d visited in East Africa. Instead of row upon row of white tents, most of the refugees lived in small mudbrick houses. And while they were plainly extremely poor, Kakuma seemed less like a place of waiting — for handouts, or to go home — and more like a town. On the dusty streets, Turkana women hawked charcoal and meat and firewood, using their takings to buy surplus rations from the residents.

The refugees, who had typically been small-scale farmers or herders before fleeing their countries, were also striving to earn a living. One area of the camp was called Hong Kong because there were so many small businesses and traders: clothing stores, video parlours, money transfer shops, bakeries and restaurants. Most ubiquitous were the “dukas,” tiny general stores providing basic goods, and occasionally a laugh too. One, which sold powdered juice, sweets, short-cake biscuits and single cigarettes, had a sign above that read: “No credit until all the donkeys grow horns.”

I thought of that duka the other day when reading about a new study, Kakuma as a Marketplace, conducted in Kakuma by the International Finance Corporation, or IFC. The IFC is the member of the World Bank group that focuses on the private sector in developing countries, and has previously had little to do with humanitarian affairs. It was invited to do research in Kakuma by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, which is exploring new ways of helping people displaced for long periods.

And so, unlike the aid and donor groups that have published countless studies of malnutrition or violence or education in refugee camps, the IFC set out to study the economy of Kakuma, where the population has swelled again in recent years to almost a quarter of a million people, making it Kenya’s tenth-biggest urban area.

Looking at the camp and neighbouring town “through the lens of a private firm looking to enter a new market,” the IFC team surveyed 1400 households, collecting data on consumption patterns and preferences, financial literacy, access to banking and telecommunications, and employment and business ownership. It found that the refugee settlement’s thriving informal economy includes around 2000 businesses — half of all the businesses across the entire Turkana region — including fourteen wholesalers and ten big markets. Despite the practical and legal limitations faced by refugees, who cannot be formally employed, own property or move, some 12 per cent of them identify as business owners or self-employed. The town, meanwhile, has 232 shops along or near the main road.

Annual household consumption in the camp and town is conservatively estimated at $56.2 million. This, the IFC concludes, demonstrates that while Kakuma’s refugees are still dependent on aid, they have sufficient economic clout to interest the private sector. Until now, commercial firms have largely ignored refugee settings — at least partly because of a lack of information about the markets there, the IFC believes. Investment by companies and social enterprises has the potential to “expand job opportunities for refugees and the host community, improve services, provide more choice, reduce prices, and contribute to self-reliance,” the report says.

Given the vulnerability of refugees, some people will be wary of private-sector involvement, especially if it comes at the expense of traditional donor services. But Michel Botzung, the IFC’s manager for fragile and conflict situations in Africa, says it is in no way suggesting replacing the “care and maintenance” function of agencies like UNHCR, but rather wants to boost the local economy for the benefit of all. “Refugees operate and grow enterprises in a very constrained environment,” he says in a telephone interview. “If you give them more support and flexibility, how far can they go?”

Nor is the IFC proposing that the private sector be encouraged to look for opportunities in emergency situations, says Botzung. The focus would be on long-established refugee camps where the residents have few prospects of obtaining citizenship in the host country or of going home in the near future.

Kakuma wasn’t meant to be one of those places, of course. When I was there in 2008, the town residents’ biggest fear was that the camp would soon close, destroying the local economy. But since South Sudan achieved its dream of independence in 2011 it has been riven by internal conflict. Around 80,000 South Sudanese have fled to Kakuma since the end of 2013, necessitating the opening of a new settlement, known as Kalobeyei, nearby. In May — more than twenty-five years after Kakuma was opened — the number of registered refugees in the two camps was 185,624, some 107,000 of those from South Sudan. Meanwhile, the town’s numbers have held steady. As in Dadaab, the vast camp that houses 235,000 Somalis in northeast Kenya, some adults in Kakuma have spent their entire lives in a refugee camp.

What the IFC study highlights is that many of those refugees have a measure of economic independence, even if humanitarian assistance remains their main source of income and work opportunities. In fact, nearly three-quarters of camp residents surveyed claim to have a regular income. This comes mainly in the form of bamba chakula (“get your food”) vouchers issued by the World Food Programme, which allow refugees to use their mobile phones to purchase selected food items from shops rather than receive a standard food package. But Kakuma residents also draw modest salaries from NGOs, earn income from their businesses or by reselling rations, and receive cash from relatives abroad.

Around half of the refugees’ expenditure goes towards consumer goods, particularly rice, pasta, flour and milk powder, which are typically purchased from dukas. The IFC says the demand is sufficiently large to support one or even two supermarkets that could serve the camp and town, bringing down prices.

Besides food and personal care items, the most popular purchases in Kakuma are television sets, motorbikes, and solar panels and power generators, since the camp is not connected to the grid and UNHCR does not provide electricity. With money also going towards cooking fuel and charcoal, the IFC says there is a market for “a commercial solution that provides energy and lighting at a lower cost.” Social enterprises already offer such services in other parts of East Africa, especially the informal settlements in big cities.

Banking is another area with potential, the researchers found. Most people in the camp and town already own mobile phones. But fewer than a third of the camp residents use their phones for banking or money transfer services, despite the ubiquity of the practice in other parts of Kenya. And even with Kakuma’s large population, only a single bank has a branch there — Equity Bank, which targets low-income customers who are ignored by most other financial institutions. Just one in ten camp residents have a bank account, and only half of the people who live in the town.

Among Kakuma residents keen to start a business, 99 per cent of those in the town and 95 per cent of those in the camp lack the necessary capital. Only 11 per cent of business owners in the camp borrowed money to start their business. Lending to poor people is not nearly as risky as one may think, though, as Equity Bank’s experience in other parts of Kenya shows. During my visit to Kakuma in 2008 I met a man named Alex Elisaba, who wore a tape measure around his neck and doubled as a tailor and a shopkeeper. Two years earlier, he had received a small loan via an aid organisation working in Kakuma. He repaid the loan in six months, and his business was thriving.

Opportunities also exist in the education sector, the IFC says. Ten years ago, the lack of school places was one reason that so many South Sudanese were willing to go back home. The situation is little better today. Kakuma has just twenty-two primary schools and five secondary schools. At least 26,000 school-age kids are not enrolled in school, mainly because of a lack of places. Some communities in the camp have responded by starting their own schools, with better student–teacher ratios than the free ones; the IFC estimates that refugees in Kakuma spend more than $1 million a year on education. “The future school system in Kakuma might be a hybrid — a mix of public and private,” the report says.

Refugees are also willing to pay for improved sanitation, it seems. Nearly half of Kakuma camp residents surveyed say they would pay for better latrines. Sanivation, a Kenyan social enterprise that installs toilets in private homes for a small fee and then collects the waste to create briquettes for heating, has already completed a pilot program in Kakuma.

The IFC’s plan is not without its critics. Jeff Crisp, research fellow at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and a former head of policy development at UNHCR, says the new study is useful in dispelling the myth of the “dependency syndrome” — the idea that refugees merely sit around waiting for the next food distribution. But he questions the merit of exploring opportunities for the private sector when the day-to-day needs of the refugees are still so profound.

“I’m much more interested in opportunities for refugees,” he tells me. “There are still big challenges when it comes to freedom of movement, registration of businesses, and access to capital.” He also questions whether Kenyan firms — who are very good at sniffing out opportunities for profit across the country — would have ignored Kakuma until now if the strong business case was there.

Indeed, the IFC notes in its report that there are still many challenges to investing in new or existing businesses in Kakuma. As many as half of the camp residents have had no schooling; three-quarters say they have no knowledge of financial matters. Regulations prohibiting formal work — refugees employed by charities are classified as “incentive workers” and paid at lower-than-market rates — make it hard for businesses to employ the best candidates. The remote location of the camp and poor quality of the roads are other disincentives for investors.

Whatever the fate of the report’s recommendations, the resilient refugees of Kakuma won’t be holding their breath. As I observed a decade ago, most of them are too busy making the best of a very bad situation, carving out a new life in “nowhere,” to worry about matters beyond their control. ●

The post Dispelling the myth of dependency appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s one thing for backbencher Tony Abbott, a former prime minister nursing a damaged ego, to set himself up as an alternative leader. There’s nothing anyone can do about that. While the home affairs minister isn’t as brazen, he does have a tendency to make things difficult for his colleagues — not quite contradicting government policy but adding bits on, inserting inflammatory statements, creating headlines. And he does it with impunity.

Early this year he led the federal government’s attack on Victoria’s “African gang crisis,” apparently because there’s an election there in November. People were afraid to leave their houses, Dutton thundered. Whether or not this was a concerted government strategy, he went further than his colleagues and left them having to explain what Peter meant. More recently he went completely off the reservation, ruminating on a plan to fast-track visas for white South African farmers, pointedly contrasting that country with “civilised” Australia. Foreign minister Julie Bishop had the job of mopping up.

Under normal circumstances, a prime minister would haul a self-indulgent subordinate over the coals — stick to the script, get on with the job — but we don’t live in normal times. The most precarious prime minister in living memory, Malcolm Turnbull grins and bears it. In this way, Dutton’s shenanigans are yet another symptom of the strange political climate we exist in.

There’s a tendency among political observers, particularly his opponents, to cast Dutton as a crafty political operator, a man of immense subtlety to whom there is much more than meets the eye. Yet the evidence is elusive. As health minister he earned little applause — even from commentators sympathetic to the government’s aims — as a generator of ideas, a salesman or an effective negotiator. The immigration portfolio transformed him, as it did his predecessor Scott Morrison, into a household name, a recognised “tough guy” and — among a tiny cohort of the population — a folk hero.

Dutton was a prime mover behind last year’s same-sex marriage postal survey. When that plan was announced, many equality supporters quivered, believing that a voluntary survey (rather than a compulsory plebiscite) would skew towards the status quo. Why else, after all, would the cunning Dutton devise it?

It turned out, according to opinion polls, that opponents of gay marriage were less likely to participate than supporters were. Oops.

With surveyed Yes support starting way in front, the No campaign’s challenge was to grind its opponents down over the course of the campaign. But most respondents returned their forms in the first week, before either side had shifted into second gear. D’oh!

A 61.6 per cent Yes vote to 38.4 per cent No — way to go Dutts.

In public, Peter Dutton doesn’t give much away. It might be a case of still waters running deep, or perhaps what you see is what you get. The off-mic glimpses we’ve been given — Dutton ingratiating himself with then prime minister Abbott with chortles about climate change in the South Pacific and “Cape York Time” (to which Abbott laughed obligingly), and that “mad fucking witch” text message accidentally sent to a journalist — flesh the character out, but only a little.

Many on the left lament his “dog-whistling.” That hackneyed phrase, signifying subliminal messaging to one group while the rest remain oblivious, implies political finesse and, most importantly, some kind of success. But Dutton doesn’t seem to have done much for the government’s position or his own standing with the general population.

The “white farmers” meme — our white brethren need rescuing from the barbaric hordes — with the implication, spoken or otherwise, that perhaps it’s time to admit our opposition to apartheid was a mistake, had been bubbling in right-wing internet circles for some time, and seems to have arrived, or at least solidified, in Dutton’s consciousness via a couple of News Corp columnists. As far as I know he is the only senior member of a Western government to expound on it publicly. Not even Donald Trump has succumbed to the temptation.

Not to be left behind, Tony Abbott — perhaps in preparation for Tuesday’s double act with Pauline Hanson — furiously, if belatedly, agreed.

Dutton is adored by the rabid right, fawned over on Sky News (“Good stuff. You put steel in the government’s spine,” gushed Paul Murray in a typically chummy interview on Monday) and on a few chosen radio programs that cater mostly to older conservative males. They, like many ideologically committed campaigners of various stripes, project their own convictions onto the general population; for them, the minister’s soundbites are good politics, and if only the wimpy Turnbull would follow suit, the government wouldn’t be in all this trouble.

Yes, “prioritise white farmers” is a signal, a tug at the heart strings, a longing for a simpler, more homogeneous time. Depending on the survey wording, you might even get a majority of voters supporting the idea, but its strong emotional appeal is restricted to a tiny portion of the electorate, outside which it remains a fringe issue. It won’t rescue the government, change many votes or elevate Dutton’s standing as preferred Liberal leader (and hence prime minister), which remains stubbornly in single digits.

Rather than try to divine dastardly genius in Dutton’s actions, it might be more realistic to see him as someone who lets his ideological inclinations get the better of him. He evidently doesn’t get out much, avoids the ABC (they’re “dead to me” he announced last week), prefers the adulation of friendly media outlets and perhaps forgets, or doesn’t understand, that there’s a wider world out there.

Yet even he probably realises he went too far when he more or less called a major African nation “uncivilised,” and he probably knows that it’s damaged his leadership prospects among his parliamentary colleagues.

Dutton is a symptom of the current fragile political climate and enfeebled prime minister. He is perhaps the closest we have in senior circles to a Trump-like demagogue. It’s just possible, though unlikely, that he’ll become prime minister before the next election.

But the electoral and economic cycle favours Labor, and as long as that party’s leaders avoid John Hewson’s fate of drowning in policy detail, the Dutton prime ministership would not last long. It could even be argued such a contest would do the country good. ●

The post Small world appeared first on Inside Story.

A central component of Australia’s asylum policy has been Operation Sovereign Borders, a naval operation intended to identify, intercept and turn back refugee boats before they reach the country’s shores. Taking its cue from Canberra, the European Union has adopted a more extreme approach, subcontracting the task of interception and return to the Libyan Coastguard and militia groups that detain, abuse, exploit and enslave people seeking to cross the Mediterranean.

Most of the literature on Australia’s approach to the refugee issue covers the period since 2001, when John Howard’s government refused to allow a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, to enter Australian waters because it was carrying more than 400 asylum seekers, most of them from Afghanistan. Shortly afterwards, Canberra introduced the Border Protection Act, confirming Australia’s sovereign right to determine “who will enter and reside in” the country, and the Pacific Solution, whereby asylum seekers were incarcerated on the small island state of Nauru, where their claim to refugee status was considered.

Claire Higgins’s new book breaks a considerable amount of new ground by providing a detailed account of Australian refugee policy-making between the mid 1970s and early 1990s, a period when a relatively small number of asylum seekers — around 3000 — arrived by boat from Vietnam, Cambodia and China. The figure was to grow substantially in later years, reaching a peak of around 17,000 in 2012.

Some commentators (including Malcolm Fraser, who served as prime minister between 1975 and 1983) have argued that this was an era of exemplary generosity. Draconian responses such as pushbacks and detention were considered but rejected. The resettlement of refugees from Southeast Asia was initiated and subsequently expanded. And, as Higgins explains, while successive governments were eager to control the arrival of “boat people,” they also felt that it would be advantageous for the country to honour its responsibilities and uphold the international rule of law.

Higgins’s account of refugee policy-making during this period neatly combines a chronological narrative with thematic analysis. A brief introduction outlines the methodology employed by the study, reviews the existing literature on the events that it covers, and presents the facts and figures relating to boat arrivals. Subsequent chapters focus on the government’s efforts to control the refugee story presented to the Australian electorate, the methods employed to ascertain whether the asylum seekers had a valid claim to refugee status (almost all were allowed to remain) and how resettlement was used as a means of limiting spontaneous arrivals.

The book concludes with an analysis of Australia’s relations with countries of first asylum in the region, an account of the country’s engagement with the international community on refugee issues, and an examination of the debate that took place within government and parliament on the fraught issue of detention. As chronicled by Higgins, a decisive point was reached in 1989, when an impending influx of Cambodian people prompted the authorities to place two newly arrived families from that country under house arrest. It was a first step towards what was to become Australia’s most infamous refugee policy: mandatory and indefinite incarceration.

There is a great deal to admire about this book. It is engagingly written, carefully avoiding academic or bureaucratic jargon. It tells a gripping story while providing key insights into the many variables and different stakeholders that played a role in determining Australian refugee policy during the period under review. It makes excellent use of archival sources, some of them previously unexplored.

Asylum by Boat also raises a series of questions that remain highly relevant today, not only in Australia but also in many other parts of the world. Do states have an obligation to admit refugees, or can they legitimately be intercepted and turned back? Should countries of origin and transit be persuaded (or bribed) to prevent the departure and onward movement of asylum seekers? And to what extent can creating safe and legal routes avert the need for people to embark on difficult and dangerous journeys from one country and continent to another? ●

The post Operation Sovereign Borders: a prehistory appeared first on Inside Story.

Dutton has run the government side of the latest News Corp–Coalition tag-team outrage campaign — the one about Melbourne’s “African crime wave.” He is, perhaps, the worthiest of today’s crop to assume the mantle of the legendary John Howard.

Yet when voters are asked in surveys who they think should lead the Liberal Party and hence be prime minister, the contest is between Malcolm Turnbull and foreign minister Julie Bishop, who each have around 30 per cent support. At around 5 per cent, Dutton barely registers. (His predecessor as immigration minister, treasurer Scott Morrison, attracts about the same level of support; Tony Abbott sits in the low teens.)

What’s going on? Isn’t migrant-bashing popular in voterland anymore? At a time when Australians find inspiration in so few politicians, shouldn’t the tell-it-like-it-is home affairs minister be riding a wave of adulation?

Australian politics is not in a healthy place. Donald Trump aside, it is difficult to think of national leaders and senior government members of other comparable democracies who regularly debase themselves, and their country, as ours do with these campaigns against minorities. Turnbull, once proudly above all this, is now so enfeebled he feels obliged to join in.

Political commentators mostly agree that it all makes good politics — but does it? Is it all it’s cracked up to be?

Dutton is certainly popular, phenomenally, among a tiny section of society — the self-appointed “base” and conscience of the Liberal Party. The Sky-News-after-dark cohort: foaming at the mouth, ideologically fanatical, they demand the Coalition prosecutes culture war after culture war, on immigration, climate change and Islam.

Quite a few of the larger Liberal movement, including MPs, reside in this group. Crucially, they project their obsessions onto the general population and insist this is where the smart politics is. It is them, more than the public, that Dutton and the ever-shrinking Malcolm largely aim to impress. Superficially it’s about retail politics, but deep down the motivation is internal legitimacy.

How did Australian politics arrive at this position? The answer consists of two words: John Howard. You can argue over his government’s accomplishments — good and bad — but when it comes to damaging, divisive rhetoric it set new standards for what is acceptable and, more importantly, what is believed to “work.”

The assumed potency of the politics, particularly regarding asylum seekers, has in turn polluted the policy — see, for example, what seems to be the deliberate inflicting of unnecessary misery on offshore detainees.

We got here via a series of events through which norms were established. It wasn’t always like this.

In 1988, opposition leader Howard attempted to generate a populist wave by suggesting Asian immigration be slowed. The notion was extremely popular in the electorate — Newspoll found more than three-quarters in favour — but the Hawke Labor government, not yet blessed with today’s generation of highly skilled, science-based apparatchiks, declined to capitulate. When Howard lost the leadership the following year, that ugly foray was roundly seen as a contributing factor.

In the profession of politics, lessons are learnt and codes of acceptable behaviour established, and when Howard returned to the leadership in 1995 he felt obliged to repudiate those youthful indiscretions. For the first half of his prime ministership his occasional tendency towards racially tinged politics — his inability to publicly disagree with Pauline Hanson’s assertions about Indigenous Australians and Asians, for example — was largely seen as an unfortunate indulgence, a little embarrassing.

But then came the 2001 election, and his and immigration minister Philip Ruddock’s astonishingly (by the standards of that time) inflammatory rhetoric (“I don’t want people of that type coming into this country,” the prime minister fumed at the height of “children overboard”) — followed, most importantly, by the election outcome. The strategy, roundly criticised before election day, was perceived to have prevailed: winners are grinners and Howard and his brand of politics were now seen as unassailable. That which had been no-go became mainstream.

None imbibed these lessons more enthusiastically than the Labor Party: nine years later, for example, after the Abbott-led opposition had promised to decrease immigration levels, the Gillard government validated Abbott’s strategy by declaring they would lower them even more. Hawke’s example was forgotten.

Sure, we should be able to discuss the best way to deter unauthorised maritime arrivals. Integration of migrants and refugees shouldn’t be out of conversational bounds. But when national leaders indulge in abusive campaigns against ethnic groups, they are setting a damaging example.

Is there a way out of this nasty place we find ourselves in? I believe the solution lies in taking away the political motivation. The electoral politics of minority-bashing has never been as potent as it was or is cracked up to be; it’s an issue that can generate high levels of public emotion without being a net vote-winner. Howard would have won in 2001, by about the same amount, had the Tampa never arrived and asylum seekers not become a central election issue.

Labor is extremely likely to win the next federal election, regardless of who is leading the Coalition (or, to a point, who is leading Labor), irrespective of tactics the Coalition adopts. If the Howard lessons are to be unlearned, the best scenario for the country, and indeed the Liberal Party, would be for Peter Dutton to be prime minister when this government meets its maker. If not Dutton, then Morrison will do, or even Abbott. Give the fanatical Coalition base what they demand, adopt the strategy of Andrew Bolt, Ray Hadley and Alan Jones, and let them go down with all guns blazing.

Then after the landslide result, as the Coalition forlornly picks up the pieces, the lessons of defeat will be learnt.

Australian voters aren’t necessarily nastier than their counterparts elsewhere; the grotesquery has been in our political class. Yet, as Howard learned three decades ago, race-baiting is not a winning electoral strategy. ●

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The work shown in Stuttgart and Venice is also part of the Triennial, which opened last week at the National Gallery of Victoria. Or is it? In Melbourne, the work is titled Wilson Must Go. The renaming, just a couple of days before the exhibition opened, is Breitz’s protest against the NGV’s use of Wilson Security staff.

Wilson has provided guards for Australia’s infamous offshore detention centres in Nauru (since 2012) and on Manus Island (from 2014 until October 2017). Wilson staff have been accused of having committed or been implicated in human rights violations, including child abuse, detailed in the Guardian’s Nauru files. To use Breitz’s words, “Wilson security has violently enforced the imprisonment of refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres.” She therefore felt that “it would be morally remiss… for me to remain silent in the context of the current conversation that is taking place around the Australian government’s ongoing and systematic abuse of refugees.”

As she put it on another occasion, “The same eyes that watched over murder, rape and child abuse in the detainment centres where these refugees are held would be watching over my work, these same people would care for my work. This scene became repulsive to me and I just felt the responsibility not only to my practice but also to the interviewees [featured in the art work] and to this museum that has been so generous to me.”

Breitz has been careful to stress that she does not have an issue with the NGV, which claims it was not responsible for appointing Wilson as the gallery’s “interim security provider” (to replace the previous contractor, which had been accused of underpaying its employees). Under the title, “Why I’m Sabotaging My Own Work,” Breitz wrote last week that “I trust that the NGV will receive this gesture as one of solidarity.”

Solidarity, if not love, was on display two days after the exhibition opened when the NGV hosted Candice Breitz in Conversation, a ticketed event with Ivan O’Mahoney, director of the SBS reality TV series Go Back to Where You Came From. “I care deeply about this museum,” Breitz told the gathering, which included her Melbourne gallerist Anna Schwartz and Simon Maidment, the senior NGV curator who has been Breitz’s main point of contact. She also emphasised how “very rigorous” and “very generous” the NGV had been in providing her with information about its relationship with Wilson Security. If anybody had bought a $25 ticket in the expectation of witnessing a controversial discussion, they would have been disappointed. All speakers seemed to share Breitz’s view and agree that Wilson must go.

The NGV has not endorsed Breitz’s protest — or those of two other Triennial artists, Irishman Richard Mosse and Mexican Rafael Lozano-Hemmer — but it has been accommodating, suggesting that it sympathises with the artists’ decision to protest. The gallery’s public stance is understandable. Wilson Must Go has generated publicity and allowed the NGV to position itself as a critical voice. In a city such as Melbourne, where many inner-city residents pride themselves on their liberal politics, public cultural institutions can be expected to be sympathetic to asylum seekers.

“It’s important for us that the museum remains as a platform for people with all kinds of views and to make those views heard,” Maidment explained during another panel discussion on the Triennial’s opening weekend. “People like Richard [Mosse], like Candice [Breitz], like many of the artists in the NGV triennial… people who have voices and issues they want to tackle in new and in engaging and emotive ways, and we try to enable those voices… And we’re thankful that they are willing to engage with us like this, in productive ways.”

But while the NGV has not objected to the renaming of Breitz’s and Lozano-Hemmer’s art works and changes to Mosse’s installation, it has apparently been less accommodating when it comes to the Artists’ Committee, a Melbourne-based group of art practitioners “that makes collaborative public work around the intersection of money, ethics and culture.”

It was the Artists’ Committee that first alerted Breitz to Wilson’s role. For the past six months or so, it has protested against the NGV’s partnership with Wilson. In August, it petitioned gallery director Tony Ellwood to dump Wilson by presenting a letter signed by hundreds of artists. In early October, members of the group covered the art gallery’s most prized possession, Picasso’s Weeping Woman — in 1986 famously stolen and later returned by political activists — with a black shroud featuring Wilson’s logo. Last week, at the occasion of the Triennial’s VIP reception, Committee members picketed the NGV entrance.

The Committee claims that the NGV has retaliated against local artists critical of its involvement with Wilson; according to a statement posted by the group last week, two Melbourne artist-run initiatives had been “in discussions with NGV programming staff about participation in the Triennial EXTRA program, but were promptly dropped from the program after they expressed concern about Wilson Security’s contract.”

Artists picketing the Triennial opening at the National Gallery of Victoria. Artists’ Committee

The NGV has also been careful to frame the protest as an issue to do with the freedom of artists, rather than an issue about Manus and Nauru. It did not object when Richard Mosse amended his art work by incorporating a message from Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani, who is currently held on Manus; an art museum sympathetic to his plight — rather than that of artists with a conflicted conscience — might have invited Boochani to join by phone or video link one of the discussion panels held in conjunction with the Triennial’s opening. He would have been an obvious choice, because his voice, via an interview with Melbourne writer Arnold Zable, is featured in the Triennial catalogue.

Breitz’s own experience also suggests that the NGV’s accommodation of the protest is only part of the gallery’s response. When she visited the art gallery the day after the Candice Breitz in Conversation forum, she reported: “As I entered the main door, the Wilson security guard posted at that door audibly got on his walkie talkie… ‘She’s carrying a “Refugee Rights Bag,”’ he told the person on the other side. The museum has me under surveillance.”

The bag that had attracted the guard’s attention was one of 5000 tote bags handed out at the Australian pavilion during the preview of this year’s Venice Biennale. Advertising Tracey Moffatt’s “My Horizon” solo show, the bag is emblazoned with the words “Refugee Rights” and “Indigenous Rights.” When Breitz “had a quiet chat” with the Wilson guard, he told her “that he and his colleagues were under strict instruction to report anyone who looked like they might have ‘political overtones,’ and especially anything to do with the ‘whole refugee thing.’”

The Triennial has five broad and unconnected themes: movement, change, virtual, body and time. Breitz’s installation, categorised under “movement,” is located in two adjoining rooms on the gallery’s third floor.

The visitor first enters a space resembling a movie theatre. On a large screen, the Hollywood actors Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore perform the narratives of six refugees. The visitor is made aware of the dynamics of representation and attention. Breitz reminds her audience that the experiences of refugees are not as highly valued in the “attention economy” as the fictional stories produced and disseminated by Hollywood. The fast-paced montage produces an awkward — and involuntary — dialogue between the two actors, in which different parts of the world, different kinds of borders and different reasons for fleeing one’s country become interwoven.

Only by passing through the space featuring Baldwin and Moore can the visitor enter the second space of the installation. Here, six television screens and accompanying headphones allow the visitor to sit across from the six refugees and listen to their stories. Each of the six testimonies is several hours long and screened in its entirety. The work engages with the multiplicity of being a refugee and in doing so potentially makes the spectator identify with the predicaments of displacement: anyone, including the spectator, might be forced to flee.

Breitz’s work is a thoughtful comment on our lack of attentiveness to the voices of people with whom we have little in common, and our propensity to tune in to the voices of celebrities. Her renaming of Love Story suggests that she is similarly attuned to the attentiveness towards herself as a critical artist, and that the new title functions to clarify her position, rather than sabotage her work, as she claimed when explaining her decision to protest. In other words, for Mosse, Lozano-Hemmer and Breitz, the reframing of their works may have been more than an attempt to avoid being “morally remiss.” The knowledge of the Wilson controversy in the Melbourne art scene created a context in which their art might have been misread.

Breitz expressed surprise that none of the Australian artists whose work is part of the Triennial was willing to join the protest. On the day of the Triennial’s opening, she commented on her Facebook page: “What I’ve learnt about Australia so far: You can put a lid on things here. Most people are willing to look the other way. Most people are comfortable remaining silent.”

One of the silent artists is Ben Quilty. His work — the painting of an orange life jacket he picked up on the Greek island of Lesbos — was also prompted by the issue of forced displacement. In a review for the Guardian, Brigid Delaney quoted him as saying, “Look at Peter Dutton, it’s a disgrace. You have to teach empathy and compassion — and a great place to do that is a gallery or museum, where you have all these children coming through.” In this instance, moral outrage directed at the likes of border security minister Dutton seems to do little more than legitimate the aestheticisation of forced displacement.

Breitz’s work demonstrates that the representation of the experiences of refugees — or the exhibition of objects representing these experiences, for that matter — does not automatically engender compassion and empathy. But what if a work of art produced awareness — or compassion and empathy, as Quilty claims? Could that be enough?

A visitor to the National Gallery of Victoria, although she might become more aware, more empathetic or more compassionate, would not necessarily act in solidarity with refugees as a result of her visit. That goes also for the artists: an engaged artist like Quilty may feel for the suffering of the people he encountered on Lesbos, but he did not translate his feelings into actions beyond the production of a work of art. Breitz, Mosse and Lozano-Hemmer, on the other hand, faced with the question “Is it really me who needs to act?,” decided to go one step further, not least because they could.

We love Breitz’s work, applaud her stance and admire her ability to articulate it so well. But we are also unsettled by the silence with which it has been met. This silence seems indicative of the ease with which the protest could be accommodated and appropriated by a major public cultural institution. Instead of serving as a call for denouncing the Australian government’s human rights abuses, the reframed art works became exemplars of artists’ freedom to have their say. Mind you, the freedom to speak up is not necessarily extended to anybody carrying a bag emblazoned with the text “Refugee Rights.”

The opportunity to host the artists’ protest allowed the NGV to dissociate itself from human rights abuses in offshore detention centres. It could also be argued that Breitz let not just the NGV and the Triennial’s Australian artists off the hook, but also the exhibition’s visitors, who applaud her stance because she could be seen to have acted also on their behalf.

The NGV, however, is an easy target for people concerned about Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. Wilson has far bigger contracts. It provides comprehensive security services to Arts South Australia, for example. In Victoria, its government clients include the Department of Human Services and the Department of Treasury and Finance. And of course, Wilson Security is only a subcontractor on Nauru; the human rights abuses occurring there are ultimately the responsibility of the Australian government and of the political parties that have lent bipartisan support to its policies.

But let’s finish by returning to those words of Breitz’s: “What I’ve learnt about Australia so far: You can put a lid on things here… But it’s hard to put a lid on the world.” ●

The post It’s hard to put a lid on the world appeared first on Inside Story.

Back then, the number of remaining asylum seekers on Nauru was just twenty-seven, far fewer than the almost 800 on Manus today. Over time, more than 700 had been resettled in Australia, notwithstanding the Howard government’s pledge that they would never be given permanent residency here. The last twenty-seven were in such a bad way that the psychiatrist employed by the International Organization for Migration, which managed the centre, warned that she would not be responsible if any of them resorted to suicide.

John Howard’s immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, responded by despatching a team of mental health experts to Nauru, who duly supported the psychiatrist’s call for the asylum seekers to be evacuated. Led by Paris Aristotle from the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture, the team reported that a number of the asylum seekers had “a history of suicide attempts and incidents of self-harm,” and identified “extreme levels of hopelessness and worthlessness” as major indicators of the suicide risk.

The minister made no mention of those findings when she announced on 14 October 2005 that all but two of the asylum seekers would be granted visas to come to Australia. Rather, she attributed the decision to “the government’s constant review of the failed asylum seekers caseload.”

Thirteen of the group were found to be genuine refugees, and the rest were given humanitarian visas, a move Vanstone said was “consistent with the government’s flexible approach to managing complex caseloads.” Her announcement on 14 October 2005 didn’t prompt any serious attempt by people smugglers to restart their trade.

There are six differences between that situation and what we see today, and they help explain why we are faced with what the UNHCR has correctly called an “escalating crisis.”

The first is that the numbers are much, much greater this time, especially when the number of refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru — well over a thousand — is added to the count.

The second is the government’s refusal to respond to the many warnings about the psychological state of those who came seeking Australia’s protection and the likelihood they will take extreme action.

In September last year, Aristotle implored the Turnbull government to remove asylum seekers from Nauru and Manus Island quickly or face the “high likelihood” that “many more men and women will express their despair by attempting to harm and kill themselves.” His concern was supported by a study by three mental health experts sent to Nauru and Manus by the UNHCR earlier last year. They found rates of depressive or anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder among asylum seekers and refugees on Manus Island “amongst the highest recorded rates of any surveyed population.”

In stark contrast to what happened in 2005, the warnings were ignored. What is more, the bleak predictions of suicides have come to pass. Two suicides have been reported in recent months on Manus, bringing to six the number of asylum seekers who have died after being transferred against their will to Papua New Guinea. The two most recent deaths followed constant expressions of concern by fellow detainees and advocates about the adequacy of mental health services.

The third difference is the government’s total refusal to yield to pragmatism and its blind adherence to the proposition that any display of compassion will be a green light to the people smugglers. This is despite the fact that there hasn’t been a successful boat arrival since well before the deal to resettle up to 1250 detainees in the United States was announced twelve months ago today.

Having secured that agreement with the Obama administration, the government had the opportunity to maximise the prospects of as many detainees as possible by helping them to present their cases; to secure a durable solution for 150 others by accepting a longstanding offer from New Zealand; to transfer those most damaged by their period in detention to Australia for medical treatment (as well as those with direct family links); and to revive efforts to find other resettlement places in Canada and elsewhere.

Immigration minister Peter Dutton could have borrowed Vanstone’s language and portrayed such action not as a softening of policy but, rather, as being “consistent with the government’s flexible approach to managing complex caseloads.” Instead, he has stuck to the strategy of trying to force asylum seekers to return to their country of origin by offering them no hope and no support and insisting the only other option for those on Manus not accepted by the United States is to stay in Papua New Guinea.

The “extreme vetting” of applications by the Americans has been extraordinarily slow, and the pressure on the refugees has escalated with the premature removal of services from the detention centre at Lombrum and the instruction that detainees must move to accommodation the UNHCR says is not yet ready, in an area the asylum seekers insist, with justification, is not safe.

Moreover, the offer from New Zealand has again been rejected, or at least put on indefinite hold, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support the current minister’s concern that it could enable the refugees to come to Australia through the back door — and despite the fact that the US deal and the offer of 150 resettlement places from New Zealand will not cover the refugee caseload.

Mr Dutton needs to be asked how many of the refugees accepted by New Zealand during the Howard years have moved to Australia. The answer is that the overwhelming majority settled very successfully in that country and have no desire whatsoever to move here. The back-door argument simply doesn’t stack up.

The fourth difference in 2005 was that Howard was more or less unassailable as leader of his party, having secured four election victories. Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, on the other hand, is imperilled. His minister shows all the signs of wanting to advance his own leadership aspirations — and ward off any threat to his re-election in his Queensland seat from the left (GetUp!) and the right (Pauline Hanson) — by presenting himself as the unbending defender of the country’s borders.

The fifth difference is that, back in 2005, a group of Coalition MPs was prepared to challenge the prime minister on the treatment of asylum seekers, even to the point of crossing the floor. Led by Petro Georgiou, they included Russell Broadbent, Judi Moylan, Judith Troeth and Bruce Baird, and they had the support of others including Mal Washer and the National Party’s John Forrest.

Now, Broadbent is virtually the sole dissenting voice in the Coalition party room. He has made it clear that he is profoundly unhappy with the situation, but the stakes of crossing the floor are simply too high, as it could bring down the government.

This leads to the sixth and final difference: back then, there was strong support within the Labor opposition for a more compassionate and flexible approach, led by Carmen Lawrence, the former premier of Western Australia.

Since before the defeat of the Rudd government in 2013, Labor’s criticisms of the government’s treatment of those on Manus and Nauru have been hollow because of its own refusal to entertain the idea that anyone from Manus or Nauru will be resettled in Australia, including the fathers whose wives and children have been living in the Australian community for years.

The prospects for a swift end to the unfolding crisis and what the UNHCR has called the “unconscionable human suffering” of those on Manus are further diminished by the complexity of the situation on the ground and the history of the detention centre.

From the outset, rather than educate the detainees and the locals about each other’s culture and build trust and understanding, a deliberate effort was made to instil suspicion and even hostility. The escalation of tensions could easily result in violence, especially if police carry out their threat to remove people forcibly from the detention centre. More lives could be put at risk and Donald Trump might take the opportunity to drop what he has described as a “disgusting” and “horrible” deal he would never have made himself.

So what should happen now? The immediate challenge is to end the stand-off between those refusing to leave the centre and those who say they must move to the new accommodation at Lorengau, the only town in the province. The refugees’ insistence, backed by advocates in Australia, is that they will remain in the centre until a third country is found. It will not be acceded to. But their concerns about the state of the alternative accommodation, security and medical services in Lorengau are well-founded.

What is needed urgently is for a person of independence and integrity to be given the job of brokering a kind of truce, or at least a de-escalation, that would involve the refugees and asylum seekers moving out of the detention centre to the new accommodation, but only when it is clearly established that their concerns about security and essential services have been addressed. The independent mediator could also seek commitments that every effort is being made to assist those with applications for resettlement in the United States and restore some hope among the refugees that an end is in sight.

There is no one better qualified to perform this task than the former High Court judge Michael Kirby, whose global mediation, dispute resolution and human rights credentials are impeccable.

This, of course, is not a solution, not by any stretch, but it could break the impasse. A real solution will require pragmatism, courage, goodwill and compassion in equal measure, when all we have seen thus far is rigidity, fear, bad faith and malevolence. ●

The post How to avoid a violent end to the Manus Island stand-off appeared first on Inside Story.

But ordinary members of the public need not be so diplomatic: whether through design, weakness or sheer incompetence, Malcolm Turnbull has chosen a particularly cruel response to the gift that Ardern brought across the Tasman. He could graciously have accepted it, and opened the way to a rapid and safe resettlement of a quarter of the refugees from Manus Island to New Zealand. Or, had he been adhering to the line that his own government has insistently repeated in recent months, he could have said that the refugees on Manus Island are no longer Australia’s responsibility but Papua New Guinea’s, and that New Zealand should address its offer to the PNG government, which would probably have accepted it with alacrity.

Instead, he chose to reassert Australia’s responsibility for the fate of the refugees, at the same time ensuring that the opportunity for 150 desperate people to escape from limbo and find a new life is postponed indefinitely, until after the completion of the “US deal.”

But that “dumb deal,” as Donald Trump called it in one of his more insightful moments, is going nowhere. Having accepted a very small proportion of the refugees, the US officials concerned have departed with no assurances that they are going to complete the processing of the remaining asylum seekers, let alone allow any more into the United States.

Meanwhile, the Australian government, which has enough control over the refugees to ensure that none goes to New Zealand for the foreseeable future, simultaneously denies all responsibility or control when it comes to providing them with the basic necessities for survival. A large proportion are so unwell that they need to be on regular medication, but their medical supplies will cease this month because the Australian government no longer takes responsibility for them, and PNG is not picking up the slack. This has left underfunded and understaffed refugee support groups with the almost impossible task of trying to navigate the medical chaos on Manus Island and raise the substantial donations needed to prevent suffering and quite possibly deaths.

If we are to believe Peter Dutton and other cabinet ministers, of course, it is the refugee supporters themselves who are somehow responsible for this whole debacle. The Turnbull government’s approach to offshore detention, we are told, is a compassionate way of stopping the people smugglers, and thus preventing deaths at sea. But that rhetoric wears thinner with every passing day.

It is the government’s policy of turning back boats, and not the miseries on Manus Island and Nauru, that has prevented arrivals of people-smuggling boats on Australian shores. Boat arrivals dropped drastically, not when Julia Gillard reintroduced offshore processing, but following the start of the Abbott government’s “Operation Sovereign Borders,” or OSB, in September 2013. But then again, just how many lives are actually saved by boat turnbacks, and by the Coalition’s entire policy of “being cruel to be kind”?

No one knows the answer, of course, since the government has no interest at all in finding out what happens to refugees either before or after the moment their boat is turned back from Australian waters. Despite the veil of secrecy with which OSB is shrouded, though, there have been reports of turned-back boats running out of fuel or being left aground on the borders of Indonesian waters. The Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales notes that refugees returned to Sri Lanka and Vietnam under OSB have been interrogated and imprisoned, and torture has been alleged in at least one Sri Lankan case.

Nor do we have any idea how many turned-back refugees have simply gone on to board other dangerous people-smuggling boats in desperate attempts to reach other safe havens; and we have no idea how many of those deterred from attempting to reach Australia by boat have been imprisoned or killed in their own countries or en route. The government’s policy does not make refugees safe. It simply ensures that they do not die in Australian waters.

If there is one good thing that has come out of the meeting between Ardern and Turnbull, it is an end to the bipartisan support for the chaos and cruelty of the Coalition’s refugee policy. Labor is finally beginning to find an alternative voice on the issue. The urgent task now is for opposition parties to join forces with the growing number of government politicians showing queasiness at their own party’s policies, and to demand answers to a few basic questions.

What evidence can the government provide to show that its cruelty on Manus Island saves lives elsewhere? What assurances can the government give that any more refugees will be processed and resettled under the US deal, and when might that happen? Why can the government stymie refugees’ chances of going to New Zealand, but be incapable of working with PNG to provide the refugees with the basic necessities for safety and survival? And when will the misery, shame and chaos of Manus and Nauru end?

Meanwhile, it’s surely time for Jacinda Ardern to start talking directly to the government of PNG. ●

The post The cruellest option appeared first on Inside Story.

What really happened in 2001? After a series of disastrous polling results early in the year, the Coalition clawed itself most of the way back into electoral contention, mainly by handing out enormous amounts of money. Then the Tampa appeared on the horizon, with its load of rescued asylum seekers. Although the stand-off between the government and the ship’s captain generated enormous controversy, it barely caused a ripple in the two-party-preferred polls. It was only after the 11 September attacks in the United States that the Howard government won back majority support.

Even then it was a close-run thing. With election day looming, a trend back to Labor began showing up in the polls. If the campaign had run for a few more weeks, Kim Beazley could well have become prime minister, and a completely different legend would have been created.

Tony Abbott swallowed the myth whole. In mid 2010, still learning the ropes as opposition leader, he promised to revive Howard’s Pacific Solution and reintroduce temporary protection visas. Before the announcement, the parties had been level-pegged on 50 per cent; over the following fortnight, six polls taken by four pollsters found that the Coalition’s two-party-preferred figure had slipped by an average of one percentage point — not enough to pin a trend on, but hardly a resounding endorsement of the new policy. In the following weeks, the Coalition lost more support.

Two years later, after he was elected prime minister, Tony Abbott managed to “stop the boats.” The polls momentarily lifted, then resumed their grim trajectory. After a run of thirty bad Newspoll results, Abbott was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull, who not only persisted in treating offshore detainees harshly but also went on to give his zealous, high-profile immigration minister extra duties. Twenty-one more Newspolls later, there’s little to suggest that this has been a vote-winner either.

Yet the myth refuses to die. The likely reason is that it meshes so well with the internal dynamics of the Coalition and the Labor Party. For the Coalition, it must feel like a rare, visceral link to a large group of voters who worry about immigration but are left cold by the Coalition’s views on a whole range of issues, from Medicare to industrial relations (including, as we’re likely to find out soon, marriage equality).

For Labor, the myth taps into two primal fears: that immigrants — any immigrants — pose a threat to Australian jobs and wages, and that John Howard was more in tune with middle Australia than it is. (He wasn’t; he was just very lucky in the timing of his prime ministership.)

It’s true that many voters worry about boat arrivals, but most of them vote on the basis of their hopes and fears about health, education and the economy. In this light, the Coalition’s belief in the electoral success of its harsh treatment of boat arrivals is actually a liability: it helps create a false sense that the government is in tune with the electorate, when in reality the middle ground is steadily moving away. If the Coalition does manage to win the next election, Gonski 2.0’s Simon Birmingham will deserve far more credit than Peter Dutton.

The 2001 election myth has also slowed down the hard but vital work of developing a regional approach to forced migration. Stopping the boats doesn’t stop unauthorised migration, and Australia is the country best-placed to lead that process.

Offshore detention isn’t the thing that halted new arrivals — the real deterrence goes on in the waters between Australia and Southeast Asia — so the detention system has come to serve no other purpose than to send an electorally pointless message to voters. But the damage to the Coalition (and Labor) pales beside the impact of detention and uncertainty on the people who have passed through Manus and Nauru, or are still living there.

The myth has indirectly damaged our political culture too, by reinforcing the view that Australia has no responsibility to people outside its migration exclusion zone. For all these reasons, the remaining refugees and other detainees on Manus Island and Nauru should immediately be brought to Australia. ●

The post The myth that grips a nation appeared first on Inside Story.

This nightmare has arrived hot on the heels of what was already a global forced migration crisis, with the numbers of people displaced globally reaching 65.6 million in 2016, of which around one third were refugees.

It’s not surprising there have been calls for Australia to create a special resettlement program for the Rohingya, much as it did for people displaced by conflicts in Iraq and Syria in 2015, or when it offered “safe haven” visas to Kosovans and East Timorese in 1999. But jumping straight to resettlement runs the risk of legitimising the brutal efforts to force the Rohingya out of Myanmar. And nor is it clear that this is what the Rohingya want: initial assessments suggest that more than nine out of every ten want either to stay in Bangladesh or to return to Myanmar.

Last week Australia announced more support for communities affected by the violence in Rakhine State and for frontline agencies providing relief to refugee camps in Bangladesh. It was confirmed in Senate Estimates that the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, which Australia co-chairs with Indonesia, is attempting to broker a more coordinated response to the displacement crisis. Senior officials from key Bali Process countries, including Myanmar and Bangladesh, met in Jakarta in mid-October. They meet again in Kuala Lumpur this week. Australian officials visited Northern Rakhine on 2 October, and Chief of Army, General Angus Campbell, raised human rights concerns with Myanmar’s military in September.

Much more than a refugee crisis

Forced migrants – not only those from Myanmar but also from around the world – may or may not be refugees as defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. They could be asylum seekers, stateless or trafficked people, or people uprooted by conflict, natural disasters and the effects of climate change. What these people share is a vulnerability that forces them to move, internally or internationally. As the past few years have shown, their movement raises complex challenges for governments and within national and international communities.

Consider, for example, Tropical Cyclone Mora, which displaced 851,000 people across Bangladesh, Myanmar and India in May and June this year. That’s more than three-quarters of a million people on top of the Rohingya crisis. In the Philippines, meanwhile, the first half of 2017 saw 563,000 people displaced by thunderstorms and flooding; at least another 350,000 had to move because of the conflict in Marawi City.

When the World Economic Forum, or WEF, released its 2017 Global Risks Report, large-scale involuntary migration was ranked second for likelihood and sixth for impact. The WEF was late to the party: between 2007 and 2015, forced migration hadn’t made either of the WEF’s “top five” lists, ranked by likelihood and impact.

By 2016, of course, the risk of large-scale forced migration was a reality. Crises the previous year in Syria, Yemen, and the Andaman Sea (where thousands were stranded after fleeing Myanmar and Bangladesh by boat) had broken decades-old displacement records, with the numbers topping sixty million for the first time since the second world war.

But what is especially telling, and somewhat misleading, is that the WEF still rates forced migration higher for likelihood than for impact. Yet four of the top five risks for impact in 2017 — extreme weather events, water crises, natural disasters, and the failure of climate-change mitigation and adaption — have impact partly because they result in forced migration.

Although the WEF has devoted much attention to freedom of movement as part of its mission to “improve the state of the world,” this has mainly been about the movement of goods and capital, not of people. The same has been true, at least until recently, of international organisations and agreements. Put simply, there is very little global governance of migration. Smaller, localised efforts deal with parts of the challenge, such as labour migration and human trafficking, but these don’t add up to an effective international arrangement. This gap contrasts with the long-established international rules for the protection of refugees, especially the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, of which the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is guardian.

It was only last year that the International Organization for Migration finally became part of the formal machinery of the United Nations as the UN Migration Agency. At the same time, countries agreed to negotiate a global compact on safe, orderly and regular migration, alongside a global compact on refugees. They also recognised the intricate relationship between migration and the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Starting with the region

These global developments are promising, but the reality is that the best prospects for progress on migration, including forced migration, are at the regional level. Here in Asia and the Pacific, we can either respond reactively, by scrambling to address each new crisis as it arises, or we can proactively build a coherent framework to provide consistent, well-formulated responses based on regional cooperation, shared responsibility and distributed capability.

Calls for a coherent regional response have been central to critiques of Australia’s tough border protection and refugee policies. The argument runs like this: if Australia devoted the same level of resources to regional cooperation that it spends on offshore processing, then we could find a way to “stop the boats” by providing asylum seekers and refugees with options that don’t involve paying thousands of dollars to people smugglers and risking dangerous journeys at sea.

That might seem utopian, but regional cooperation is the best and most decent hope we have for making progress in that direction. This is why the Centre for Policy Development joined forces with policy institutes in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia in 2015 to establish the Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration. The Dialogue brings together government and non-government officials from key countries in the region with one goal: creating more effective, dignified and lasting regional responses to forced migration. It seeks to foster collaboration, facilitate a deeper understanding of regional perspectives, build trust between critical influencers, and cultivate a long-term policy framework to support the movement of vulnerable people.

The Dialogue’s organising principle is that that more effective regional governance of forced migration in Asia and the Pacific is both essential and possible. After five meetings, including last month in Manila, we are seeing real signs of progress.

But building a regional cooperation framework is slow, grinding work. It means forging common ground between competing national interests; it involves working with existing institutions, like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, which have other priorities; and it requires broadening the focus of current arrangements — like the Bali Process — to improve humanitarian outcomes.

Until recently, effective responses to forced migration have not been a priority of governments in the region. Nor has collective action. International rules governing the treatment of forced migrants have had few followers in this region. Of ASEAN’s members, only Cambodia and the Philippines have ratified the Refugee Convention and the UN Conventions on Statelessness.

A notable exception to the tendency to act unilaterally was the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action, which enabled the resettlement of a wave of refugees from post-conflict Indochina. But the CPA, despite its strengths, is an inadequate guide for our current challenges. It worked in a different time and a very different context.

The region’s inability to learn from the past and improve collective responses was painfully (and fatally) evident in May 2015 when thousands of Rohingya and Bengalis were stranded in the Andaman Sea. Speaking in Bangkok less than a year later, Hassan Wirajuda, Indonesian foreign minister from 2001 to 2009 and co-founder of the Bali Process, conceded this wasn’t the first time regional responses had been found wanting.

“We must admit that the region then — some twenty-five years ago — was not well prepared and equipped to handle that large-scale influx of migrants following the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia,” he told an Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration meeting early in 2016. “Ironically, neither were we ready to cope with a much smaller flow of Rohingya migrants last year.”

It wasn’t just that the region wasn’t ready to cope with the 2015 Andaman Sea Crisis. The key regional institutions — ASEAN and the Bali Process — didn’t respond at all. The silence and inaction prompted Wirajuda to tell the Australian and Indonesian ministerial co-chairs to “step up or step aside.”

Glimmers of hope

But there are signs the tide is turning.

Late last year, Indonesian President Joko Widodo issued a decree to protect refugees. In March this year, ASEAN’s Convention Against Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children entered into force, followed swiftly by a 2017–20 plan for its implementation.

The Sixth Ministerial Conference of the Bali Process in March 2016 established a new emergency response mechanism and authorised a review of the region’s response to the Andaman Sea crisis. Its recommendations — which included the creation of an operational task force on planning and preparedness, and a commitment to greater collaboration with ASEAN — were adopted in Sri Lanka last November.

And, in August, the first Bali Process Government and Business Forum was held in Perth, featuring ministers and business leaders from forty-five Bali Process countries. A comprehensive work plan to tackle human trafficking, forced labour and related exploitation was released.

It’s easy to dismiss these developments as too little and too late. But they are a necessary start, and they share a recognition that unilateralism and quick fixes will not do. Governments acting on their own tend to produce problems of the type we are seeing on Manus and Nauru, along with the human suffering and trauma that goes with it. Copying strategies from other regions won’t do either. So much is clear from the relative failure of the European response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Each region, especially ours, has specific needs that require tailored responses.

Achieving the necessary reforms involves patience and resolve. CPD and our partners in the region are developing ideas and creating the conditions in which reforms can be advanced within a fractious and fraught political environment. The process is never fast enough, but there are no shortcuts.

The elements of a better regional approach have long been argued for and have often advanced. Sadly, however, there are no silver bullets; no elegant regional “solutions.” Partly, this reflects the deficit of trust, information and capability between policy-makers in the region, which has created a dangerous vacuum as the number of people on the move has risen.

In the absence of regular and frank dialogue, it’s impossible to know where priorities and perspectives diverge and where common interest might be found. You can’t plan and develop capability for foreseeable or unexpected crises. There is no line of sight for what might be possible within and between countries. You are left to nut it out on the hop.

Deliberations about mass displacement are inevitably sensitive and complex. Consider, for example, the crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh right now. A frank discussion should cover the prognosis for ongoing conflict in Rakhine State, Myanmar’s commitment to allow those displaced to return, and how those returns can occur safely. Alongside this is the further assistance required by Bangladesh authorities, international agencies, and vulnerable populations now in temporary camps. Victim identification and registration of those who have moved is essential. So too is an assessment of the risk of onward movements, including by sea, and the potential exploitation by people smuggling and human trafficking networks. Equally important is the possibility of integrating new arrivals within Bangladesh, and the availability of resettlement options for those permanently displaced. It’s no easy task given the sheer scale of movement, and is best advanced with the involvement of Myanmar and Bangladesh both at the table.

Waiting for rest of the world?

Hassan Wirajuda’s successor as Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, has stressed the importance of building regional consensus and not waiting for the rest of the world to step in. Speaking before the current Rohingya crisis broke out, he said the region had to break out of its 20^th century “straightjacket”. Natalegawa said change wouldn’t come “by adopting declarations, statements of intents or treaties. It requires doing things and establishing practices”.

At this stage, there is limited public information on what actions ASEAN and the Bali Process have taken, or new practices they have followed. But there is enough to suggest that this time might be different.

The ASEAN chair released a public statement on behalf of ASEAN foreign ministers. Although it was later criticised by Malaysia, and ASEAN continues to attract strong criticism for its inaction, the statement was an advance on ASEAN’s more muted approach during the Andaman Sea crisis. Individual ASEAN members, including Indonesia, have been particularly proactive. Indonesia’s foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, was the first foreign official to visit Myanmar and Bangladesh after the crisis started. Specific actions, including assistance from ASEAN’s Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance of Disaster Management, were recommended by ASEAN, and accepted by Myanmar. Aid from the Centre started to arrive in Rakhine State in mid-October. The big test for ASEAN will be at its leaders’ summit in a fortnight.

The Bali Process, which uniquely has Myanmar and Bangladesh among its core members, was advised in September to use its new authority to broker a frank discussion among interested and affected governments and institutions. Senior officials met in Jakarta in mid-October for this purpose, with representatives of Myanmar and Bangladesh participating. This is a big step forward for the region and for the Australian and Indonesian co‑chairs, given the heavy criticism of their efforts in 2015. Senior officials will gather again for an Ad Hoc Group meeting in Kuala Lumpur this week.

Patiently impatient

These are baby steps, of course, and they only relate to this crisis, which is part of the much larger global displacement that has been going on for several years. It’s a crisis certain to intensify as environmental migration becomes more pronounced, and one that can’t be solved entirely by the Bali Process or ASEAN. The hard work has barely begun.

Indonesia’s Hassan Wirajuda has said that the absence of an effective global governance system for migration means that our region will depend solely on its ability to create its own regional order. He has called for a regional institution focused on international migrants. Non-government and unofficial talks will continue to play an essential role.

In fact, regional and “mini-multilateral” arrangements are emerging as a key to the success of the global compact on migration, which is to be finalised in New York next year. Regional consultations on the compact will take place in Bangkok next week. This reality is dawning on ministers, senior officials, international organisations and civil society groups. Waiting for the rest of the world to step in and respond to migration crises takes too long, and can be counterproductive.

As part of the region with the largest number of forced migrants in the world, countries in Asia and the Pacific must take responsibility for brokering responses to forced migration. As they are beginning to acknowledge, the most predictable, effective and legitimate responses will be homegrown. ●

The post Patient policy-making for a region on the move appeared first on Inside Story.

“Okay, okay, finish,” said the cleaner knocking on the door. “Finish, finish.”

He had called his wife, Sultana, to tell her he’d arrived. She sounded groggy on the phone, and when he asked why, she told him it was the middle of the night where she was, in the Yemeni port city of Aden. Only then did he realise he was in a time zone several hours ahead of the Middle East.

He had spent US$50 on the room and had just $20 left in his pocket. His plan was to visit the local office of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, where he hoped to find support and accommodation. Then, with any luck, he’d be leaving Jakarta to find a new home for him and his family.

This is the story of Mohammad Abdul Aziz Osman, a Somali refugee who has lived on his wits on the streets of Jakarta for nearly four years. Like thousands of other refugees in transit countries like Indonesia, he is stuck in limbo and cut off from family and support.

This story could equally have started in a village near Mogadishu, where Aziz was pursued by Al-Shabaab militants, or on an overcrowded boat crossing the Gulf of Aden, or in a refugee camp in Southern Yemen. But let’s start about twenty-four hours before his encounter with the Jakarta hotel cleaner, when Aziz left his wife and their three children in Aden.

It was 26 September 2013. Aziz had been driven to the airport by a people smuggler, who dropped him at the terminal, handed him fake documents and pointed him towards the check-in counter. He remembers the man coaching him to be calm. “Just be slowly,” the smuggler advised. But Aziz was confused. He had never been on a plane before. Which counter should he go to? Which door should he walk through? He paid an airport cleaner 2000 rials (about A$10) to guide him through customs.

Minutes before his flight, he realised he was waiting for the wrong plane. As he recalls it, he slapped his forehead. “Better I wash cars,” he thought, thinking of the job that had sustained him during the years he and his family had lived in Yemen. But he ran through the airport terminal until he found his plane. He remembers the feeling of relief.

After he left the hotel on his first morning in Jakarta and set out for the UNHCR office, Aziz heard the call to prayer. It was Friday, the day when all Muslims are called to worship, so he crossed the road and joined the men praying on the street outside the mosque.

As the prayers ended and he was about to go in search of UNHCR, he noticed a motorbike key on the ground. He picked it up, looked at it for a moment, and then started walking through the crowd leaving the mosque. He stopped people to ask in Arabic or broken English whether the key belonged to them. As the numbers were starting to thin, a man glanced at it, and then looked again. Aziz saw his growing realisation that his key, which he thought he’d left safely at home, was in the hand of this foreigner.

This was Rojak Gunnaldi, a small, thin man with a gentle manner whom Aziz now describes as “better than a brother” and “a man I would die for.” Although he speaks neither English nor Arabic, Rojak soon understood that Aziz was desperate. He took him to a cafe where a colleague spoke enough English for Aziz to explain that he needed to register as an asylum seeker.

Rojak took him on his motorbike across the city to UNHCR, where they were told the office had closed for the day and he needed to return on Monday. So Rojak offered to put him up for the weekend. In his small room, he fed Aziz and looked after him, even as the Somali fell ill from heat exhaustion.

It wasn’t until Tuesday that Aziz was well enough to go back to UNHCR. As they soon discovered, though, the agency was barely coping with the number of people seeking help. The two men waited in a long queue to see an official, who noted Aziz’s details and registered him on a long list of people seeking asylum. Afterwards, Aziz remembers Rojak saying, “Okay, now you can go.” But Aziz replied that he had nowhere to go and no way to support himself.

“Okay,” Rojak said. “You can stay with me.” For the next seven months they slept on the same mattress on the floor of Rojak’s one-room house.

“That man,” says Aziz, “he very good. He say you stay with me, no problem. I say, Rojak, God bring me.”

To repay him, Aziz fetched water each day and cleaned the room. He also carried water for the neighbours, and cleaned the corridors and picked up rubbish. He never asked for payment. The community warmed to him. People smiled as he passed and took the time to talk to him. They offered him food and sometimes small amounts of money.

But one day Rojak told him he had to leave. He was getting married, he told Aziz in tears, and there was no room for him in the tiny house. Rojak apologised and they wept together.

This was when I first met Aziz. It was June 2014 and he was sitting on a mat outside the UNHCR building in the Menteng area of downtown Jakarta. Behind him, a cardboard sign read, “UNHCR Kita perlu bantu dan fasilitas” (We need help and facilities). There was something about the way he sat there with his legs folded, motionless, staring into the street. I stopped and said hello.

I was making a program for Radio National about the treatment of asylum seekers and focusing on Afghan and Pakistani Hazaras, who were arriving in large numbers, lured by smugglers offering trips on boats from southern Java to Christmas Island. Tony Abbott was in power and the boats had stopped, but young men were still pouring into Indonesia. I had met and interviewed a group of eight people — the youngest aged sixteen — who explained that they had paid smugglers US$64,500 between them to get to Jakarta, with no prospect of onward travel and no way of returning to their own countries.

He asked me to sit down on the mat. He wore a neat blue shirt over his thin frame, and his refugee papers were folded in his pocket. He told me he had been sleeping on the verandah of a nearby hotel and used the showers at a mosque not far away.

“I have problem in my country,” he said. “Me, no mother. Me come here. UN no give eat, drink. Al-Shabaab — but me I no like.”

He had picked up bits of English and Indonesian and his story came out in bursts. He was angry that UNHCR could give him nothing. He was fearful for his wife and children in Yemen. He was defiant about the religious zealots and militants who had harassed and tried to recruit him in his village near Mogadishu. He was frightened by a future in which he saw no resettlement and no security, at least not any time soon.

Within minutes he was stammering in a high pitch in both languages, punctuated by sobs. “Anak anak [children],” he said. “Me I have wife. Me I want future, good. Me I like work. Me I like future… nothing mother, father. Me I want future, me.”

When I asked him what UNHCR was doing to help, he showed me a letter he’d been given inviting him back for an interview the following April, more than ten months away.

I heard his words over and over when I was editing the program back in Melbourne, but they didn’t lose their power. In the months afterwards, I wondered how he was getting along on the streets of Jakarta.

So, in April 2015, I went back to the same spot and asked around. I showed a few people his picture. They all knew him and the word quickly filtered out. Soon he appeared, smiling and dressed in a t-shirt, old jeans and a pair of thongs. Yes, he was okay, he said. His English had improved, and so had his Indonesian.

UNHCR had eventually brought his interview forward by a month. Rojak had kept in touch and dropped by from time to time with small amounts of money. He had escorted Aziz to the interview because he wanted to tell UNHCR what life was like for his friend on the street. Now Aziz was waiting for the agency to grant him refugee status, a vital step on the way to resettlement in another country.

He showed me the little alleyways where he swept and picked up rubbish. A woman who owns a cafe near UNHCR and is known to everyone as Ibu Deni saw us talking and vouched for him. She told me he works hard and asks for nothing. She also said that I should tell the Australian government to look after him. On a wall just thirty metres away, an Australian poster declared, “NO WAY: You Will Not Make Australia Home.” Anyone who had registered with UNHCR after 1 July 2014, it warned, would be denied entry to Australia.

Aziz’s quest for safety really began in 2009 when he paid smugglers US$100 for a boat trip from Bosaso in northern Somalia across the Gulf of Aden. He remembers there were forty-three people on board, among them twenty women, some with children. He and the single men sat at the bow.

“I had no luggage. No bags. No anything. Just t-shirt,” he told me. The waves washed over the gunwales. Many people were sick. He was burnt by the sun and seared by the salt. By the third day they had run out of water and people were finding it hard to swallow.

“Never go by boat again. Very dangerous,” he said. “First thing I do [in Yemen] was cancel this. I said to them [his wife and children], ‘Don’t come.’”

On the night of the third day, the boat landed on a beach on the southwest coast of Yemen, near where the Gulf of Aden narrows before becoming the Red Sea. The police bussed them to Ma’afa, where they were given food. The next morning, they were taken to Al Kharaz refugee camp in the desert.

A few days later, Aziz decided to make his way to Aden. Work was available at a market near the entrance to the city, he’d heard, where many Somalis and Ethiopians wash cars to survive. Despite his fears, he cleaned cars all day so that his wife Sultana and their three children could make the same boat journey. When they finally embarked, he waited anxiously for five days before the family was reunited.

Yemen hasn’t exactly been a safe haven for his wife and children. When we talked, the Saudi air force had been bombing Houthi rebels in Sana’a for a week and Aziz hadn’t heard from his family for twenty-five days. “Sometimes I have signal, sometimes I do not,” he told me. “It’s very difficult.” He said his wife can’t go out. “People are not working. She can’t do cleaning, she doesn’t feel safe.” As he spoke, he began to cry.

Normally, Sultana would leave their three children, then aged between two and five, in her one-room apartment between 7am and 4pm while she cleaned houses.

“One time my child spilled hot water,” said Aziz. He was using his t-shirt to wipe away his tears. He raised his arm to show how Soada had scalded herself on her forearm and ankle. After five months, he said, the burns peeled away. He pinched his skin to show the effect.

Aziz on the hotel rooftop where he sleeps in exchange for doing odd jobs. Andrew Dodd

“Many times Soada asks me, ‘Papa, when you come?’” said Aziz. “My wife, too, asks, ‘What are you doing? You are there. I am here.’ I say, ‘Wait, wait.’”

“Maybe next time I meeting you, I have two babies, maybe one,” his wife has said, warning him of the risks their children are exposed to.

“Wait, wait,” replied Aziz. “Maybe next time life is good.”

He can’t admit to her that he has no idea when, or if, life will get better, but he has invested too much to consider returning to the Middle East.

For now, as Aziz told me, “I sleep on the roof.”

I asked him to show me where, so he led me up the hotel’s narrow stairs onto the roof, where his bedding was rolled up neatly in the corner. The hotel owner let him sleep there if Aziz tidied the corridors and swept the stairs. He explained with pride how he had removed several loads of rubbish. He lay down to show where he slept. The UNHCR building was framed in perfect silhouette behind him.

By the time of my next visit, in February this year, Aziz’s options had narrowed. Donald Trump had stopped immigration from seven Muslim countries; as a Somali who had lived in Yemen, Aziz was banned twice over. He told me he was getting at least one meal a day by helping a man called Doli pack up his warung each night at 1.30am. He had briefly found a room to sleep in, but it hadn’t worked out and now he was back on the roof of the hotel.

It had been raining the night before, so we stepped around his pile of damp bedding and clothes in the stairwell, where he had sat for a couple of hours to wait out the storm. By mid-morning the roof was hot again and he collected his washing, which had been hanging on a string near the air-conditioning units.

Later he told me he was thinking of going to one of the country’s immigration camps, where refugees can get a bed and regular meals. But it would mean being locked up twenty-four hours a day in awful conditions. “I’m not ready yet,” he said. “But life difficult here, brother.”

Aziz wanted me to meet Rojak. He wanted me to talk to the person who had saved him. So that afternoon we went to the upmarket restaurant where Rojak works. It was a Sunday afternoon and well-dressed families were sitting at rows of tables on a pier, facing the water. Jetskis raced around circuits a hundred metres offshore. Across the water was a building shaped like a cruise ship, with four residential towers, each forty storeys high, designed to look like the ship’s funnels.

Rojak and Aziz were delighted to see each other. In proficient Indonesian, Aziz complimented Rojak on his red bandana, which signified he had reached the most senior waiter’s rank. Between serving customers, Rojak came back and the two of them continued talking about their wives and families and Aziz’s hopes for resettlement. Aziz had decided not to tell Rojak that he had moved back onto the roof. “I not want him to feel heavy,” he told me. He hadn’t mentioned it to his wife either.

Rojak ordered plates of food for us and insisted on paying. He told me that he helped Aziz “as anyone would, because he is a fellow Muslim, a brother and a friend.” He’s an engaging figure, cccasionally pausing to stare at me with a look that’s stern and comic at the same time.

The next day, Aziz and I were standing on a bus heading across town when the doors opened at one of the transit stops. People scrambled on as others tried to get off. Aziz noticed that a blind man was still on the platform. He jumped off the bus, took the man’s arm and gently steered him back on board to a safe place to sit. As the bus took off, he stood by the man, watching over him, steadying him with his arm as the bus jolted and braked. Three stops later, he escorted him off again.

Later, I said goodbye and got off too. I used the footbridge to cross the four busy lanes of traffic and started walking along the footpath. It soon started spitting rain and just as I was thinking I might need to find cover, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see Aziz standing behind me. He was holding an umbrella, the one he’d been carrying all morning. He pushed it into my hand and said something I couldn’t hear above the cars.

He turned quickly and walked back across the road, threading his way through the same traffic I’d avoided by taking the bridge. I stood watching as he disappeared behind a bus and climbed to the transit platform. •

The post A generous man caught in the system appeared first on Inside Story.

History doesn’t run in straight lines, but nor is it totally disjointed. Pezzullo imagined a future writing books about the history of warfare and strategy, but instead built a career in the portfolios of defence, foreign affairs, customs and immigration helping to craft national security strategy. If his star keeps rising, he will play an even broader role in creating history of the sort he once hoped to write about, as head of the powerful new home affairs ministry, which will oversee Australia’s intelligence agencies.

Pezzullo, who currently heads the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, is far too discreet a public officer to comment on possible assignments. “It’s not in keeping with etiquette to canvass, discuss or speculate about the appointment of secretaries,” he says. The prime minister’s announcement of a new home affairs ministry is still a few days away when we meet; if Pezzullo knows about it, he gives me no hint.

We talk over lunch at an Italian restaurant in Belconnen. “Thanks for coming all the way out to Canberra’s far north,” he jokes when he arrives. The venue is close to his office, and he describes it almost apologetically as “modest and suburban” but offering “very flavoursome food.” He is right on both counts. A neighbouring barn-like pub dwarfs the low-slung Bella Vista, and from the barren carpark the prospect of a beautiful outlook seems remote. Inside, however, floor-to-ceiling windows provide a panoramic view of the wintery landscape of Lake Ginninderra.

Pezzullo’s choice of restaurant matches the heritage of this Australian-born son of migrants from rural Campania, outside Naples. In 1960, his father was determined to leave a country still waiting for a postwar recovery to take hold. He chose Australia over rival destinations Canada and Argentina because his sister had already settled here. But Pezzullo’s mother was reluctant to move so far away from her parents, and went to live with siblings in Manchester. After two years of long-distance courtship, she was convinced to join her teenage sweetheart in Sydney. Once married, they settled close to his relatives in the St George area in Sydney’s south, where Michael, the eldest of three sons, was born in 1964.

“It is a typical migrant story,” says Pezzullo. His parents had little education and no formal qualifications, he tells me. His mother was pulled out of primary school at the age of six to care for a newborn sibling; she returned to school after about six months, but when she was nine she had to leave permanently to help out at home. His father never completed high school. They did unskilled and semi-skilled work, labouring on building sites and in factories and gardens, often holding down two or three jobs at a time. At home, the family spoke a mixture of Italian dialect and English. “We were spoken to in Italian but we were encouraged always to respond in English,” says Pezzullo. “It was the same with all my cousins. And our parents were very strong on that. This is our home. We speak English here.”

Pezzullo was urged to maintain his cultural heritage but regard himself as Australian. “Mum and Dad would say, ‘This country has given us everything. We owe this country everything.’” At school, he learnt to ignore insults of “wog” and “dago,” which, he says, were like “water off a duck’s back.” There was no malice in the jibes, he says, though he adds that it “wasn’t funny at times and it certainly wasn’t done in a nice way.”

Pezzullo was raised as a Catholic and went to Catholic schools, but now attends an Anglican church with his wife Lynne, who grew up in a Protestant family. Lynne Pezzullo is another influential Canberra player, providing extensive advice to government as the lead health economics and social policy partner at Deloitte Access Economics. The couple has four children.

Last year the Canberra Times ranked them at number four on a list of Canberra’s top ten power couples, but some of the other media coverage that Pezzullo has received has been less flattering. Former Australian Financial Review columnist Tony Walker recently described him as “a ruthless political operative,” while milder-mannered colleague Michelle Grattan labels him “an aggressive bureaucratic player.” ABC political correspondent Andrew Probyn says Pezzullo is seen in Canberra as “an extraordinarily hard-working, driven and intelligent fellow” who is “admired and loathed in unequal proportions.” He sums him up as “brilliant but divisive.”

If Pezzullo has an abrasive side then it is not on show as we break bread in Belconnen. He is friendly, engaged and solicitous, topping up my mineral water, inquiring about my food. (Our grilled barramundi is perfectly cooked and very reasonably priced.) He doesn’t deliver pronouncements while staring into the middle distance in the manner of some top bureaucrats I’ve met, instead leaning in to listen, making eye contact and responding thoughtfully.

His comments also reveal that he is a keen reader, especially in the area of military history and strategy. A recent speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute was peppered with references to such works: the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s biography of Henry Kissinger (Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist), Paul Dibb’s study of the Soviet Union (The Incomplete Superpower) and the writings of early twentieth-century strategists Alfred Mahan, Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman.

Pezzullo tells me this interest began early. Around the age of ten, he would play with massed groups of toy soldiers “always configuring them for battle.” He avidly watched the 1973 British documentary series The World at War and by his early teens was reading anything he could get his hands on about the great battles of the second world war — the attack on Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Operation Barbarossa. His preoccupation was not encouraged at home. “Mum remembered the war and said you never want to go through a war,” he says. “She hated the war.” The family’s only connection with the armed forces was his father’s compulsory military service in Italy, a box that had to be ticked.

Nor was it a bookish family. Pezzullo says his parents could only read and write “to a limited extent.” They encouraged scholarship but primarily as a means of getting ahead. Their view was that reading books was a necessary precursor to a professional career. They didn’t want their son to labour for a living like they had. While his parents assumed that their diligent teenager was poring over books that would help him become a doctor or an engineer, he was instead devouring information about strategy, and trying to understand how the second world war started, what Churchill’s plan of action was, and how America’s approach to the conflict evolved. “Then I branched out a bit with the first world war,” he recalls, “and similarly tried to deconstruct how nations found themselves stumbling into wars, how they can be prevented, what the strategies are for getting out of wars.”

In the early 1980s, Pezzullo felt he had found his calling studying European history and historiography at the University of Sydney. But Richard Bosworth, renowned historian of Italy, steered his bright honours student away from the academy, telling him it offered few jobs and poor career prospects. Instead, he encouraged Pezzullo to consider a more secure future in government service.

It is hardly surprising that the firstborn son of working-class migrants would feel pressure to seek a stable job with good prospects for advancement. In Pezzullo’s case, an extra consideration was in play. His mother was now a widow, bringing up her sons alone. In 1983, at the age of forty-six, Pezzullo’s father had taken his own life. “Mum had done it pretty hard,” he says, “so getting a job was important.”

Pezzullo was just eighteen years old at the time. He reveals enough for me to glimpse the distress associated with his father’s rapid and unexpected mid-life descent into illness. “I always remember he was very muscular, very strong, because he laboured all day,” says Pezzullo. Over two years, as he went in and out of psychiatric institutions in the antiquated support systems of the day, his father lost both his physical health and his self-esteem. “This was a very proud, hard-working man, physically very fit, and to see him hit a wall so he couldn’t work, couldn’t hold down a job… it was very difficult.”

In 1987 Pezzullo joined Defence as a graduate. But his career in government has not been a standard climb through civil service ranks; he has achieved a rare trifecta, working not only at the highest level of the public service but also as a top adviser to a senior government minister and a lead staffer to an opposition leader.

In 1992, after five years in Defence and a stint in Prime Minister and Cabinet, Pezzullo left his public service position to join the office of foreign minister Gareth Evans. This was not a “political appointment” in the way that term is understood today. “In those days, it was standard, especially in the foreign minister’s office, to have public servants fill the role of what were traditionally called private secretaries,” he says. “So you didn’t come up out of the party.” Most ministers in the Hawke and Keating government had a strong complement of public servants in similar roles, he says, “moving the papers, making sure that the minister has everything he needs contextually to come to a decision.” Other people in the electorate office dealt with party business and it was “very unusual” to have political officers on ministerial staff.

Pezzullo’s work for Evans was guided by some golden rules: “Never shape the advice, never filter the advice and never withhold it from the minister.” I ask him if these rules are observed today. “No comment,” he responds with a grin. But it is unfortunate, he has told politicians on both sides of the house, that the demarcation of duties has blurred. “You are never going to have a completely hard separation, because in the minister’s mind the policy, the politics, the ideology, the platform, the program, the activities, they all ultimately have to come together,” he says. But he thinks the traditional Westminster separation of private secretaries from party concerns should be maintained to the extent possible, so that they can focus on administration and policy.

“In today’s environment, where the media cycle is just revving at such a rate, the time for administration is quite rapidly being sucked out,” he says. “So you have to create time and space around the minister. The good ministers — and I’ve been blessed to work for a number of them on both sides of politics — fight hard to create that time and space for proper administration, considering certain issues, meeting with their senior public servants to go through options, commissioning new options, getting intelligence briefings, and the like.”

After John Howard led the Coalition to victory in the 1996 election, Pezzullo continued working for Gareth Evans in opposition. Then he became deputy chief of staff to Labor leader Kim Beazley, running his office and advising him on national security. It was a meeting of like minds: “Colleagues pretty quickly worked out this is not going to be helpful because these two are just going to be constantly talking about either the [American] civil war or military technology or the second world war or whatever,” he laughs.

Pezzullo rejoined Defence after Labor lost the 2001 election. He had formed a personal and professional bond with both Evans and Beazley, he says, but he didn’t see himself as “a political animal.” If Beazley had won the 2001 election, though, things might have been different. “If Kim had become the prime minister and had asked me to stay on in some capacity as a national security adviser, I would have very favourably considered that,” he says.

In “policy and intellectual terms,” the most fulfilling experience of Pezzullo’s public service career so far was writing the 2009 defence white paper under Kevin Rudd. He was excited to have the space “to deconstruct defence strategy and policy” and to conjecture in a rigorous way about the strategic circumstances Australia would face in the future. His warning about the possibility of a conventional war at sea was not widely accepted at the time. “Regrettably, it’s proved to be prophetic,” he says.

Prime minister Julia Gillard answers questions during a press conference in March 2013 with Mike Pezzullo, who was then the CEO of Australian Customs. Paul Miller/AAP Image

While assembling the white paper connected with Pezzullo’s lifelong interest in the history and strategy of warfare, the “more emotionally and personally fulfilling” part of his job as departmental secretary is leading teams, something he would never have done as an academic historian. So the high point of his career aligns with his controversial and contested role in “stopping the boats”: oversight of Operation Sovereign Borders, with its offshore detention centres, turnbacks and temporary protection visas.

At this point in our discussion, Pezzullo is at pains to ensure that he is not misunderstood. “I don’t want any suggestion that Pezzullo was thrilled by supporting Abbott or something,” he says. “I’m not talking about the political dimension, that’s between the politicians to argue about. And I’m not even speaking to the discourse around managing refugee policy.”

Satisfaction came from rising to the demands of the assignment he was set. “It was a challenging strategic and operational problem to deal with because the flow of boats was just unrelenting,” he says. “The fulfilment factor… was really about how you harness a dozen or more agencies to execute the plan.”

The role of “a responsive public servant,” says Pezzullo, is to think “conceptually and intellectually” about how to implement the policies of an incoming government. Discussing the “work in progress” that is the merger of immigration and customs, he says that public servants at his level should be able to manage changes almost irrespective of the content. He draws an analogy with industrial relations in the Howard era: “As one of my colleagues says, as a good professional public servant, you have to be able to both create WorkChoices and then, when the government changes, dismantle WorkChoices.”

Yet Pezzullo has been accused of stepping beyond his role as an independent public official to become “a muscular protagonist” in the hotly contested debate about refugee policy. In early 2016, for example, he famously told Senate estimates that “no amount of moral lecturing” by advocates would bring forth solutions to the plight of refugees detained for years in Manus and Nauru.

A strong policy thread certainly runs through Pezzullo’s career. In 2001, during a federal election campaign dominated by the September 11 attacks and the Tampa affair, opposition leader Kim Beazley promised to set up an armed Coast Guard “fully integrated into our nation’s intelligence and surveillance network” within a new “powerful, cabinet-level Ministry of Home Affairs.” Mike Pezzullo was Kim Beazley’s national security adviser at the time.

Veteran Canberra-watcher Malcolm Farr credits Pezzullo with providing “the aggressive energy” behind the armed and uniformed Australian Border Force created in the merger of Customs and Immigration (or, as critics would have it, the “hostile takeover” of the larger entity by the smaller). Dennis Atkins, another experienced press gallery journalist, says Pezzullo has long urged his political masters “to reorganise the border force, domestic intelligence and policing functions into a United States style Homeland Security set-up.”

In a follow-up telephone call, I ask Pezzullo whether he takes any credit for the intellectual and strategic impetus to create a new ministry of home affairs. “None at all,” he replies. “It was the prime minister’s decision.” The same is true of the policy Labor took to the 2001 election, he says: it was Beazley’s policy, not Pezzullo’s. He insists that he is not ducking my question. The job of public servants is to provide advice in a robust and contestable fashion, but elected officials own their decisions.

What if a public servant has serious ethical or moral concerns about a policy? I ask. Having worked closely with five prime ministers at secretary or deputy secretary level since 2005, Pezzullo says senior public servants have every opportunity to raise whatever concerns they may have, without any fear of repercussions. If, after having been heard, the final decision is one the public servant still cannot accept, because it contravenes a deep personal conviction, the public servant has no choice but to resign. “I have not had to contemplate resigning,” he adds.

As we tuck into our fish, I ask Pezzullo how he regards the deeply held views of the 30 per cent or so of Australians who find the government’s border protection policies morally unacceptable.

“I respect their right to not only oppose the policy, but to express their dissent as they see fit within the law,” he says. “I mean, the whole point of preserving your sovereignty is to allow the diversity of expression and opinion.”

But does he regard them as misguided or naive?

“No, I would never use pejorative terms like that.” He insists, though, that opponents of the bipartisan policy of offshore detention and boat turnarounds must face up to two problems: “the death rate problem” and “the rationing problem.”

To illustrate, he begins with an interpretation of the Refugee Convention that obliges signatory countries to assess the claims of all asylum seekers who reach their territory and to allow them to stay if they need protection. That’s “a perfectly valid view to at least put into the argument,” he says, but it becomes problematic when you “operationalise” it. Why? Because it builds “a supply chain of movement,” he argues, in which “non-state actors” become the intermediaries between the place of persecution, the final destination and all points along the way. While some intermediaries have honourable motives, he says, many are criminals focused only on profit.

“I can’t think of any other policy areas where you would design in the space and the scope for criminals to say, okay, I can move people,” he says. Cutting the people smugglers in, says Pezzullo, inevitably means some people will die. A conservative estimate of 1200 deaths at sea during the arrival of around 50,000 asylum seekers by boat under the last Labor government produces a death rate of about 2.5 per cent. That is not the intent of policy settings, says Pezzullo, but it is the outcome, and that can never be acceptable to any government.

He recognises that there is an alternative response to the problem: set up a government-based solution that cuts out the people-smuggling intermediaries. In other words, organise “planes, cruise ships, whatever” to go and pick people up. But this raises his second concern, “the rationing problem”: how many people do you rescue?

“What is the limit?” he asks. “If you ration it at fifty thousand, when the fifty thousand and first person arrives, what do you do then?” He is convinced that if Australia were to organise airlifts of refugees from, say, Indonesia, then countless more asylum seekers would seek to travel the same path. With sixty-five million people displaced from their homes around the world, including twenty-one million refugees outside their national borders, there is no obvious upper limit to the number of people who would seek Australia’s help.

The way forward, he believes, has three stages. First, deal with the reasons why people flee their homes in the first place. “Now Syria, that’s difficult,” he says. “In East Africa, the South Sudan, people pouring into Kenya, I get all that, but we can’t disconnect this from the Security Council, what Gareth Evans famously in his book called ‘peace building.’ That whole agenda just has to be constantly attended to.”

Second, protect people in place — either in their homelands or in neighbouring countries. Again, Pezzullo acknowledges the difficulties: safe-haven strategies in response to the war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda foundered on rules of engagement that prevented peacekeepers from using their weapons to protect unarmed civilians. Pezzullo knows that the real burden of global displacement is borne by countries of first asylum like Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Kenya. He says the international community needs to find ways to support people who flee into neighbouring countries until it is safe for them to return, and this means enabling them to work, raise a family, educate their children and get access to healthcare for a decade or even longer.

Finally, says Pezzullo, governments around the world need to offer more places to those in urgent need of permanent resettlement in a third country. There are around one million people on UHNCR’s books ready to be resettled, but only about 100,000 places available annually.

Australia is pursuing these objectives, he says, as part of the global compact initiated by the September 2016 special UN General Assembly session on refugees and migrants. He is cautiously hopeful that the process may eventually produce positive results. But as the world currently stands, critics who want to dispense with the bipartisan policy of offshore processing and boat turnbacks must address the twin problems of the death rate and rationing. “I think that there should be a respectful, clinical discussion, and if people can solve that conundrum, we should adopt the view of the 30 per cent or so that you describe in your question.”

Our allotted hour is up, but I squeeze in one last question. If changes currently before parliament were in place in his youth, I point out, then his parents, with their limited literacy, might never have met the English-language requirements necessary for citizenship. (Pezzullo has spoken elsewhere about memories of his parents’ earnest discussion about the significance of making a full commitment to Australia.) He won’t discuss the substance of the bill, but he reassures me that the government will make appropriate exemptions and create supports for refugees or people with learning difficulties.

He also believes that the context has changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Australia was seeking unskilled and semi-skilled workers to build its population. “Did you want to see signs then of, not their assimilation, but their integration?” he asks. “Yes, absolutely. Was it happening organically? I can tell you it absolutely was.” In those circumstances, there was no need for government to concern itself with English-language testing. Today, in a service-based, high-skills economy, when migrant communities remain intimately connected to their homelands by modern communications, “it’s a different world.” •

The assistance of the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund in providing funding for this article is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Making a different kind of history appeared first on Inside Story.

Merkel has a point, at least in relation to Germany. In the first six months of 2017, the number of asylum seekers arriving there fell to just over 90,000. While that’s about three times the number for all of 2006, the first year of Merkel’s reign as chancellor, it’s far fewer than last year, and only about a tenth of the total number in 2015, the year of the so-called European refugee crisis.

Martin Schulz, the Social Democrat who wants to replace Merkel as chancellor, begs to differ. Last weekend, he conjured the spectre of a new European emergency. “Unless we act now,” he warned, history would repeat itself. With Merkel and the Christian Democrats in mind, he said that it would be “cynical to play for time and try to ignore the refugee issue until the federal elections.” This week, he is off for discussions with Italy’s prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni.

Gentiloni is likely to tell Schulz that talk of a looming refugee crisis makes little sense. For Italy, the crisis is already in full swing. In the past six months, more than 100,000 irregular migrants arrived in Europe by sea, 85 per cent of them disembarking in Italy. Many more are waiting for an opportunity to make the crossing from Libya. Meanwhile, some of Italy’s European partners are refusing to come to its aid. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary have said that they won’t take any asylum seekers who first entered Europe in Italy. Austria has threatened to deploy troops at the border, and its foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, has told his Italian counterpart that Italy ought to stop transferring migrants from Lampedusa and Sicily to the European mainland.

Although Schulz made his name in European, rather than German, politics — he was a member of the European Parliament for twenty-four years, and its president for five — he is likely to be less interested in Italy’s problems than in his own. And the most pressing of these is this: how can he improve the Social Democrats’ chances of leading the next government? If the elections were held now, the most recent polls suggest that Schulz’s party would win less than 25 per cent of the vote while the Christian Democrats could expect about 40 per cent. Not only does it seem increasingly likely that Merkel will win the elections of 24 September; there is also a distinct possibility that she will lead a government made up of the parties of her choice: the Christian Democrats, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, and the Greens.

In other words, Schulz’s announcement that he wants Germany’s response to refugees to feature prominently in the election campaign is a sign of desperation. It is also risky — for two reasons. A greater emphasis on refugees would provide an urgently needed lifeline to the right-wing populists of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD), who, if the current trend continues, might not attract enough votes even to be represented in the next German parliament. If they did attract enough support, then it’s likely their success would come at least partly at the expense of the Linke, the successor party of the East German communists, which Schulz would need as partner if he wanted to be the next chancellor at the head of a red–red–green coalition government.

The other risk is that Schulz’s strategy could rebound directly on his own party. He wants to remind Germans of what happened in 2015, when Germany took in about 890,000 asylum seekers, but that risks reminding them of the fact that the Social Democrats didn’t publicly oppose Merkel’s response at the time. For the past four years, they have been part of her government, and thus — nominally at least — have been co-responsible for whatever policies the government pursued.

Schulz must be hoping that voters not only overwhelmingly regret Germany’s generous response in 2015, but also single out Merkel as the one who should be blamed. He has some reason to be optimistic. Surveys suggest most Germans believe that their country took in more asylum seekers than it should have in 2015. And Schulz’s likely claim that Merkel alone is to blame for Germany’s response could draw on evidence that many might find persuasive.

Four months ago, Welt am Sonntag journalist Robin Alexander published Die Getriebenen, a book examining in minute detail the German government’s policy response to refugee arrivals during 2015–16. The book became an instant sales hit, and within a couple of weeks it had risen to the top of the Spiegel bestseller list for nonfiction. It occupied that position for three weeks, and remained in second place for another three weeks. It still holds a respectable fourteenth place.

Alexander spoke with many of those involved in the German policy response in September and October 2015, including Bavarian premier and prominent Merkel critic Horst Seehofer. The book reads as if Alexander was listening in when Merkel conferred by phone with Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann late on 4 September 2015, with both agreeing not to turn back refugees stranded in Hungary. Alexander appears to have been in the room when, shortly afterwards, Merkel rang her deputy Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the Social Democrats, who took her call “while sitting on the couch at his home in Goslar.”

In fact, Merkel seems to have been the only key player who declined Alexander’s request for an interview. That makes Die Getriebenen a curiously unbalanced account: it is a book about Merkel, but it relies on the testimony of people, like Seehofer, who disagreed with Merkel all along, or who, like Gabriel, have been anxious to distance themselves now that Germany’s initial enthusiasm for welcoming refugee arrivals has dissipated.

Alexander is critical of Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis for three main reasons. He claims that her actions have been responsible for a number of disastrous outcomes: a fractured European Union; the rise of populist nationalism in Europe; divisions within Germany; and intensified terrorist threats. He argues that Merkel’s policy fix, namely the European Union’s deal with Turkey, didn’t solve the issue. And, most importantly, he tries to show that she had little understanding of the issues and no plan — that she made policy on the run, neither consulted her colleagues and international partners nor sought democratic legitimation, and let herself be carried away by her emotions. He singles out what he sees as two serious mistakes. One was the decision not to close the border on 13 September, although the means to do so were available at the time; the other was Merkel’s willingness to pose for selfies with asylum seekers during her visit to a hostel on 10 September.

In his indictment of the German chancellor, Alexander is not alone. In their much-discussed book Refuge, which appeared at the same time as Die Getriebenen, eminent refugee studies scholar Alexander Betts and economist Paul Collier accuse Merkel of having adopted the stance of the “headless heart” and having exacerbated rather than defused the crisis. According to Betts and Collier, Merkel’s decision not to close Germany’s borders “created powerful and disastrous new incentives,” prompting hundreds of thousands more to risk the journey to Europe. Betts and Collier, too, are scathing of the deal that Merkel negotiated with Turkey and, like Alexander, they hold her responsible for the Brexit vote. “The key decisions of the refugee crisis inadvertently resulted in the people of one of the largest member countries of the European Union deciding to leave it,” they write.

It’s hard to see how Merkel, rather than the British voters, can be blamed for Brexit (or even for the election of a right-wing populist government in Warsaw, another alleged result of her actions). Alexander’s attempt to establish a link between the mass arrivals of 2015 and the emergence of a terrorist threat in Europe is equally shaky; the fact that Anis Amri, the man responsible for the December 2016 attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, had arrived in Lampedusa five years earlier and had unsuccessfully claimed asylum can hardly serve as evidence for the claim that his crime was facilitated by the German government’s response to refugees and asylum seekers in 2015.

I would like to take Alexander’s claim that Merkel’s handling of the crisis led to a polarisation of German society more seriously. The events of autumn 2015 certainly provided oxygen to the AfD. Xenophobes do feel emboldened to speak their mind in public. And incidents of racist violence have increased dramatically over the past three years. But research suggests that the number of Germans who hold racist views has not dramatically increased; rather, many of them no longer feel too inhibited to raise their voices. On the other side of the political divide, more Germans are committed to solidarity with refugees. Germany’s response has polarised and politicised society, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

If Merkel’s policy-making didn’t have these disastrous consequences, then much of the sting goes out of Alexander’s criticism of her day-to-day management of the crisis. It doesn’t entirely invalidate that criticism, though. There is little doubt that Merkel’s decision-making — in this instance, but also on other occasions — has not relied strongly on consultations with others. She may not have been able to foresee the consequences of her actions, and may have stumbled, without a clear plan, from one crisis to the next; here, too, I concede that Alexander’s analysis may well be correct.

I strongly disagree with his charge that Merkel’s policies were driven by events outside her control, and his implied criticism that her policy response was entirely opportunistic. As I have argued in previous essays in Inside Story, the event that was key to Merkel’s response was not the drowning of Alan Kurdi, nor the discovery of the bodies of seventy-one migrants in a truck in Austria, nor the demonstration of German Willkommenskultur at the Munich railway station, nor images of refugees in Budapest holding up signs showing pictures of “Mama Merkel.” Her crucial experience happened on 26 August 2015 in Heidenau.

On 21 and 22 August, a racist mob protested against a decision by the state government to accommodate more than 500 asylum seekers in a former hardware store in that small town south of Saxony’s capital, Dresden. To begin with, Merkel was not particularly concerned and showed no interest in visiting the Heidenau hardware store — or any other refugee hostel. On 24 August, her deputy, Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, visited Heidenau. He referred to the racists who had tried to attack the facility as Pack (scum) and demanded that they be locked up. He told reporters that it was important not to concede even one millimetre to “the most un-German characters I could imagine.” That same day, the Munich tabloid Abendzeitung appeared with a blank front page under the heading: “This is what the Federal Chancellor says.” The editorial explained why the space was left blank: “The nation would have listened to her, would have thought about it, would have discussed it. Would have, would have, would have, but alas has not.”

Two days later, Merkel finally visited Heidenau. She was shocked by what she found, and told locals opposed to the asylum seeker accommodation, who had earlier screamed “traitor” and “c–t” in her face, that there would be “no tolerance towards those who question the dignity of others.” Five days later, during the customary summer press conference, Merkel added: “There can be no apologies… The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their] stance.”

The decision to defy the Heidenau protesters and to insist that asylum seekers enjoy the same basic rights as citizens in Germany informed her response to the refugee crisis. Alexander concedes as much. But I would go one step further. Her insistence on upholding Article 1(1) of Germany’s Basic Law — “Human dignity shall be inviolable” — and providing a lesson to those who don’t respect the rights of others became a leitmotif that characterised her response to the refugee crisis. Rather than being opportunistic, rather than not knowing what she was doing, she was unerring in her defiance. Under her leadership, the Christian Democrats did not lurch to the right (as they had done in the early 1990s) in a vain attempt to gain the support of those opposed to foreigners in general and asylum seekers in particular.

When Merkel declared at her party’s annual congress in December last year that “a situation like that in the late summer of 2015 cannot, should not and must not be repeated,” she was referring less to her decision not to close the borders than to the often chaotic way in which that decision was implemented. At the same time, she has always been ready to tell Germans they ought to be proud of the country’s accommodation of 890,000 asylum seekers in 2015.

I suspect it will be Schulz’s downfall to have underestimated the sense of pride Germans feel when looking back at 2015. That sense of pride has become more pronounced since the election of Donald Trump. Germans like to tell themselves that they can do better — and are more relaxed about the challenges of globalisation — than the big brother on the other side of the Atlantic.

While I don’t share Alexander’s views about the outcomes of Merkel’s policies and about what drove them, I agree with him that Merkel’s response didn’t solve anything. The deal she negotiated with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was bad to begin with, and for several months now it has threatened to unravel. So far, the benefits Turkey gains — very substantial monetary assistance, political clout and a commitment that a greater number of Syrians from Turkey will be resettled than the number of irregular migrants returned to Turkey from Greece — have seemed to sway Erdoğan not to rescind the deal. But with the relationship between Turkey and Germany nearing rock bottom, he may merely bide his time until closer to the German elections.

Here, Schulz is on to something. History may not repeat itself, but the prospect that hundreds of thousands of desperate people, encouraged by Turkey, may try to reach northern Europe is real. The question then becomes: would Germans want Schulz to deal with that crisis, or would they prefer a safe pair of hands? Would they really want somebody in charge who seems to get easily excited about impending catastrophes? If Schulz wants to draw on Alexander’s analysis, the question might also be: would Germans really want a government led by a party that two years ago, while ostensibly in power, had very little influence over the direction of Germany’s policy?

Merkel has not responded to Schulz’s over-excitement. She is on holidays. Currently, that could only be in her favour. •

The post Up against Angela Merkel, a Social Democrat wants to talk about refugees appeared first on Inside Story.

The new English-language requirement represents “a significant change” from the basic skill required at the moment, says immigration minister Peter Dutton. “We increase that to IELTS Level 6 equivalent, so that is at a competent English-language proficiency level, and I think there would be wide support for that as well.”

He’s not wrong. This is not just a significant change; it is a fundamental break. To see why, you have to understand how high a barrier Level 6 of the IELTS – the International English Language Testing System – will be for many new migrants.

In 2015, ACIL Allen Consulting evaluated the Adult Migrant English Program, or AMEP. Its report is the most up-to-date assessment of the English literacy of recent migrants. Unfortunately, AMEP doesn’t use the IELTS system, so a clean comparison of new migrants’ scores isn’t possible. Instead, we need to translate AMEP’s system, the International Second Language Proficiency Rating, or ISLPR, into IELTS equivalents using what information we can find on the public record:

• Answering a 2006 Senate estimates question, the immigration department said an ISLPR 2 is approximately equal to IELTS 4 or 5.

• In the ACIL Allen review, an AMEP service provider is quoted as saying that an “ISLPR 2” is equal to IELTS 4.5.

• In a submission to the Productivity Commission’s migration intake inquiry, David Ingram, a linguist who was involved in devising both of these language testing systems, said that “universities that require IELTS 6 for entry to particular courses usually require 3 in all macroskills on the ISLPR.”

We can infer that IELTS 6, the level of English proposed by the Turnbull government to be eligible for Australian citizenship, is equal to ISLPR 3. And what proportion of new migrants get a score of ISLPR 3 after completing their government-allotted 500 hours of English training in the AMEP?

None. Zero per cent. Of the AMEP attendees who completed 500 hours of training between 2004 and 2012, 0 per cent of new migrants reached the level required for the new citizenship test.

As ACIL Allen found, 28 per cent of AMEP clients leave the program with scores of 0 or 0+ (“zero or formulaic,” the lowest levels of proficiency) on all four ISLPR elements: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Just 7 per cent of clients exit at ISLPR 2 (social proficiency, the equivalent of IELTS 4.5) after receiving 500 hours.

The Adult Migrant English Program’s performance in reducing the proportion of clients scoring at the lowest levels (0 or 0+) on the International Second Language Proficiency Rating, or ISLPR.

Source: AMEP Evaluation: Report to the Department of Education and Training, ACIL Allen Consulting, May 2015.

In 2004–05, about 20,000 new migrants enrolled in AMEP, a number that grew to about 30,000 in 2011–12. Sixty per cent of the new migrants in AMEP classes are women and children. Of course, many new migrants do not attend AMEP classes for a variety of reasons. In 2014–15, about 80 per cent of eligible humanitarian migrants, 20 per cent of eligible family migrants and 8 per cent of eligible skilled migrants attended AMEP.

What these figures show is that somewhere north of 30,000 people each year would be ineligible for Australian citizenship under the new rules. While a proportion will increase their English proficiency with time, outside the classroom, language proficiency research shows that this is a slow and gruelling process.

Using conservative estimates of the three key elements – AMEP enrolment trends, the rate of English proficiency improvement over time, and net migration trends – anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000 new migrants each year are highly unlikely to meet the proposed English proficiency level for Australian citizenship in their first decade of settlement.

Over time, this will generate a growing population of people excluded from citizenship. It’s impossible to say with any certainty what this will look like over the long term, but the available evidence suggests a substantial number of people will never receive Australian citizenship.

Some people might say these new migrants will simply have to learn and this is a good incentive to get it right. This “tough love” argument should be called out for what it is: a willingness to see people permanently excluded from our society. No voting. No standing for public office. Exclusion from many public service jobs. The possibility of expulsion from Australia by visa cancellation.

Given that 35 per cent of humanitarian migrants score the equivalent of an IELTS 2 after their AMEP classes finish, the new rules will specifically refuse citizenship to a significant proportion of refugee migrants to Australia. This is despite the fact that the figures reveal that refugees appear to love Australia more than any other group of migrants – at least if you measure this according to their higher propensity to seek citizenship.

Others might say this means we need to give people much more English-language support and training. Perhaps this is true. But we also need to recognise that coming to a new country is really difficult. It’s hard enough for rich, English-speaking migrants. But think about a Sudanese single mother with four children who is illiterate in her own language. To introduce a formal English-language test requiring IELTS 6 is to tell this woman she isn’t welcome as an Australian citizen. And if you think this is a handpicked example on the margins of our migration program, Australia granted 1277 “Woman at Risk” visas in 2015–16 as part of the annual humanitarian program, for “protection of refugee women who are in particularly vulnerable situations.”

And this doesn’t even get into the potential for married couples to be separated by an English-language test, or for children to pass easily but have to watch their parents excluded.

IELTS Level 6 is by no means perfect English. You can read this practice essay and scoff, if you like, at the simple errors highlighted. The official definition is this:

Generally, you have an effective command of the language despite some inaccuracies, inappropriate usage and misunderstandings. You can use and understand fairly complex language, particularly in familiar situations.

But the practical effects of imposing this standard are immense. It amounts to the deliberate exclusion of thousands of new migrants from Australian citizenship. Back in 2015, on the same topic, I wrote, “The worst outcome is permanent exclusion from society because barriers to entry are too high. An English-language test for citizenship would be such a barrier. This exclusion would occur despite an indefinite right to remain in Australia. A tiered, broken system of residency with little long-term hope.”

While almost all Australians believe speaking English is an important part of what makes someone an Australian, is this the type of society we want to live in? •

The post A new class of migrants: the never-to-be-citizens appeared first on Inside Story.

First responses ranged from bewilderment to ridicule. David Harris of the American Jewish Committee reminded the Pope that “the Nazis and their allies erected and used concentration camps for slave labour and the extermination of millions of people during World War II.” In Australia, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was also quick to denounce the pontiff. “The Pope really is a fool if he cannot tell the difference between a Nazi concentration camp and a refugee camp,” Bolt sneered.

The Pope made the offending remarks in Rome’s Basilica of St Bartholomew during a service for twentieth and twenty-first century martyrs, including an eighty-five-year-old French priest, Jacques Hamel, who was killed last year by Islamist extremists. During his sermon, the Pope also referred to a Muslim man whose Christian wife had been murdered because she refused to take off her crucifix. He had met the man last year during a visit to a refugee holding centre on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Refugees were not the focus of the Pope’s sermon, and media reports suggest that his written notes didn’t include a reference to concentration camps. The Vatican has, however, made available a transcript of what he said. “I do not know if that man is still in Lesvos or if he has managed to go elsewhere,” Pope Francis said of the man he encountered last year. “I do not know if he was able to get out of that concentration camp.” He immediately offered an explanation for his use of the term: “perché i campi di rifugiati – tanti – sono di concentramento, per la folla di gente che è lasciata lì.” In the Reuters report, that explanation is rather clumsily translated as “because refugee camps, many of them, are of concentration (type) because of the great number of people left there inside them.”

The news agency’s decision to insert an extra word (“type”) to help readers make sense of the Pope’s remarks is an indication of their ambiguity. Did he want to say that refugee camps can be likened to concentration camps because of the number of people accommodated there? Didn’t he rather, as I suspect, realise that his impromptu remark could be misunderstood, and try to backpedal by drawing attention to the fact that the refugees are “concentrated” in holding centres like the one on Lesvos and are not at liberty to leave them? After all, they are being sent back to Turkey under last year’s controversial deal between the government in Ankara and the European Union.

In any case, the quote makes it clear that the Pope did not equate refugee camps with Nazi concentration camps. Having visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last year, he would know that what he saw in Lesvos bore no resemblance to the slave labour and extermination camps associated with the name Auschwitz. But David Harris had a point when he said that “precision of language and facts is absolutely essential when making any historical reference.” Was the pontiff – who, after all, is not a native Italian speaker – not sufficiently attentive to the words he used when he spontaneously referred to concentration camps? Or was he perhaps deliberately careless to provoke a response?

Australians would be familiar with comparisons between concentration camps and camps holding refugees. In 2002, for example, Melbourne artist Juan Davila, who came to Australia in 1974 as a refugee from Pinochet’s Chile, called the Woomera immigration detention facility a “concentration camp.” Two years earlier, one of Australia’s most respected refugee law experts, Sydney University academic Mary Crock, was reported to have said after a visit to the Curtin detention centre that “aspects of the centre resembled a concentration camp.” More recently, the regional processing centres on Manus Island and in Nauru have frequently been likened to concentration camps.

If we take “concentration camp” to mean “Auschwitz,” then such comparisons are extremely problematic. If, however, the intention is to employ the term in a more generic sense, then it is arguably legitimate to use “concentration camp” to draw attention to certain aspects of European holding centres and Australian immigration detention facilities.

According to the New World Encyclopedia, a concentration camp is “a large detention centre created for political opponents, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people”; imprisonment in such camps is not guided by “due process of law fairly applied by a judiciary.” In the English language, the term was first used during the Cuban war of independence (1895–98) to refer to the reconcentrados, camps set up by the Spanish military to intern Cubans. During the second Boer war (1899–1902), the British established concentration camps to “concentrate” Boer civilians; the term was then widely used in the British press. More than 26,000 women and children died in these camps.

In Germany, the equivalent term, Konzentrationslager, was not pioneered by the Nazis. It was first used in 1904 during the genocidal war against the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa to refer to internment camps that were modelled partly on the concentration camps in neighbouring British South Africa. In the early years of the Weimar Republic, concentration camps were set up for short periods to intern non-German Jews and left-wing political prisoners. Thus, when the Nazis came to power and almost immediately set up Konzentrationslager – the Dachau concentration camp commenced operations on 22 March 1933, only seven weeks after Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor – neither the term nor the concept was new.

The first Nazi Konzentrationslager were not designed to exterminate large numbers of people. It was not until after the second world war, once the full extent of the Holocaust had become known, that the term “concentration camp” acquired the connotations it has today. These connotations are so specific that they arguably don’t cover the full range of Nazi Konzentrationslager.

In Australia, a government agency still used the term in a generic sense as late as 1940. When Smith’s Weekly complained in November of that year that the Sydney telephone directory listed two internment camps for enemy aliens as “concentration camps,” it was not decrying the use of the term, but outraged at the fact that the Post Office published the camps’ locations while censorship prevented newspapers from revealing such details.

Does this history matter, given that the term concentration camp is now universally associated with Nazi death camps, and particularly with Auschwitz? I believe it does, if it helps to remind us that the concentration of irregular migrants at the so-called hot spots established by the European Union, and the concentration of asylum seekers and refugees in Australian-run immigration detention centres, is not entirely unprecedented.

A year ago, former Court of Appeal judge Stephen Charles QC wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: “The camps in Manus Island and Nauru have long since ceased to be mere detention centres. They are now concentration camps.” Such an observation could be helpful too. Not because the regional processing facility in Nauru resembles Auschwitz, but because the term “detention centre” may no longer be adequate to describe that facility, in the same way that the term “refugee camp” (which connotes a camp set up to protect and look after refugees) may no longer be an adequate designation for the holding centre on Lesvos.

Charles seems to have had Auschwitz or other death camps in mind when he referred to concentration camps. He wrote that the purpose of the concentration camps in Germany “was to separate various groups – communists, Jews, homosexuals – from the German community.” That was certainly true for the earlier Nazi camps, such as Dachau and Buchenwald. It could be argued that detention centres, too, are such spaces of exclusion.

The pontiff’s impromptu use of the term campo di concentramento may well have been the result of a deep sense of frustration over Europe’s asylum seeker and refugee policies, and the lack of interest in the plight of refugees in much of Europe. He followed his reference to the man he met last year at the holding centre on Lesvos with the observation that “ agreements seem to be more important than human rights.” I suspect the agreements that the Pope had in mind were the 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey and the agreement between the EU and Libya concluded earlier this year. Human rights organisations have condemned both.

It is unlikely that the Pope’s criticism of the European response to refugees and asylum seekers would have been reported if he hadn’t used the term “concentration camp” in the same sermon. And maybe that also justifies his use of the term. At least that’s what Christoph Heubner seems to believe. He is the vice-president of the International Auschwitz Committee, which represents Auschwitz survivors. Heubner did not think the pontiff’s words were inappropriate. “He overdrew to move hearts. That’s legitimate.” Heubner told the German Press Agency.

In last year’s Sydney Morning Herald article, Stephen Charles claimed that the German Konzentrationslager “were maintained in great secrecy; most Germans had little or no knowledge of the awful and dehumanising conditions in which detainees were kept.” This is a myth that many Germans are still fond of repeating. But research has conclusively shown that Charles’s is not an accurate observation. It would be equally untrue to say that Australians have little or no knowledge of the conditions on Manus and in Nauru, or that Europeans have no way of knowing about the conditions in Greek refugee camps (or in the prisons of the European Union’s new best friend, Libya).

And maybe this is the only appropriate comparison between today’s camps and the Nazi concentration camps: today’s Europeans and Australians pretend that they don’t know and bear no responsibility for their governments’ response to refugees and other irregular migrants in the same way that most Germans between 1933 and 1945 pretended the camps had nothing to do with them, and that the best response was to cover one’s eyes and ears.

Pope Francis didn’t say that. But he might have. On more than one occasion, he has condemned what he calls “la globalizzazione dell’indifferenza,” the globalisation of indifference. The attentiveness demanded by David Harris – a “precision of language and facts… when making any historical reference” – is essential indeed. It should also be an attentiveness attuned to etymologies and contested meanings. But even more essential is the kind of attentiveness about whose lack the Pope has been so concerned.

The post The globalisation of indifference appeared first on Inside Story.

I have three pillows in my bed. One, I put my head on, the other I put my legs on, and the third one I just hug. When I hug the pillow I sometimes like to pretend as if I’m hugging my girlfriend [laughing]. Ah! I mean, I’ve been here three years, how can I get a girlfriend? Yes, some people have girlfriends on Facebook, but I’m not living in Facebook relationships. Maybe they are using a different face, a different name? Maybe men can use a girl’s photos? It’s difficult to believe [laughing].

You know, I have sent too many emails to universities in Australia. I asked them for an online scholarship and I explained my situation: I’m living in the detention centre, and my financial situation is not perfect. I came here to Manus Island, 28 September 2013. I was seventeen. It was a hard decision, but we had no choice.

My name is . Jack? It is my grandfather’s name. Maybe they took it from the British in Sudan, a long time ago. I was born in a village called Kiskita. In 2013, war started in that area and we lost half of our family. We fled from that village to a big city, El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. We came to a refugee camp called Riyad, where my family lives now. You know, Darfur is really big. The wars have lasted from 2001 until now.

Some people here are saying to me, “You are a leader.” I have a nickname from the guys, they call me Immigration. Why? Because when immigration staff brought us here, they just released us inside the camp and we found our rooms by ourselves. I was helping new arrivals to find rooms and beds. In camp, if you say Omar, not too many people know me. But if you say Immigration, they know me well. Because I’m trying to help people. Sometimes I like to talk politics, and some people are hoping one day I will become a minister of parliament. Even some people are calling me Minister.

I’d like to study instead of doing nothing. I want to study for my future. If you want to change something you have to learn. Education is light. You have to light your life, and you light other lives also. Do you know why I want to study law, and especially international law? Because I want to work with international organisations, like Amnesty or UNHCR [the UN refugee agency]. I want to help, I want to help people. If I can’t help, just I want to tell the truth, about what is right and what is wrong. I am interested in law because I have confidence I can help my people. Yes, my English language is too slow, but I have ability to learn more. I believe.

My English teacher, David, advised me about scholarships and helped me to write the letter. And then I copied it onto my email, and sent it to several different universities, asking for scholarships for online study. I sent it to Melbourne Law School and Adelaide, and another university in Perth. Always law schools. I forget the names, but they all replied to me. The answer they told me was, “You do not have an Australian visa.” The first condition to apply for university, or to get a scholarship from an Australian university, is you need to have an Australian visa. And finally I gave up. They were telling me, “Just stay strong and get out of detention, and come here. If you get a visa in Australia, then we have many different organisations helping people to get scholarships.” Yep, I remember, but unfortunately I get nothing.

I think about my future – why not?

My family is still living in Riyad refugee camp. My mother is there and my brothers, but my father is in another country, Chad. Have you heard of Chad, bordering Sudan? My father also ran away, like me, ’cause of lack of safety. We are from the Zaghawa tribe. The people who killed most of our family, they are everywhere, and the camp is open. They can enter the camp at any time. You can’t guarantee your safety.

I’m the first child, the oldest. I spoke with them last Sunday. I call them every thirteen or fifteen days. They know my situation already. I just ask, “Are you okay?” And they ask me, “Where are you?” The same question, every time. Same answer. I’m still in the camp, same as them and I don’t know my future. I tell them that I’m okay. In fact I’m not okay, I’m not feeling good, but I tell them I’m okay. The oldest son should look after his parents and brothers. You help them and if the financial situation is not perfect, you should sacrifice to get a job and help them. They need my help.

Sometimes I think back to my situation in Sudan and I know it’s not good to go back. I do other stuff to keep myself busy, sometimes studying English in my room, sometimes playing football. Sometimes I read books like Nelson Mandela’s – leaders like him, they were suffering a lot and then finally they got their freedom and they achieved their goals. When I look to those people, it’s kind of encouragement, you know, to survive.

When I am thinking a lot, I can’t sleep well. Some days when you feel good and happy you sleep early, and the other days will be totally different, especially when you hear some news coming out from the Australian government. The politicians, they know we will suffer. Every single word they use to describe us – it’s rumours, you know?

Nightmares start. I have nightmares, like action nightmares, people attacking people. Now we have memory problems, we can’t remember what happened yesterday, or last night. Our memories are not normal, they cannot record anything. I’m talking to you now, but maybe after a couple of hours I won’t remember what I said to you. I forget too easily, not like before. I worry about that, yes, of course – that maybe it’s getting worse, worse. Maybe one day we will lose our minds. I have seen a lot of people here lose their mind. They arrive normal, like you, but the situation makes them like that.

Yes, I think about my future – why not? Even the animals they need a future. Like anybody else, like any normal person, I need a future. I want to study and I want to help myself, my family, my people, people generally. Why not? Seeking asylum, that’s a crime? Under what kind of law? If you come by boat and sought asylum in Australia, you are guilty, yes? Why they don’t take us to the court if we are really guilty and we really are terrorists? I want Australian people to discover the truth by themselves. I believe in justice. •

They Cannot Take the Sky is published by Allen and Unwin.

The post They call me Immigration appeared first on Inside Story.

The Bali Process is the key diplomatic forum in which Australia and forty-three other countries in the region discuss the challenges posed by forced migration from countries in the region and beyond. Members themselves describe the Bali Process as “a voluntary, inclusive, non-binding forum for policy dialogue, information sharing and capacity building.” Established in 2002, its full title is the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime are also members, and other countries and agencies participate when appropriate.

Although ministerial meetings are usually held every two years, this March’s meeting was almost a year late. It was perhaps no coincidence that relations between the Bali Process co-chairs, Indonesia and Australia, had been strained during that time by Australia’s incursions into Indonesian waters during boat turnback operations, and Indonesia’s execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran for drug offences.

The region had also faced a refugee crisis that left up to 8000 Bangladeshi and Rohingya people stranded on boats in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Abandoned by people-smuggler crews who feared Thai government law enforcement, these thousands waited, many perishing, without basic food, water and medical attention, while surrounding countries delayed humanitarian assistance and asylum.

Not surprisingly, those tragic events were among the matters discussed at this year’s meeting, which commissioned a review to “share lessons” and “work to implement necessary improvements.” Led by Australia and Indonesia, the review will consider “options for improving national, regional and subregional contingency planning and preparedness for potential large influxes of irregular migrants in the future.” Its timing is still unclear.

The ministers also acknowledged the “unprecedented levels of displacement and mobility seen globally since the last ministerial conference,” and adopted a declaration reinforcing member countries’ commitment to tackling “complex challenges.” Many of the meeting’s recommendations focused on preventing future maritime crises (and associated loss of life) and tackling the underlying causes of forced migration.

Ministers directed member governments to consider their responses to people arriving by boat, giving priority to coordinating procedures for rescue at sea, identifying predictable places for disembarkation, improving reception and screening systems, and engaging civil society in delivery of post-disembarkation emergency assistance. They also recommended research into temporary protection and local-stay arrangements.

Significantly, the meeting agreed on a special mechanism to enable the Bali Process co-chairs to consult, and where necessary convene future meetings, to consider “urgent irregular migration issues with affected and interested countries in response to current regional issues or future emergency situations.” According to Peter Hughes, a former deputy secretary of Australia’s immigration department and now a fellow of the Centre for Policy Development, this mechanism “provides a vital avenue for the Bali Process to make a difference in responding to mass displacement.” The fact that countries agreed to this special mechanism corresponds to their acknowledgement at the meeting of the need for more “agile, timely responses.” Attendance at meetings called by the co-chairs will be voluntary, and the impact of this mechanism remains to be seen.

Ministers recognised the importance of “providing basic protection for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers” and of “inclusive socioeconomic development, full respect for human rights and measures to reduce statelessness.” Underlying ministers’ statements is the view that unless humanitarian and protection needs are met, “people will continue risking their lives on smugglers’ boats.” Their decision to extend the focus of policies to migrant protection is significant; in the past, Bali meetings have been preoccupied with legal responses to people smuggling and human trafficking (and especially their criminalisation).

The meeting welcomed long-term solutions for refugees in the form of the “provision of resettlement places” and “appropriate local solutions.” A toolkit to improve systems for registering births, deaths and marriages is also being developed and countries were encouraged to participate in order to “enhance the capacity of states to identify and provide protection to at-risk populations.” Regional information campaigns are being developed to highlight the dangers of irregular boat journeys.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, ministers recognised the need to expand “safe, legal and affordable migration pathways” as an alternative to journeys facilitated by people smugglers. Member governments were encouraged “to consider how labour migration opportunities can be opened up to persons with international protection needs.” Family reunification programs are another possibility. The declaration also referred to “exploring viable temporary migration schemes.” An Australian Human Rights Commission report released in September this year also advanced options to “expand opportunities for safe entry to Australia.”

While the trend of the March meeting is positive, the devil will be in the implementation – if it occurs at all. Recent history tells us that the Bali Process has not resulted in significant protection-focused policy initiatives among its members. A 2011 Regional Cooperation Framework, agreed to by all Bali Process members, expressed the clear need for “practical cooperative solutions that also address humanitarian and protection needs,” but even five years later the framework has not been translated into national policy in Australia or other member countries.

Australia’s processing and detention arrangements with Nauru and Papua New Guinea are inconsistent with the protection-centred approach to which it is committed under the Bali Process. In their recent book Refugees, Regionalism and Responsibility, Penelope Mathew and Tristan Harley explore this policy contradiction, pointing out that “Australia has inverted the moral responsibility for resettling refugees by sending asylum seekers to developing countries in order to evade the hard legal obligations of allowing unauthorised boat arrivals to seek asylum in Australia.” Further evidence that governments in the region may not truly be committed to protection sentiments expressed in Bali Process meetings can be seen in the lack of effective, immediate response to last year’s crisis in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.

In mid 2015, the Refugee Council of Australia, the peak body for organisations representing refugees in Australia, argued that “large multilateral forums like the Bali Process are unlikely to provide any significant impetus for change in the region.” Will things be any different after governments have had the opportunity to implement the commitments they signed up for at this year’s ministerial meeting? Recent history suggests not – though one key difference this time around is that Australia’s Pacific Solution is unravelling. With Canberra forced to look for alternative policies, it’s not unthinkable that one day soon the Bali Process may be taken seriously as a means towards an alternative policy. •

The post As the Pacific Solution unravels, Bali provides a lead appeared first on Inside Story.

The key protagonists were Shen Narayanasamy, GetUp!’s human rights campaign director, and retired general Jim Molan, co-author of the Coalition’s refugee and asylum policy and Tony Abbott’s former special envoy for Operation Sovereign Borders.

As the transcript reveals, the two speakers offered up very different numbers for Australia’s annual migration intake:

SHEN NARAYANASAMY: I think there is an alternative [to Operation Sovereign Borders] because when you understand that we take 800,000 people a year and we have done so since prime minister John Howard, the highest intake in history, it’s because we know it turbo-charges our economy and contributes to our society. 

JIM MOLAN: 800,000 per year? 

SHEN NARAYANASAMY: 800,000 per year. 

JIM MOLAN: 200,000 per year. 

SHEN NARAYANASAMY: No, 800,000. 

JIM MOLAN: 200,000 per year. 

SHEN NARAYANASAMY: This is the problem. 

JIM MOLAN: 200,000 per year. 

At this point, UNSW law professor and refugee expert Jane McAdam intervened in an attempt to clarify matters. She suggested that the two figures could be reconciled: Molan was referring to Australia’s annual intake of 200,000 permanent migrants, while Narayanasamy was including an additional 600,000 temporary migrants.

Neither of the two protagonists threw much light on the issue; in fact, the exchange probably only added to the level of public confusion, despite McAdam’s attempt to reconcile the figures. This was surely not the panellists’ intention. But combative, live television is not the best place to discuss statistics, particularly when they are complex. Counting the number of migrants Australia takes in each year might appear simple, but it is not really so straightforward.

All three panellists were correct in their own terms: Australia’s annual permanent migration intake is capped at just below 200,000 people (Molan’s figure) and each year around 600,000 migrants are granted temporary visas as international students, working holiday makers or temporary skilled workers (McAdam’s figure). Adding these two numbers together gives the total of 800,000 (Narayanasamy’s figure). But there are two serious problems in counting migration numbers in this way.

The first is that there is a big difference between the number of visas granted in any one year and the number of migrants who actually arrive. Many people granted visas are already in Australia, renewing an existing visa or shifting between different visa classes. Each time this occurs, no additional person enters Australia. They may be changing their status – which can have significant implications – but this doesn’t change the number of people who are coming and going across the frontier.

We know, for example, that almost half of Australia’s permanent migration program consists of people who are already here, generally on some kind of temporary visa. In 2015–16, 190,000 permanent skilled and family visas were granted, of which more than 91,000 went to people already in Australia. To include these people in the number of migrants Australia “takes” in a financial year is to engage in double counting.

The same issue arises in relation to temporary migrants. At least 100,000 of the people granted temporary visas in 2015–16 were transferring from one type of temporary visa to another: 36,000 working holiday makers obtained a second twelve-month working holiday visa; and about 73,000 international students moved to a different type of study visa (from an English-language course to university entry, for example), or to a 485 post-study work visa, a 457 temporary skilled work visa or a working holiday maker visa. There are also other movements across and within visa classes (when working holiday makers become students, for instance, or 457 visa holders renew their work visas). Again, since all these migrants are already present in Australia they can’t be included in the national annual “intake” without double counting.

If we exclude these two groups, then the number of visas issued to permanent and temporary migrants arriving in Australia from another country in any one year would fall below 600,000.

There is an added complication: the need to account for New Zealanders on “special category visas.” Under the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement, New Zealanders can enter Australia freely, to live and work for an indefinite period, and aren’t included in the migration program statistics. We can set the New Zealand issue aside, however, because it is part of the second, more significant issue we face in counting Australia’s annual net migrant intake – the fact that hundreds of thousands of people also leave Australia every year.

Many students, working holiday makers, international students and 457 visa holders go home at the end of their travels, their studies or their employment contracts. Some permanent residents and citizens also live outside Australia for extended periods, returning to previous countries of residence, pursuing job opportunities or following their hearts or their study goals.

So any meaningful attempt to quantify Australia’s annual migrant “intake” must also reckon with the number who depart – at least as long as our intention is to get a handle on the nation’s capacity to manage the impact of migration flows on such things as the demand for housing, jobs, transport, healthcare and government services.

After years of trying different measurements, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has settled on a methodology for counting migrants that takes account of both arrivals and departures while excluding short-term visitors like tourists. If you’re in Australia for twelve out of sixteen months, you’re included; if you aren’t, you’re not. This enables the ABS to come up with a figure for net overseas migration, or NOM, which is critical to understanding why Australia can’t be said to be taking 800,000 people a year.

The big difference between the number of visas granted in any one year and the number of people who are in Australia for at least twelve months in a sixteen-month period, was neatly visualised in the Productivity Commission’s recent report, Migrant Intake into Australia:

Migration flows, 2013–14

Source: Productivity Commission, Migrant Intake into Australia, figure 12.3, page 416

The commission’s chart shows the many different migration pathways, including arrival on a temporary or permanent visa, the granting of onshore visas to people already here, departure or progression to citizenship. These are key to understanding why the number of visa grants doesn’t tell us how many people are arriving. The chart shows, for example, that 298,000 migrants came to Australia on temporary visas in 2013–14, yet in that year there were almost twice as many temporary visas issued (292,060 international student visas, 98,570 skilled worker visas, and 183,428 working holiday visas).

So exactly how many migrants does Australia take each year in net terms – that is, if we deduct departures from arrivals and exclude short-term visitors like tourists? In 2014–15, the ABS estimated the total was 168,200. As the chart below shows, the trend over the last six years has been for the net number of migrants to decrease.

Net overseas migration to Australia

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Migration, Australia, 2014–15, 3412.0

There is a big difference between Net Overseas Migration of 168,200 people and the assertion that “we take 800,000 people a year.” Molan’s figure was certainly closer than Narayanasamy’s, but seemed to be based purely on the government’s annual quota for permanent arrivals, with no allowance for temporary migrants or departures.

GetUp!’s Shen Narayanasamy used her 800,000 figure to mount an argument in favour of increasing Australia’s annual humanitarian intake, including urgently resettling around 1500 people who have been recognised as refugees on Manus (561) and Nauru (929) but who continue to languish in those places at the government’s pleasure.

She laid out her case in much greater detail at the Wheeler Centre’s Di Gribble Argument in Melbourne the previous week. Identifying what she called “the great immigration con” perpetrated under prime minister John Howard, she argued that the overall size of our migration intake means we shouldn’t be anxious about boat arrivals and could certainly do much more to accommodate refugees. “At their panic-inducing peak in 2013, boat arrivals brought 25,173 people seeking safety to Australia,” she said. “Over the same period we welcomed 818,863 people on a variety of long-stay temporary and permanent visas… without anyone batting an eyelid. That’s an average of 2200 migrants coming through arrival terminals in our airports every single day.”

If 800,000 new migrants were arriving each year without being offset by a large number of people also leaving, then we would definitely notice dramatic differences in everyday terms. It would put significant strain on schools, hospitals, roads, public transport, housing and other services and infrastructure.

This is not to disagree with the politics of Narayanasamy’s position: as a rich, developed nation Australia clearly has the capacity to resettle many more refugees, including those on Manus and Nauru. The government’s claim that people smugglers would set sail again the moment Australia weakened its resolve on resettlement lacks merit. It is even less credible to suggest that taking up New Zealand’s offer to resettle 150 refugees each year from Manus and Nauru would reignite maritime smuggling. On Q&A, Molan suggested that the government had spurned New Zealand’s refugee resettlement offer because “in three years’ time, after they go to New Zealand, they have the right to come to Australia.” Aside from Molan’s factual error (it takes at least five years’ residence to become an NZ citizen), his claim that resettling refugees from Manus and Nauru is handing a “people smuggler somewhere in Java something to sell” isn’t convincing.

As Frank Brennan, Robert Manne, Tim Costello and John Menadue have argued, while Australian naval forces keep intercepting maritime asylum seekers and returning them to Indonesia (or Sri Lanka) the people smugglers will struggle to find customers for their trade:.

How many asylum seekers would be willing to pay people smugglers thousands of dollars when the overwhelming likelihood is disruption by Indonesian authorities or interception by the Australian navy and return to the place of their departure?

How, then, should we assess Australia’s capacity to resettle more refugees and provide them with housing, jobs, education and healthcare, without massive disruption to, or opposition from, existing residents? Rather than looking at absolute numbers, the best approach may be to consider Australia’s net migrant intake as a proportion of population. Making this comparison over time provides a more useful measure of Australia’s capacity to manage higher migration levels, including an increase in the resettlement of people displaced from war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq. A chart from Treasury’s 2015 Intergenerational Report provides this data:

Net overseas migration as a percentage of the population

Source: Treasury, 2015 Intergenerational Report: Australia in 2055, chart 1.5.

Looked at this way, it is clear that migration as a proportion of population peaked at around 2 per cent in the “populate or perish” years after the second world war, when Australia resettled tens of thousands of displaced Europeans. Migration fell to its lowest point under Gough Whitlam, then waxed and waned in the Hawke–Keating years before peaking again at around 1.5 per cent of population, under John Howard, in the first decade of the century.

What this chart doesn’t reveal are the dramatic changes to the migration system during that period, and particularly from the mid 1990s onwards. Until about the end of the cold war, the federal government generally maintained firm control over the number of people who entered the country. Each year, the permanent migration program was established in the budget with an allocation of permanent visas. These were virtually the only visas available, and their numbers were set by Treasury boffins based on their projections of future economic circumstances. As emigration from Australia also tended to be permanent rather than fleeting, this ensured the total number of people coming and going was pretty easy to count.

Today, governments and bureaucrats face a very different proposition. While the Australian government continues to set the number of permanent visas in the budget each year, migration overall is managed rather than controlled. There is no cap on temporary migration: the number of people who arrive as New Zealand citizens, international students, working holiday makers or skilled workers on 457 visas is determined by factors that are largely beyond government control: employers’ demand for overseas workers, the success of our universities and training organisations in attracting fee-paying international students, the exchange rate, and rates of youth unemployment in countries that are reciprocal partners in the working holiday maker scheme.

In this sense, Narayanasamy was right to claim in her Di Gribble Argument that John Howard doubled Australia’s migration intake while asserting that “we will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.” She was right, too, in saying that the disconnect between tight border control and high migration went virtually unnoticed in public debate, as did the transformation of Australia’s migration system from a tightly controlled program of permanent settlement to an uncapped and demand-driven scheme with high levels of temporariness.

Yet her laudable aim of encouraging Australians to support a much higher intake of humanitarian migrants needs to be based on firmer foundations than the flawed assertion that Australia already accepts 800,000 migrants every year (not least because for many people this high figure might be reason to slam the entry gate shut rather than open it wider).

Nor can humanitarian migrants – refugees and other displaced people – be compared easily with international students, working holiday makers or skilled workers on temporary visas, since they generally have very different characteristics. Humanitarian migrants are generally likely to be much less fluent in English and, on average, to have lower skills and qualifications. Statistically speaking, they will find it much harder to find employment and may come with a burden of trauma and illness. For this reason, humanitarian migrants need much greater levels of support than other migrants (whether temporary or permanent). Fiscal questions are also involved, since humanitarian migrants are immediately (and rightly) eligible for government benefits like Newstart and services like Medicare, whereas temporary migrants and new permanent residents are not. 

None of this means that we should dodge the challenge of increasing Australia’s refugee intake, or support the government’s claim that Australia is already doing enough, or disagree with the proposition that large-scale humanitarian migration could be in Australia’s long-term interest (just look at how this country has benefited from the resettlement of displaced people from postwar Europe and of refugees from Indochina).

There is no doubt we could do much more. History, and migration numbers, tell us as much. In 1980–81 under Coalition prime minister Malcolm Fraser, Australia had a population of just below fifteen million people and resettled 22,545 humanitarian migrants. We have never reached that number again. If we resettled an equivalent number of refugees proportionally to our population today, then our current annual humanitarian intake would exceed 33,000 people. This is 75 per cent above the increased intake of 19,000 people promised by Malcolm Turnbull at the recent refugee summit in New York, and significantly beyond Labor’s election promise to increase Australia’s humanitarian intake to 27,000 by 2025. Yet we are a much richer country today than we were in 1981. •

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As UNHCR’s assistant high commissioner (protection) from 2005 to 2013, I was one of the “troika” with whom António Guterres worked closely. For ten years, with energy, integrity and a belief in accountability to beneficiaries, he skilfully steered the organisation through a dramatically worsening displacement environment, recurring budget crises and the quicksand of UN politics.

Guterres came to that position as a socialist politician who commanded widespread respect among his political peers, but he was untested in the intricacies of the humanitarian world. This inexperience might have proved a liability, were it not for other attributes he brought to the job, among them his broad historical and geographical knowledge and a prodigious appetite for facts and figures. It helped that he was a capable and winning communicator, interchangeably in four languages, a skill that certainly contributed to his record as one of UNHCR’s most successful fundraisers. That he had a tendency to micro-manage was perhaps the main concern expressed internally. Decisions did not back up, though; they were taken.

The SG-to-be is a consummate politician. Some people feared early on that this might become a liability for an organisation, UNHCR, mandated to stand up for the rights of individuals against government malfeasance. At the best of times, politicians will be challenged to ensure that their policies remain coherent and immune to political pressures and shifting currents. They can also be somewhat conflict-averse. The flipside, of course, is that top UN positions are quintessentially political functions.

Guterres’s political credentials meant he was able to deal convincingly with the governments on whose financial and political support UNHCR relies, in a language they understood. He proved himself adept at talking with, rather than at, governments, at moving on from disagreements, at building positive outcomes out of discordant beginnings, and overall at convincing funders to continue to support refugee assistance and protection even if their inclinations might have led them elsewhere. In all of this, he did a service to a chronically under-resourced organisation, fully dependent on voluntary contributions and trying to implement its mandate in a world of growing asylum fatigue and contracting humanitarian efforts.

Will these qualities carry him to similar success as the secretary-general of an institution currently underrated and underutilised, and not always well served by its member states?

The United Nations is now seventy years old. It was conceived in the 1940s, together with the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which became the World Trade Organization), in the shadow of the Second World War. Securing lasting peace and economic recovery were central preoccupations, nationally and ly. The extent to which the UN has been successful in its pursuit of these goals has been the subject of endless review and criticism. How might the new SG turn this around?

The UN’s critics love to dwell, with some justice, on the inefficiencies and bureaucratic hurdles that beset its main intergovernmental bodies, the General Assembly and the Security Council. Its bewildering structure is spread over many headquarters and field offices, and an abundance of institutions, organisations, intergovernmental councils and assemblies, and secretariat offices. It labours under layers of rules, instructions and administrative policies, some written but many not, and a plethora of meetings, arrangements, languages, initials, titles, appointments and contracts.

Guterres came into UNHCR vowing to pursue stability and avoid the mistake of initiating change before he had consolidated his authority. This was well received in an organisation that had seen its fair share of costly, unsettling and ultimately inconsequential reconfigurations. He nevertheless did embark, after a grace period, on an important restructuring that was ultimately credited with having dramatically pared back headquarters, located staff closer to the point of need, and diverted much-needed dollars from administration to operations. This augurs well for what lies ahead for him in New York. That said, transforming the United Nations from within includes improving how its agencies cooperate, a process already in train but one with which UNHCR (and Guterres at its helm) has had problems. These he will have to work carefully around.

Whether the UN will ever get the funds and qualified people necessary for its work is a perennial question. In his troika meetings, Guterres used to bemoan the necessity of annual visits to each and every donor government ambassador in Geneva, hat in hand so to speak, but he accepted these visits as his personal responsibility, going beyond his regular encounters on the diplomatic circuit, and they paid dividends. Under his leadership, too, a wariness of private sector partnerships was replaced by whole-hearted embrace, which found its reflection in a major overhaul of UNHCR’s external relations arrangements and staff, and again a healthier funding situation.

If Guterres has shown himself to be adept when it comes to funding, this may prove but one of the challenges he will have to face early to in ensure the relevance and value of the UN and its institutions in an era of major geopolitical and social change. Here, he will not be starting from scratch. Steps already taken include the greater democratisation of the SG selection process, which brought him to his new position. But the long-advocated, more sweeping reforms of the Security Council, designed to rid it of the increasingly outdated vestiges of the postwar order, have yet to be realised. In particular, the veto power of its permanent five members is an historical anachronism that increasingly undermines the legitimacy of the organisation.

More generally, the Security Council’s composition is sorely out of kilter with modern geopolitical realities. The Asia-Pacific region, for example, accounts for over half the world's population but has only 20 per cent of Security Council seats. Reform of the Council’s processes and composition remains a highly divisive issue, and will call for political skills of a high order. It will help that Guterres has those skills as he works with governments over the coming period to bring about the necessary changes.

Another constituency, “we the peoples,” will also need to be cultivated with care, understanding and empathy at an early point. A different culture of accountability – one that values its individual beneficiaries as much as its client governments – is called for. This is an era in which the gap between citizens and their governments is growing progressively wider. There is a rejection of elites. The power of civil society to effect change in its own right – ahead of, no longer behind, national leaders – is seemingly unstoppable. The ascendancy of revolutionary disruptive technology and ubiquitous social media has seen to this. The UN needs to connect better with people if it is to deal with the current retreat from globalisation and a broadening consensus against mass migration. Here, empathy will have the edge over political know-how. Guterres introduced into the standard UNHCR lexicon the phrase “the people we serve.” He starts off on the right foot.

Guterres will also have an edge in overseeing the programs and operations delivered through the UN, which do connect with and make a real difference in the people’s everyday lives. It is a mistake to understand the UN solely by reference to its intergovernmental processes and bodies. The many different organisations and specialised agencies it houses feed and vaccinate millions of people, respond with billions of dollars to natural and human-induced disasters, and provide shelter, support and protection to vulnerable women, children and men through targeted programs on every continent. The sustainable development goals set by the UN and pursued through its organisations are a much-hailed successor program to the Millennium Development Goals, commended as the largest, most sustained and concrete global poverty reduction effort of all time.

UNHCR, with its budget of billions and its reach in the 120-plus countries where it protects and assists refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers and stateless people, is a sterling example of the critical value of the UN’s humanitarian work. The exodus of millions of Syrians to neighbouring states and beyond is an indication, if one is needed, of the scale of the challenge that mass displacement can represent. The problem is regrettably much bigger than Syria, though. Some sixty-five million people are displaced at the moment. Around twenty-one million of them are refugees, 85 per cent of whom live in developing countries with human rights and governance issues of their own. Fewer than one in forty refugee situations are resolved within three years and many continue for a decade or more, with donor funds progressively drying up and millions of people left in sub-standard living conditions with no prospects. The new SG’s familiarity with the global displacement crisis is arguably his biggest plus.

The UN is often criticised for making insufficient progress in delivering on its charter responsibilities – promoting peace, security and respect for human rights, and encouraging economic development. The theory of the charter is one of peaceful states and fulfilled peoples existing in an ever-better world fostered and furthered through the UN. Of course, the reality is very different. Critics can point to many examples, from the unresolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict to Syria, from the perceived under-response to the Ebola crisis to relative impotence on climate change, not to mention the growing disparities in wealth and resources between countries and among peoples. There is a high probability that the displacement crisis will increasingly be affected by environmental factors such as population growth, declining resources and inequality of access to them, ecological damage and climate-induced disasters. Most recently, the critics were lukewarm about the UN summit convened last month in New York to chart a new course on refugees and migration but dismissed by some as rhetoric-heavy and substance-short.

It is too easy to lay these failures at the door of the UN. The organisation is ultimately dependent on the will of governments to facilitate its work. More often than not this means that its activities collide with politics, security, national interests, donor priorities and capacities. Having headed a UN organisation for which this is an ever-present daily reality, the new SG knows the problems better than many. He is well prepared, even if this does not diminish the sheer scale of the tasks ahead of him. •

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In Germany itself, the anniversary dominated newspapers and magazines and featured prominently on talk shows and current affairs programs on television and radio – to the extent that Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, an event whose anniversary usually prompts intense public reflection, was barely mentioned. But which was the pivotal event that deserved to be singled out? Which date in particular marked Germany’s extraordinary response to the refugee crisis?

Was it 27 August, when the bodies of seventy-one migrants were found in a refrigerated truck in Austria? Was it 2 September, when Nilüfer Demir’s images of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose body had been washed up on a Turkish beach, began circulating online? Or was it rather 4 September, when Angela Merkel and her Austrian counterpart Werner Faymann agreed to ignore the Dublin Regulation and issue an invitation to refugees who were receiving a hostile reception in Hungary?

While all these events received much attention, most German commentators focused on 31 August 2015. On that day, Angela Merkel gave her traditional Sommerpressekonferenz, an extended mid-year press conference. Before inviting journalists’ questions, she spoke about the influx of refugees into Europe. By then, the ministry of the interior expected a total of 800,000 irregular migrants to arrive that year in Germany alone.

Merkel said that Germans’ response needed to be guided by the principles laid down in the Basic Law, the Federal Republic’s 1949 constitution. She referred to Article 16a, the right to asylum. She also talked about Article 1(1) – “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority” – and emphasised that it did not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens.

At length, she discussed the measures already taken or planned by her government. “Germany is a strong country,” she said in conclusion. “The motif with which we approach these things has to be: [In the past,] we were able to do so much – we are able to do this. We are able to do this, and wherever there are obstacles, we have to overcome them, we have to deal with them.”

More than anything else, the three words wir schaffen das (we are able to do this) are likely to define Merkel’s reign as chancellor. Even back in August 2015, it was clear that they were more than a rhetorical flourish (which is not something Merkel is known for anyway) and had been planted deliberately. Since then, she has reiterated these three words many times, albeit sometimes with qualifiers (such as “but we won’t be able to do this all by ourselves”). Despite being harshly criticised for her statement by members of her governing coalition, and despite the fact that a clear majority of Germans now opposes her refugee and asylum seeker policies, she has stuck to these three words.

In recent weeks, public commentators seeking to identify the event that could stand in for the extraordinary developments of August and September 2015 have focused on Merkel’s optimism at the time, and on her stubborn refusal to abandon it – even after the number of arrivals was larger than anticipated, after the sexual assaults perpetrated by migrant men on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne and elsewhere, and after the terrorist attacks in July. Of course, wir schaffen das also lent itself to analyses exploring whether Germany has indeed been “able to do this,” and whether there is any foundation for the chancellor’s continued optimism.

In other respects, though, the focus on the anniversary of Merkel’s wir schaffen das was a curious choice, because the Sommerpressekonferenz preceded the decision she and Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann made to accommodate thousands of refugees stranded in Hungary. In a way, the commentators didn’t so much commemorate the occasion on which she first uttered the three words, but rather her subsequent refusal to back down and adopt a less optimistic tone after the decision to keep Germany’s borders open.

What prompted Merkel to launch her wir schaffen das on 31 August last year? And how did her decision to be demonstratively optimistic relate to the decision four days later not to bar large numbers of refugees from entering Germany?

Merkel introduced her discussion of refugee issues at the press conference by talking about the dead migrants discovered in Austria four days earlier. “These are images that exceed our imagination,” she said. “All this happens while we here live in very secure circumstances.” The tragedy on an Austrian Autobahn allowed Merkel to contrast the precariousness of the lives of people fleeing war or persecution with the comfort enjoyed by Germans, but it didn’t prompt Merkel’s decision to talk to the nation, via the Sommerpressekonferenz, about refugees.

Merkel was spurred to take the initiative by events a week earlier in the small town of Heidenau, just south of Saxony’s capital, Dresden. On the weekend of 23–24 August, racist riots in front of a former hardware store, which had been repurposed to accommodate asylum seekers, reminded Germans of a past most thought was well behind them: the past of the anti–asylum seeker hysteria of the early 1990s and the pogrom-like protests in Rostock-Lichtenhagen on 22–25 August 1992.

Merkel travelled to Heidenau on 26 August. This was the first time in her ten years as a chancellor that she had visited a hostel for asylum seekers. She was stunned when locals greeted her with chants of “Volksverräter,” a term that was used in Nazi Germany to designate people accused of treason against their own nation.

Merkel’s wir schaffen das was also a statement of defiance in light of the aggression and anger she experienced in Heidenau. “We need to clearly distance ourselves. There can be no apologies,” Merkel said at the press conference five days after her visit, referring to the protesters. “The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their] stance.”

When, less than a week after her wir schaffen das, she agreed to let refugees stuck in transit in Hungary enter Germany, she did so partly to send a message to those who had rioted in Heidenau. Not only was she not going to make concessions to appease xenophobes; she upped the ante, as it were. In doing so, she seemed, for a while at least, to have the backing of a broad majority of Germans, and the almost unanimous support of the print and electronic media.

Since August last year, there have been other Heidenaus. An alarmingly large proportion of Germans sympathise with those who try to torch buildings where asylum seekers are accommodated. In two state elections in the former East Germany, in Sachsen-Anhalt on 13 March and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern earlier this month, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a party whose leaders openly advocate xenophobic and Islamophobic positions, have won well over 20 per cent of the vote, in both instances becoming the second-largest party in state parliament.

In Sachsen-Anhalt, the AfD polled far more votes than the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens combined; in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the state in Germany’s northeast that includes Merkel’s own electorate, it won more votes than the Christian Democrats. (In the state electorates that comprise Merkel’s own federal electorate, the Christian Democrats prevailed narrowly.)

For almost a year, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Democrats’ Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU, has relentlessly attacked Merkel over her refugee policies. This may partly be because he was outraged about not having been consulted on 4 September, when Merkel and Faymann agreed to ignore the Dublin agreements. But his stance is also informed by a doctrine, once formulated by the legendary Franz Josef Strauss, that there must not be a democratically legitimated party to the right of the CSU.

More recently, Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the Social Democrats and Merkel’s deputy in the federal coalition government, has also hit out at Merkel, both accusing her of mismanaging Germany’s response to refugees and echoing Seehofer’s demands that the government agree on an upper limit of irregular migrants admitted to Germany per year.

Last month it emerged that Merkel did not in fact invent the line wir schaffen das; rather, it was Sigmar Gabriel who had coined it in a podcast on 22 August last year. It is telling that he has kept quiet about his authorship, preferring instead to criticise Merkel for repeating a phrase “that doesn’t solve a single problem.” He also doesn’t want to be reminded of the fact that, unlike Horst Seehofer, he was briefed beforehand about Merkel and Faymann’s plan not to close the borders to refugees, and did not raise any objections.

Neither Seehofer nor the hate-mongers from the AfD have been swayed by the fact that Merkel has presided over the introduction of several draconian legislative measures. These make it easier for the authorities to deport asylum seekers whose claim for protection has been rejected, and make it possible to provide different levels of support to asylum seekers depending on where they come from. Merkel’s critics have also been unimpressed by the controversial German-engineered deal between Turkey (or rather, its autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) and the European Union, which makes it all but impossible for irregular migrants to enter Europe via Greece.

Angela Merkel doesn’t have many political friends these days. In the Bundestag, perhaps the Greens, with whom Merkel would love to be able to form a coalition government, are her staunchest supporters. In earlier years, the Social Democrats were happy to bask in the glow of her popularity. But with an eye on the federal elections in the second half of next year, they are now distancing themselves from a chancellor who appears to be wounded.

Gabriel has obviously been encouraged by the fact that in the elections of 4 September in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Social Democrats did comparatively well, although they too lost votes. Their comparative success has been widely attributed to the opportunism of the premier, Social Democrat Erwin Sellering, who criticised Merkel’s response to refugees, saying during the election campaign that “Merkel still pretends that Germany can accommodate everybody who has been persecuted.”

How justified are Merkel’s detractors? Were Germans “able to do this”? And if so, are they likely to be able to do this in years to come?

Federal, state and local authorities have been struggling to cope with the influx of asylum seekers. If it hadn’t been for the fact that many Germans have volunteered their time in the past twelve months – for example, accommodating new arrivals, teaching them German, helping them to fill in forms, interpreting, organising transport and childcare – many government services would probably have collapsed.

But it should also be acknowledged that the number of new arrivals, particularly between August and November 2015, presented enormous challenges even for a country as affluent and well-organised as Germany, and that, overall, these challenges were met successfully.

The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees – the agency in charge of registering new arrivals and processing their protection claims – has underperformed, to say the least. Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers are still waiting to lodge their claims, and many more have been waiting for months, if not years, for a decision. But once the agency was able to recruit hundreds of new staff last year, things began looking up: in the first eight months of 2016, it has made decisions on almost 400,000 asylum claims, and in the same period only a little over 250,000 asylum seekers arrived in Germany.

So far, only 40,000 of those who have arrived since 2015 have found a job. The unemployment rate among refugees is above 50 per cent, compared to 6.1 per cent overall. But rather than being an indication that Germany was not “able to do this,” this result demonstrates that last year’s expectations – that refugees would quickly find employment and thereby address labour shortages – were utterly unrealistic.

The federal government has spent billions of euros on paying for accommodation, language courses and training, and the processing of claims. It can afford to do so, because Germany doesn’t have a budget deficit. But the funds have not always arrived at the local government level, where they are most needed.

Sufficient funds have not been a guarantee for efficient management. New arrivals are distributed across Germany according to a formula that takes into account individual states’ population size and economic capacity. The performance of state and local administrations has varied significantly. Bavaria, led by premier Seehofer, has done comparatively well, whereas the state of Berlin has performed particularly poorly.

Resources have not been spread evenly among asylum seekers. Eritreans, Syrians and Iraqis, for example, have access to language classes, while those from countries that have been deemed safe do not. Among asylum seekers and refugees, a class system has emerged. Some asylum seekers have had their claims processed promptly; others haven’t yet been invited to submit claims, although they arrived some time last year. Some have been stuck in gymnasiums and other emergency accommodation; others have been accommodated in apartments.

While the number of irregular migrants who arrived last year posed enormous challenges, there is broad agreement that the authorities are comfortably able to cope with the expected 300,000 new arrivals this year. This is still a sizeable number in a country of about 82 million people.

The government’s capacity to deal with the influx is reflected in somewhat surprising opinion polls. While a majority rejects Merkel’s refugee policies, the proportion of Germans who trust Merkel’s wir schaffen das has risen from 37 per cent last September to 43 per cent in August, according to Emnid polling.

The question of whether Germany will continue to successfully manage the arrival of irregular migrants can’t be readily answered. What if Erdoğan decides that it is not worth Turkey’s while to act as a bouncer at Europe’s southeastern gateway? What if, once again, hundreds of thousands of refugees enter Europe via Greece and then make their way to Germany? What if the economic situation in Germany changes, unemployment rises, and there is pressure on the budget? Most importantly, what if the popular opposition to the presence of irregular migrants in Germany continues to grow?

Many German observers have been astounded by the fact that Angela Merkel has stuck to her guns and maintained wir schaffen das. In the past, she wasn’t known for policies that were ideologically driven, nor was her approach to governing informed by unshakeable convictions. Often, as she sought to align her views with those of the majority of voters, it was difficult to figure out what exactly she stood for. That is clearly no longer the case. Also, unlike some of her predecessors, Merkel is not a gifted speaker, and does not usually rely on rhetoric to communicate her views to the public; it was therefore unusual for her to make so much use of a three-word slogan.

But let’s not be fooled. Angela Merkel has not ruled out seeking another four-year term as chancellor at the 2017 elections. All indications are that she is already preparing herself for battle. She knows that she needs to regain the affection and trust of voters to be able to pull off a fourth election victory. Insisting stubbornly that Germans will be able to deal successfully with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees is not going to allow her to make up lost ground.

With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that the launch of wir schaffen das on 31 August last year was indeed a historic occasion. Exactly one year later, she has come up with a new and very different line: Deutschland wird Deutschland bleiben (Germany will remain Germany).

She tried out these words first in an interview with the liberal Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. Unlike wir schaffen das, the new line came in response to a question and did not seem to have been planned. But lest anybody failed to grasp its significance, on the day of the interview’s publication the website of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union ran an article with the title “Merkel: Deutschland wird Deutschland bleiben.” A week later, Merkel repeated the line in a much-anticipated speech in the German Bundestag. On both occasions, she said that “Germany will remain Germany, with everything we cherish.”

Both the old and the new slogan use the first person plural. Merkel seems to seek a communion with her people, although the significance of the grammatical form is ambiguous. The “we” in wir schaffen das could refer to the government as well as to all Germans. In the more recent line, Merkel seems to suggest that her patriotism doesn’t differ from that of other Germans. Or is she perhaps using the royal we?

The earlier line was meant to encourage Germans to swing into action. It is oriented towards the future. Now she seems to be intent on calming down her audience, assuring them that the past is replicated in the future. “Let’s make things happen,” on the one hand, and “nothing will happen,” on the other.

In one sense, this new slogan is tautological. But in another, it affords the opportunity to define what Germany is, or ought to be, all about. In the Bundestag last week, Merkel spelled out what the Germany she cherishes looks like. According to the chancellor, it is based on four values: freedom, security, justice and solidarity. In another recent interview, she said, “We are a country for whom the dignity of every single human being is paramount.”

This is, of course, not the same Germany that AfD voters conjure and long for, although her new mantra is dangerously close to the AfD’s rhetoric. The party’s leader in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, for example, said recently, “We fight for Germany to remain the country of Germans.”

Merkel embraces change but assures voters that everything will stay as it is. Thorsten Denkler, Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Berlin correspondent, called this “Merkelian dialectics.” Taken on its own, Merkel’s new line is unrealistic – much more so than her wir schaffen das. It suggests that all newcomers embrace and adapt to German values and German cultural traits, whatever they may be. It denies the obvious: that Germany has changed almost beyond recognition in the space of one generation, and is likely to continue changing rapidly both as a result of globalisation and because of its substantial migrant intake.

But I suspect that if Merkel feels confident enough to run again next year, and if she is re-elected, it will be because enough voters have realised she was right on 31 August 2015, and ignore her new mantra. And if my hunch is correct, then an extension of her term as chancellor (possibly courtesy of Greens support) would only prove that Germany has not remained what it was, and that it continues to evolve as a dynamic society of immigration.

At this point, it is difficult to predict what will happen next year. It may well be that the AfD’s support continues to surge. On the weekend, though, in local elections in Lower Saxony (a West German state), the AfD mostly remained below 10 per cent, which might suggest that the party’s meteoric rise is a predominantly East German phenomenon. Next Sunday, the voters of Berlin will elect a new state parliament – and the result of these elections will provide further clues.

It may well be that Horst Seehofer’s recent Deutschland muss Deutschland bleiben (Germany must remain Germany), rather than Merkel’s Deutschland wird Deutschland bleiben, will gain traction. While Merkel told the Bundestag that Germany has changed and will continue to change – “there is nothing wrong with change,” she said – Seehofer and his Christian Social Union don’t want Germany to change “as a result of migration and refugee flows,” as the party’s recent position paper put it. Merkel tries to reassure Germans; Seehofer tries to make the most of their fears.

Will the established parties be able to absorb AfD voters? And if so, what would be the price? Last week, the former leader of the left-wing Die Linke, Gregor Gysi, put forward an idea that makes some sense. “The [Christian Democrats] have a job to do, which can’t be done by anybody else. They could integrate parts of the AfD,” he said. In his analysis, the AfD has become possible because Merkel made the Christian Democrats adopt Social Democratic policies, just as her predecessor as chancellor, Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, had distanced himself from his party’s Social Democratic heritage. As a result, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats have become almost indistinguishable parties of the centre; the AfD then filled the vacuum that opened up on the right of the political spectrum. In Gysi’s view, the problem could be rectified once the Christian Democrats are in opposition (which would require Die Linke and the Greens to join a Social Democrat–led government).

If the Christian Democrats were to lose next year’s election, support for the AfD might indeed decline. That’s not so much because Merkel’s party would move to the right, but because the AfD’s focus would be gone. The party is beset by internal rivalries and power struggles. With one exception, its message is diffuse. That exception is the demand, inevitably chanted at rallies by supporters of AfD and and the anti-immigration movement PEGIDA: “Merkel muss weg!” (Merkel has to go).

Yes, the right-wing populists are opposed to Muslims, refugees, inner-city lefties, feminists, intellectuals, footballers of African background and others who in their view don’t have a place in the country of the Germans. But they reserve their hatred for Merkel, the East German woman who betrayed them. As Tilman Gerwien wrote in the magazine Stern last week, “the AfD is the anti-Merkel party.” It is their shared hatred of Merkel that holds the AfD’s warring factions and its disparate group of followers together. If she were to go, the party’s main target would disappear.

What Gysi didn’t say is that many of the AfD’s voters in the East German states previously voted for Die Linke. The AfD’s success became possible also because Die Linke, once identified as a left-wing party of protest, has become yet another establishment party. Since 2014, one of its politicians has even been premier (of the East German state of Thuringia). Nor did Gysi mention that the deputy leader of his party, Sahra Wagenknecht, has lately been advocating refugee and asylum seeker policies that are suspiciously close to those of the AfD.

There is another reason to be wary of Gysi’s analysis. The circumstances of the rise and demise of another right-wing populist party, the Republikaner, in the early 1990s suggests that the Christian Democrats might only strengthen the AfD if they took on some of its agenda and thereby tried to absorb its voters. The Strauss doctrine may have worked in Bavaria, but in neighbouring Baden-Württemberg attempts by the Christian Democrats to starve the Republikaner of votes by adopting right-wing populist positions backfired badly.

Views on whether Germany has changed, or will change, for the better may differ. But it is hard to argue with the claim that over the past twelve months German domestic politics have been more fascinating, and have had more significant implications for the rest of Europe, than at any other time in the past twenty years. And it’s hard to see how that will change anytime soon. •

The post Germany, one year on appeared first on Inside Story.

A week earlier, the PM had told a business lunch in Melbourne that he was “ready to reach across the aisle” to “work constructively with Labor and the crossbenches.” He went on: “A genuine commitment by Mr Shorten to bipartisan support for a responsible approach to the budget can help deliver positive results for the broader Australian community. We will take him up on that.”

But in case anyone was fooled into thinking that he was actually proposing something new, the PM slammed Labor five times in the next minute, making it clear that all the talk of seeking bipartisan support was a sham. It’s business as usual, and right now, from both sides, the business of politics seems to include demonstrations of faux bipartisanship.

Malcolm Turnbull’s idea of bipartisanship is that Labor will adopt Coalition policies; Bill Shorten’s idea is that the Coalition will adopt Labor policies. Nothing new is happening.

But as two opinion polls this week have shown, business as usual is not working in Malcolm Turnbull’s favour. Australians are not happy with their leaders. The PM’s once massive lead over Bill Shorten is now almost gone, and it’s clear that the 50.36 per cent of the two-party vote the Coalition won on election day was a reprieve rather than a ringing endorsement – just like the 50.12 per cent Labor won in 2010.

Shorten, of course, has given him no encouragement. He’s not into bipartisanship either, he’s into toppling Turnbull as soon as possible and forcing a divided Coalition back to the polls. Tony Abbott as opposition leader declared war on virtually everything Labor did, making good government impossible. It’s appalling for the spectators, but revenge is sweet, and the Coalition can expect Labor to give it the same treatment.

The reality is that Turnbull is trapped. If he continues to drift within the Coalition mainstream, as he has since taking office, his electoral support will keep eroding and his grip on power will slip away. Yet if he seizes the initiative to chart his own course, as Australians expected when he took office, the party reaction would be savage, and would destroy, if not his leadership, then the unity required to win a third term.

That is the hard political equation that explains why, whatever they say, real bipartisanship is off the political agenda – to fix the deficit, or to do anything else. The government will be blamed if things go bad, so it needs bipartisanship more than Labor does. But Turnbull does not feel free to offer it – and if he did, Shorten would probably reject it.

But let’s wish upon a star. Suppose both leaders were genuine in saying they want to take a bipartisan approach to fixing the budget deficit, and suppose their party rooms supported them. What would it look like?

Malcolm Turnbull, always good with words, did a fine job of defining it in his Melbourne speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia:

The big economic challenges and opportunities we faced in May are still there. And central to them all is this – how do we ensure Australia remains a high wage, first-world economy with a generous social welfare safety net? How do we ensure that we advance a fair Australia, a just society, where all share in our prosperity, at the same time as we drive strong economic growth?… With success and prosperity comes responsibility, to ensure the most vulnerable among us, the least advantaged in our society, are not left behind.

But how can those Christian words be reconciled with what the government is actually proposing in its budget cuts? As Peter Martin demonstrated starkly in the Age, the Turnbull government is asking parliament to cut the incomes of the poorest of the poor – unemployed people already way below the poverty line – to even lower levels.

The Turnbull government remains committed to almost all the measures that the Abbott government proposed in the 2014 budget but could not get the Senate to pass. That includes making young unemployed people live on nothing for six months before getting the dole, and slashing $20 billion from university funding in the decade from 2018. The first is heartless, and the second – when you consider how crucial the universities are to developing Australia’s future workforce and generating export income – is senseless.

You might conclude that the government is cynical in everything it has to say about the budget – advocating bipartisanship in words while rejecting it in deeds, claiming to support a “generous social welfare safety net” while its actions seek to kick the victims by leaving them with little or no support.

If it were serious about bipartisanship, however, the principle of getting the budget back in balance would be a very good centre to work from. It would give both parties room to evacuate their established policy positions and tackle issues that we need to tackle.

For example:

• There is a strong consensus among the experts that the Direct Action policy cannot deliver on the government’s pledge to cut emissions by 26–28 per cent of the 2005 level by 2030 unless it is given teeth. That can be done by allowing its safeguard measure to morph into a de facto emissions trading scheme, at least for the electricity sector, creating financial incentives for firms to reduce emissions sharply or pay others to do so – or to face penalties, which become budget revenue.

Bipartisanship is crucial to getting an effective policy that guides investors to reducing emissions at the lowest possible cost. As the Grattan Institute puts it:

Without an approach that provides certainty well into the future, businesses will not make the long-term efficient investments in low-emission technologies that can reduce emissions at lower cost. If Australia delays, then the task will be harder in the future… In the absence of the political consensus needed to implement best policy, we should work with what we have.

At some point, if he is to survive as the nation’s leader, Turnbull must cajole, bully and/or outflank his conservative opponents in the party by bringing the Nationals onside to endorse an effective climate change policy. If we fail, no one will suffer more than the Nationals’ core constituency: farmers, for whom a hotter earth will mean financial ruin as more moisture evaporates and crops and grasses wither on the stalk. Fixing the budget may provide a new way into this politically difficult problem.

• There is no issue on which Australians are more divided than our treatment of the asylum seekers found to be genuine refugees but left stranded for years in the prison camps on Manus Island and Nauru. Like the government’s plans to cut unemployment benefits, this policy is un-Christian, yet it too has worked for the government politically. It is still working, with the Essential Poll reporting that only 21 per cent think we are treating asylum seekers too harshly, while 29 per cent think we are too soft, and 31 per cent think we have the balance right.

The government may decide not to change a winning policy. But I suspect that support could erode sharply as opponents succeed in persuading more Australians to distinguish the policy of turning back the boats – a battle the government has clearly won – from the separate issue of how we should treat refugees who are already here. There would be significant budget savings if we gave them a chance for a decent life – if not in Australia, then in New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia or some other acceptable place of resettlement. It’s an issue on which Turnbull could redefine himself.

• Labor, too, should be ready to abandon policy positions. One of its most egregious is the opportunistic policy of blocking plans to lift the pension age to seventy by 2035. Wayne Swan deserves plaudits for being the first treasurer brave enough to propose lifting it to sixty-seven, but that became law only because Joe Hockey got the Coalition to support it. Labor should do the same this time, because there is no escaping the need for this one.

The polls show the increase is very unpopular, but we all must face facts. Our lifespans are extending at an extraordinary pace. The life expectancy of a male at the age of sixty has grown by nine years in half a century. Pensions are not free. They must be paid for by taxpayers, and it is not fair to ask future taxpayers – who themselves will be bringing up families, paying rent or mortgages, battling to make ends meet – to pay for a vastly increased number of old people in future, without older Australians themselves sharing the burden in some way.

Increasing the working age to seventy would mean that, down the track, half of the increase in our life expectancy would be spent in work, and half in retirement. It’s a fair, sensible reform, and Labor and the Greens should endorse it.

Among many other issues on which both sides ought to be ready to give ground is the health system, where Labor has fanned expectations that no government could meet. The Grattan Institute set out a solidly argued case for a range of policies on which the “sensible centre” could agree, in its pre-election “Orange Book,” and its chief, John Daley, penned a valuable set of suggestions with Brendan Coates in the Conversation.

If there is reason for encouragement, it is that treasurer Scott Morrison has done exactly what Daley and Coates suggested by going out to make the case for budget reform. In his speech to the Bloomberg forum last week in Sydney, he came clean about the size of the problem, pointed out the cost for future generations, focused on what was politically possible and, perhaps most importantly, admitted that the problem was not just one of spending being too high, but also of revenues being too low.

That was a big step towards a future consensus. Elsewhere in Inside Story, Peter Whiteford has shafted the myth that Australia is in the grip of an unsustainable explosion of welfare benefits. A recent front-page lead in the Australian claiming that Australia is suffering “rampant growth in public-sector jobs and wages” was equally untrue. This furphy rested entirely on unreliable, mercurial hours-worked data while ignoring the actual Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on government employment, which showed that over four years numbers have risen from 1.895 million to 1.899 million. Its “rampant growth” is in fact 0.05 per cent a year!

Budget repair will be a long, hard task. I can’t see any reason for hope in what Turnbull and Shorten are saying, but Morrison’s speech did actually move the debate towards the sensible centre. Yet the politics of the issue suggests that could be as close as we’ll get. •

The post In search of the “sensible centre” appeared first on Inside Story.

The Manus detention centre has been found to be unconstitutional and must close; the PNG government says refugees can settle in the country if they choose, though few want to. Nauru has made it clear that refugees can’t remain permanently on its territory. Bill Shorten might have promised to redouble efforts to find alternative resettlement places, but the reality of the Labor–Coalition unity ticket is that neither side has the faintest idea of where these refugees might go.

To justify the policy of offshore processing and turnbacks, both parties resort to the realist language of necessity. When recycled prime minister Kevin Rudd announced shortly before the last election that no one arriving by boat after 19 July 2013 would settle in Australia as a refugee, he described the measure as “hard public policy… which must now be implemented.” It was a “practical step forward,” he said, and would be taken “calmly, rationally and with resolve.” Australians might have “kind and compassionate” hearts, but we would accept the policy because we also have “hard heads.” In other words, we must focus entirely on the result we are seeking and ignore (or suppress) any niggling emotions that might prompt us to discuss the ethics of the process we use to get there.

Turnbull used remarkably similar arguments during the 2016 election campaign. On Q&A, responding to a contractor’s description of the situation on Manus – “It is terrible the way they treat the people there. They are treated worse than animals” – he acknowledged that the policy was “harsh” but insisted that it was necessary because “the alternative is far worse.”

“None of us have hearts of stone,” the prime minister added, while insisting that the situation requires us to behave as if we do. To resettle refugees from Manus and Nauru in Australia would be, he says, “the biggest marketing opportunity for the people smugglers you have ever seen.” They would exploit our “weakness” and the “boats would be setting off again.” The consequence would be “women, children and families drowning at sea.”

Labor’s policy differs slightly from the Coalition’s. It would abolish temporary protection visas and open up Manus and Nauru to journalists. But in the first leaders’ debate during the campaign, Shorten was eager to show that he and Turnbull were essentially one. “We would defeat the people smugglers,” he said. “We accept the role of boat turnbacks, as we should, because we don’t want to see the people smugglers back in business.”

While the emphasis shifts, both leaders give essentially the same reasons for why we must be tough: to defend the integrity of our borders, save lives at sea and defeat the smugglers. On Q&A, Turnbull added keeping children out of detention to the list. In his time as immigration minister, Philip Ruddock claimed that harsh policies were needed to shore up public support for an orderly migration program that might otherwise be overwhelmed by a xenophobic Hansonite backlash.

Regulating movement across borders, combatting people smuggling, saving lives at sea, keeping kids out of detention and countering racism – all these are legitimate aims of public policy. Indeed we might say that policy-makers are obliged to act to realise such aims. Problems arise, though, when we are told that there is only one realistic, hard-headed way to do this, and when leaders insist that moral questions are an unwelcome and unhelpful distraction from the necessary task of achieving a practical solution.

“No amount of moral lecturing from those who seem unable to comprehend the negative consequences of an open borders policy will bring forth those solutions,” immigration department head Mike Pezzullo told Senate estimates in February 2016. “All that can be done is being done,” he insisted, with reference to the search for resettlement places beyond Australia and New Zealand. Pezzullo suggested that to deal in the real world of necessity, we must be wary of giving expression to feelings like empathy. “Yielding to emotional gestures in this area of public administration simply reduces the margin for discretionary action which is able to be employed by those people who are actually charged with dealing with the problem.”

The famously hard-headed Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith, best known for his description of the invisible and indifferent hand of market economics, might argue otherwise. He regarded empathy (or sympathy, as he called it) as the fundamental human emotion, crucial to our capacity to establish norms of behaviour that enable us to live together cooperatively. For Smith, emotion (“immediate sense and feeling”) rather than reason is the source of our “first perceptions of right and wrong.”

Defenders of Australia’s system of border control would say that this is an area of public administration that must be quarantined from such troublesome moral sentiments. A hard head can’t be combined with Smith’s soft heart. We must do what is necessary.

In his discussion of just and unjust wars, political philosopher Michael Walzer argues that the word “necessary” enfolds two meanings – inevitable and indispensable. To say that something is inevitable is to accept that it could not be otherwise; it is the outcome of forces beyond our control, like a natural disaster, or an event that we could not possibly have anticipated because of our ignorance of essential facts. We can only decide if something was inevitable with the benefit of hindsight. To describe an action as indispensable, though, is to make it contingent on some particular outcome; it is to assert that A is necessary (indispensable) in order to achieve B. And this kind of argument is always open to challenge.

Walzer discusses this issue with reference to the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War (a text Turnbull also likes to reference). The Athenian representatives argue that it is necessary (indispensable) to invade the island of Melos in order to maintain and expand their empire. To allow Melos to remain neutral would show weakness and so invite other subjugated territories to rebel. With thirty-eight ships and 3000 soldiers waiting offshore, the Athenian “negotiators” tell the Melian leaders that they have no choice but to surrender. The Melians refuse to submit, and defend their stance with talk of what is right, rather than what is necessary. The Athenians respond by arguing that if the Melians had the upper hand, they “would be acting in precisely the same way.” The Melians are duly crushed.

The Melian Dialogue is the classic example of realism in international relations and a staple text in defence studies and foreign policy training. The thrust of the realist reading is that while we might clothe our actions in the language of justice, dignity and honour, when push comes to shove, it is interests and power that hold sway in international relations. Noble talk is just gloss. In the end, as the Athenians say, “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” The dictates of realism and necessity draw a line under, or through, moral arguments.

The applicability of this doctrine to the policy of offshore detention and turnbacks is apparent. We are told repeatedly that there is no other way. Policy is instrumental in achieving one particular aim – stopping the boats – and the only valid measure of assessment is whether that aim is achieved. “You could say we have a harsh border protection policy, but it has worked,” a newly installed Turnbull told RN Drive in September 2015. “’I know it is tough, but the fact is that we cannot take a backward step on this issue.” There is no place for moral qualms or ethical discussion.

But, as Walzer points out, if “necessary” really means “indispensable,” then it should mark the start of a moral argument, not its end. He asks us to step back from the final, fateful dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians and consider what kind of debates may have taken place in the assembly in Athens some months earlier. Away from the front line, he contends, crucial questions of morality and strategy must have been in play. Will the destruction of Melos really reduce the risk to Athens from its client states? Might massacring the Melians in fact weaken the empire, since Athens will be seen as ruthless and tyrannical? Is it right to make an example of Melos to expand Athens’s imperial ambitions? Are there alternative policies that might achieve the same outcome without the same loss of life? Perhaps the questioning might have gone even further: is maintaining and expanding Athenian imperial power really a desirable aim in the first place?

With no known record of these discussions, Walzer admits that he can only speculate as to what was actually said. He does note, though, that Thucydides recorded an earlier debate about the fate of the Mytilene, who had broken ranks with Athens to ally with Sparta. The assembly first determined a collective punishment: all the men of Mytilene would be put to death and all the women and children enslaved. The next day, the assembly softened the decree. (“Only” a thousand ringleaders are condemned to die.) The amendment could be seen as “realist” in the sense that the assembly determines that massacring or enslaving the entire population might undermine the stability of the empire, but Walzer’s point is that (at least in Thucydides’s account) the citizens’ repentance and concerns about excessive cruelty cause them to revisit their original decision. “Moral anxiety, not political calculation, leads them to worry about the effectiveness of their decree.”

In other words, Walzer concludes, the destruction of Melos was not inevitable. It was a deliberate choice, and a different process of deliberation and a different choice were possible. The same can be said of our border protection policies; they too invite and require debate that draws on ethical principles as much as practical outcomes.

Some people might claim that what we do in Manus and Nauru can’t be described as punishment. People are safe from the persecution they faced in their homelands; they are fed and clothed and given shelter. This argument is unsustainable, and amounts to wilful ignorance, especially after the publication of Madeline Gleeson’s carefully documented book Offshore. To punish some asylum seekers in order to deter others is to treat people as means not ends, and so breach the Kantian categorical imperative that sits beneath contemporary conceptions of human rights.

We can ditch Kant and argue instead on the moral ground of utilitarianism – the greatest good for the greatest number or, to express it as Peter Singer does, doing all we can to minimise “avoidable pain and suffering.” We might argue, as many of our politicians appear to do, that the reduction of suffering achieved by preventing drowning at sea justifies any increased suffering caused by detention on Manus and Nauru. But such a crude calculus invites its own crude utilitarian rejoinder: might not the reduced suffering of displaced people who make it to safety counterbalance the increased suffering of those who die in the attempt? Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers around the world appear to have drawn exactly this conclusion.

Any serious attempt to discuss the issue in utilitarian terms would require a more nuanced debate and a broader perspective. If our yardstick is the biggest possible reduction of avoidable pain and suffering, then we can’t focus solely on those displaced people who happen to come into Australia’s orbit; we must also consider what we can do to help the record numbers of people forced from their homes around the world.

I am not trying to suggest that there is an easy or obvious solution. To say that we should simply deal compassionately with those who manage to get here is to risk lives at sea and let the smuggling networks determine who gets protection and who does not.

My argument is that the real world and the moral world can’t be separated and that tough moral debate is a necessary part of the process of practical policy. If we incorporate moral considerations into our thinking, then we will have to work harder and think differently about our approach. This does not mean being impractical and indifferent to outcomes. Over the past four years, Labor and Coalition governments have spent billions of dollars vigorously pursuing deterrence through offshore detention; might the situation look different if similar energy and resources had been devoted to working with neighbouring governments to build a comprehensive regional protection framework?

If necessity rules our actions and realism is transcendent, then all discussion of justice is pointless and all talk of morals irrelevant. But this is not the case. Moral arguments have purchase; they are every bit as “real” as instrumentalist approaches and practical outcomes. Inconvenient as it can be to those in power, morality exists in the world (alongside strategic and other interests) and, as Walzer writes, “notions about right conduct are remarkably persistent.” That is why passionate concern about what happens on Manus and Nauru keeps returning to the surface: morality matters to us as human beings.

It is the capacity to make moral choices that allows us to describe ourselves as free beings. “Stand in imagination in the Athenian assembly, and one can still feel a sense of freedom,” writes Walzer, referring to the decision about the invasion of Melos.

Athens destroyed Melos when it was at the height of its imperial power. Thucydides’s history goes on to describe the subsequent naval expedition to Sicily, which ended disastrously for the Athenians. This turning point in the Peloponnesian war led to Athens’s ultimate defeat by Sparta.

So the real realist lesson may be this: when political leaders invoke the language of necessity, it is time to be on our guard. •

The post “None of us have hearts of stone”: refugees and the necessity of morality appeared first on Inside Story.

Instead, the government announced two new initiatives: legislation to allow authorities to impose control orders on fourteen-year-olds suspected of planning terrorist activities, and an approach to the states with the view to introducing post-sentence preventive detention for people convicted of terrorist offences.

Neither initiative is particularly new. A similar amendment to counterterrorism legislation was introduced last year. The bill was found wanting when it was scrutinised by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, not least because it would have authorised control orders on people under the age of eighteen without including any significant safeguards.

Later, in December 2015, the Council of Australian Governments meeting had agreed on post-sentence preventive detention for terrorists as well as longer pre-charge detention for terror suspects. Post-sentence detention is already possible for sex offenders and, in some states, for perpetrators of particularly violent crimes.

So what prompted Turnbull and attorney-general George Brandis to call a press conference earlier this week to resurrect last year’s initiatives? “There has been an increase in the frequency and the severity of terrorist attacks globally and particularly in Western nations such as ours,” the prime minister explained. He referred to three attacks in particular: a suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed at least eighty people and wounded more than 230, and the attacks in Munich and near Würzburg in Germany.

In Munich, a German-born eighteen-year-old had killed nine people, most of them teenagers from Turkish or Albanian backgrounds; in a train near Würzburg, a seventeen-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan armed with a hatchet and a knife had attacked fellow passengers, wounding four of them. While the Munich attacker was apparently targeting Muslims, the Afghan teenager was inspired by Islamic State propaganda; police found a hand-painted jihadist flag at his home.

Brandis and Turnbull’s press conference wasn’t prompted by attacks targeting Australians or a terrorist incident on Australian soil. Nor was it occasioned by evidence that suggested such an attack is imminent. “We have the best counterterrorism, the best security agencies in the world,” Turnbull claimed, which suggests that the new legislation was not designed to shore up an otherwise fragile security apparatus.

Why, then, did the government prioritise the fight against terrorism? For one, by talking about terror, Turnbull avoids talking about the Australian Building and Construction Commission reforms or his economic plan. Given the likely composition of the new Senate, the first project is dead in the water; as far as the second is concerned, Australians have surely heard enough about “jobs and growth” for the time being.

Does the announcement indicate that the prime minister agrees with the assessment of the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, that the Labor Party is allowed to score easy goals on account of “the Liberals bizarrely vacating the rhetorical field”?

Or is he concerned not so much about what’s been said to the left of the Liberals, as by the noises emanating from the right? Is the emphasis that the government places on new counterterrorism measures perhaps a signal in the direction of far-right populist Pauline Hanson and her supporters? During the election campaign, Turnbull said that Hanson was “not a welcome presence” in Australian politics. But he met with her this week, a day after the counterterrorism measures were announced, and, according to Hanson, the two had an amicable discussion. “He took note of everything I said and was very interested in my opinion,” Hanson told reporters afterwards. “I feel he is prepared to listen to me.”

According to Turnbull, the measures announced this week “are designed to deter terrorism, prevent it, ensure that the nation and our people are kept safe and to provide reassurance that Australians can and should continue going about their daily lives.” Perhaps more importantly, the prime minister wants Australians to “understand and recognise that the Australian government and its agencies are doing everything possible to keep them safe.”

Counterterrorism measures are, on the one hand, just that: measures to combat terrorism. On the other, though, they respond to Australian anxieties. These anxieties are not necessarily well founded. Australians might think they aren’t safe, and to make sure they feel safe the government introduces new counterterrorism measures.

This approach has a precedent. During the second world war, the Australian authorities interned residents of Japanese, Italian and German extraction both as a precautionary measure, to prevent them from assisting the enemy, and to appease public opinion. At the time, the government had no reliable evidence that so-called enemy aliens were intending to act as spies or saboteurs, but there was ample indication that public sentiment was overwhelmingly in favour of their internment.

Turnbull and Brandis weren’t the only members of the newly elected Australian government who invoked the threat of terrorism this week. Immigration minister Peter Dutton – a man who attracted much praise from his boss during the election campaign and again this week when both men celebrated the success of Operation Sovereign Borders – told Sky News editor David Speers that doctors must be prevented from disclosing what’s going on in Australia’s immigration detention centres. The secrecy provisions in the Border Force Act, Dutton confirmed when questioned about the doctors’ pending High Court challenge to the act, are “an anti-terrorist measure.”

Of course, anti-terrorist measures are only necessary if the asylum seekers imprisoned in Nauru and on Manus Island include terrorists. While neither Dutton nor Turnbull has said that Australia’s offshore detention centres are designed to prevent terrorists from entering Australia, Dutton’s comments invite Australians to draw that very conclusion. Dutton, in particular, has form in this regard. On the second-last day of the election campaign, he linked boat arrivals to terror attacks. And some three months earlier, Malcolm Turnbull linked the terror attacks in Brussels to the arrival of refugees – only to be told publicly by Belgium’s ambassador to Australia, Jean-Luc Bodson, that such comments were “dangerous”.

At around the same time as Malcolm Turnbull announced new counterterrorism measures, another attack took place in Germany. A twenty-seven-year-old Syrian man who had come to Germany two years earlier as a refugee blew himself up outside a music festival in the Bavarian town of Ansbach. His claim for protection had been denied, and he was told that he would be deported to Bulgaria, where he had initially entered the European Union. Fifteen people were wounded in the suicide attack. In a video the attacker professed loyalty to Islamic State.

Like her Australian counterpart, German chancellor Angela Merkel responded this week to the terrorist threat and to fears in the population. Not only did she call a press conference, she convened the traditional summer press conference, which is usually held towards the end of the summer school holidays, a month early. There she announced a nine-point plan to combat terrorism. Like those of her Australian counterparts, the measures she proposed included new legislation. But the law to be introduced in Germany is not aimed at curtailing the rights of terror suspects or keeping people in prison after they have served their sentence; rather, it is to prevent the online sale of guns.

Given that the attacker on the train and the Ansbach suicide bomber had both sought refuge in Germany, Merkel had much to say about her country’s response to refugees. “The fact that two men, who came to us as refugees, are responsible for the crimes of Würzburg and Ansbach, mocks the country that has accommodated them,” she said, only to add: “It mocks the many other refugees, who have genuinely sought our protection against violence and war, and who want to live peacefully in a world that is foreign to them, after they lost everything.”

According to Merkel, the terrorist attacks challenge Germany to reconcile its insistence on freedom with its desire for security. George Brandis also talked about “respecting our liberal democratic values” and “keeping the balance right between security and freedom.” But the values that Brandis invoked are ill-defined.

That’s different in Germany. Constitutionally, Merkel has much less wiggle room to negotiate the contradictions between human rights and the security concerns. At the same time, she remains unwilling to revise her mantra “Wir schaffen das” (We are able to do this), which she first formulated during last year’s summer press conference.

“Again and again – after New Year’s Eve in Cologne, and now again after the horrible terrorist attacks – we ask ourselves: Are we really able to do it?” she said. “Are we able to successfully master this great challenge, which in the last instance is the flipside of globalisation’s positive effects and which demonstrates to us the dark sides of globalisation? For me, there is no doubt: we stick to our principles. One principle is Article 1 of our Constitution, that human dignity is inviolable. But another principle is: we provide asylum to those who have been persecuted for political reasons, and, in line with the Geneva Convention, we also provide protection to those who flee war and displacement.”

In Germany, Hanson-style populists who demand that refugees and Muslims be kept out enjoy at least as much support as they do in Australia. The right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, has tried to exploit the terrorist attacks of the past two weeks. But it is inconceivable that Merkel would agree to meet with AfD leader Frauke Petry to find common ground.

It’s the recognition of the principles mentioned by Merkel that distinguishes the discussions about terrorism and refugees in Germany from those in Australia. In Australia, the discourse of human rights is weak, not least because it can’t draw on the codification of such rights in the Constitution. That’s why the journalists who attended the press conference at which Turnbull and Brandis introduced the new counterterrorism measures failed to ask about the appropriateness of control orders for fourteen-year-olds – who, mind you, have not been convicted of any crime.

Notwithstanding the differences between Australia and Germany, public discourse in the two countries has one feature in common. In both countries, terrorism is associated primarily with attacks perpetrated by Islamists in the West. “There has been an increase in the frequency and the severity of terrorist attacks globally and particularly in Western nations such as ours,” Turnbull claimed earlier this week.

Because of Western military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, Germans and Australians may still take note of terrorist incidents in these countries. But there is next to no awareness of what has been happening in Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Yemen, Thailand or Bangladesh, although these countries have each suffered more from terrorist attacks than either Australia or Germany.

“Everything is global in the twenty-first century in reality, because of the speed of communications,” Turnbull told journalists. People in Nigeria or Yemen might beg to differ. In the affluent West, we are still safely quarantined from much of what Merkel called the “flipside of globalisation’s positive effects.” •

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For the film’s courage, the director-producer Eva Orner should be saluted; the project came out of the toughest conditions of production, and often looks as rough as bags, with passages shot on the run, blurred and jerky. Those elements take nothing from its vividness; they rather convey its urgency. Many committed film-workers put time and money into this film, among them Robert Connolly (Balibo), who acted as one of several producers and helped to secure its release.

On Manus, a large, rusting tin shed, left from the second world war, confines a long row of double bunks. Spouses, parents and children are separated; others are forced into proximity with people they don’t know. Visibly, people are damaged, not only by recurrent physical brutality, but just as seriously by forced inertia and boredom. How Horner and her team got into the places, we don’t find out. Journalists and photographers are forbidden entry – a spectacular case of censorship by the Australian government.

The film brings back the uncompromising pronouncement by John Howard during his reign – remember? “We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.” (I recall some wry comment then on how the inhabitants had no choice when a certain boat turned up in 1788.) The nation’s present policies contravene those UN human rights treaties and conventions to which Australia long ago signed up. It was pronounced as imperative that we must “stop the boats,” boats being somehow more dangerous than planes. Those who supplied the boats, and took money from the asylum seekers, may indeed be classed as criminals; those they’re exploiting are not. With this policy Australia is punishing the innocent – more severely, in fact, than it punishes offenders convicted in the courts, who at least know the limits of their jail terms.

One of the several young witnesses who went to the camps as volunteer social workers said that what she saw made her ashamed to be Australian, a feeling most viewers will share. The film ends with a salute to the late Malcolm Fraser, who enabled the admission of 70,000 asylum-seeking Vietnamese in the 1970s. Many of us didn’t like him much back then; perspectives change.

Chasing Asylum should be seen as widely as possible. Despite the thin attendance, it was some relief to see that at the Nova in Melbourne, six screenings were scheduled for the next day, with an extra at the weekend.

The Sydney Film Festival is in full multiscreen swing, still as ever at the resplendent State, but also scattered across town and out to Casula. The program of restorations and revivals most valuably includes the late Chantal Ackerman’s wonderful Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, and one of the real masterpieces of Japanese cinema, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story: not to be missed – this is the kind of thing festivals are, or should be for; but there’s only one screening. •

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Asylum seeker policy, an area that has bedevilled the Labor Party since 2001, was first off the rank. While it can be argued that the vote-changing effect of this issue is exaggerated, it certainly seems to play with the collective Labor mind – and that probably means it’s a case of the perception becoming the reality, at least as far as Labor’s capacity to respond goes. As a political minefield it has now been around for twice as long as Australia’s Vietnam war/conscription controversy (1965–72), and it isn’t going away unless war itself suddenly loses its appeal as the preferred tool of conflict resolution in various parts of the world.

Labor’s weakness is accentuated by the revelation that several of its candidates are on the record as opposing the party’s asylum seeker policy, hardly a good look from the campaign team’s point of view, but no real surprise given the ongoing lack of due diligence in the preselection process. This is a curious shortcoming given that social media often provides the opportunity to find out the views of candidates seeking party endorsement. Of course, this presumes that parties are seeking to nominate the best-qualified, most electable candidate available, rather than give a seat to the next factional aspirant in the queue. This is not a uniquely Labor ailment, as shown by the experience of the (now ex-) Liberal candidate for Fremantle (who withdrew his candidacy, neatly complementing the disendorsed Labor candidate) and some other recent preselection history.

The second diversion from Labor’s preferred policy script concerns the relationship with the Greens. Convinced that Julia Gillard’s “deal” with the Greens was a key component of her government’s unpopularity, the Coalition has sought to use the prospect of a close election to scare voters into believing that another Labor–Greens deal is imminent, and that the only way to avoid such horror is to re-elect the government.

Labor’s response – that it would seek a new election rather than enter into any arrangement with the Greens – may sound suitably macho, but ignores the complexities of a hung parliament. It smacks of a refusal to accept the judgement of the electorate and poses the question of how the party would respond to an identical result: send the voters back to a third poll, until they get it right?

Importantly, such a reaction ignores the role of the governor-general. A hung parliament is one of those rare occasions on which, in the absence of a party leader commanding a clear lower house majority, scope exists for vice-regal discretion and independence. Certainly, Peter Cosgrove would be under no obligation to call a new election on the advice of a party leader who hadn’t won a lower house majority. He would be entitled to seek alternative ways of avoiding a new poll so soon after the one held on 2 July.

In such a scenario, for all its bluster, Labor could be forced to at least consider a limited agreement with the Greens. This could involve support for a Labor minority government on matters of supply and confidence, but without any commitments on policy. In the event that the Greens sought policy undertakings, and Labor called their bluff, it would be open for the Greens to offer a supply/confidence arrangement to the Coalition, perhaps for a limited time. While such a deal may well be anathema to both the Coalition and the Greens, it can also be argued that the desire to retain office, or secure office, will trump everything else. It is worth remembering that the Greens supported a minority Liberal government in Tasmania in the 1990s.

None of this is to argue that, given a hung parliament, a fresh election might not be held sooner rather than later. But it is important to remember that the idea that Bill Shorten, without a lower house majority, could advise a fresh election some time the following week is fanciful.

Labor’s frustration, while understandable at one level, seems to contain a fair element of denial about the modern party system in Australia. Put simply, the two-party system is dead, and has been for some time. The conservatives had to confront this reality on their side nearly a century ago, giving rise to the coalition agreements that characterise non-Labor politics federally and in most states. Even then, the Coalition church is not broad enough to encompass the entire conservative congregation, with other right-wing alternatives securing support from time to time, especially at Senate elections.

Historically, Labor did much better than the conservatives, retaining a virtual monopoly of the progressive/left vote long after the disappearance of the class system that had underpinned this dominance. But, as in most parts of the democratic world, it is simply not possible for one party to represent the totality of (sometimes conflicting) interests on that side of politics. This is not necessarily a reflection of some inadequacy on the part of Labor, any more than it is for the equivalent party in other comparable democracies: it is a reflection of social reality.

An intelligent discussion of this difficult truth is unlikely in the heat of an election campaign, but the problem for Labor is that it seems incapable of dealing with it at any time in the political cycle. Perhaps the party needs to balance its focus on strategy and tactics with a cool, dispassionate, intellectually informed analysis of relations with the Greens.

Still, it is difficult not to feel some sympathy for Labor partisans aggrieved at the way in which (apart from the Murdoch press’s incessant preaching to the converted) the Greens are treated with kid gloves by much of the media. By way of illustration, contrast leader Richard Di Natale’s promotion of his party as more mainstream and ready to help govern with the utterances of Jim Casey, the Greens candidate with a realistic chance of defeating Labor’s Anthony Albanese in the seat of Grayndler. Casey is credited with suggesting that it would have been preferable for Tony Abbott to retain office in order that his oppressive policies could provoke the oppressed masses into some form of street protest and civil disruption. How this burst of Trotskyist nostalgia is compatible with Di Natale’s “ready to help govern” theme is not readily apparent, but the leader seems to have escaped the scrutiny that should have resulted. This is probably a more important question than are his problems with the parliamentary interests register and his creative approach to the payment of his au pairs.

While all of these issues are of interest to those who follow elections closely, it seems that none has been important enough to produce a significant change in voting intentions, as measured by the polls. In a campaign this long, it is likely that the uncommitted voters who decide election results have simply not tuned in yet, and may not do so for quite some time. •

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But the polls still say that most of us expect the Coalition to win. In the past, that’s sometimes proved a good measure of our real voting intention, and sometimes not: last year Queenslanders thought Campbell Newman would be re-elected too. And it’s worth remembering that Australians have voted to eject nine of the last thirteen governments facing re-election (although one, the Weatherill government in South Australia, clung on with the support of independents).

For a close campaign, so far it’s been remarkably well-mannered. Sure, there are elbows flying, false claims made, and newspapers campaigning themselves while pretending to be reporting the campaign, but there’s been nothing yet to cause the referee to stop play – partly because there’s no evidence that we’re taking much notice.

On polling day, who will remember that six weeks earlier the Australian Federal Police raided the offices of Labor’s shadow communications minister, Stephen Conroy, and a staffer, in a quest to find out who leaked incriminating documents about the cost blowouts and delays in the rollout of the NBN? Will all those headlines change anyone’s vote?

Some real issues intruded on the campaign. Treasury and the Department of Finance released their eagerly awaited independent assessment of the true budget position, which delivered a sharp warning of the need for more spending cuts and tax rises if Australia is to get the budget back under control and start paying back the money we have borrowed since 2008.

Environment minister Greg Hunt and his shadow Mark Butler held a civilised, indirectly enlightening debate on climate change policy at the National Press Club. And the Financial Review published a JWS Research poll confirming that, with few exceptions, the public opposed almost every savings measures in the budget, and supported every spending measure.

All of these dragged from the shadows of the campaign the hidden reality that after the election, whoever wins, we need a different style of government. During a campaign, the parties pretend they don’t agree even on the things they do agree on. When it’s all over, we need them to find common ground: on tax reform, on budget savings and on climate change policy in particular. We need to leave these years of ultra-partisanship behind us and restore a political culture in which Liberals and Labor can make common cause in the national interest.

More of that later. Meanwhile, this week’s campaign headlines suggest that Labor had better get its act together quickly on penalty rates, and the Coalition on refugees – and, perhaps, on migration generally.

On penalty rates, let’s be clear about the issue: the Fair Work Commission has been asked whether Sunday should have a different penalty rate from Saturday, for workers in the food, hotel and retail industries. That’s all. The issue is not whether they should receive penalty rates, but which penalty rate they should receive. And understandably, their unions are under pressure to explain why working on Sundays is so much worse than working on Saturdays.

Labor’s official line is that it is in favour of keeping penalty rates as they are, but it is the Commission’s decision. It has already made a submission in the case along these lines, and if it wins the election it would make a second submission, this time as the government. But in the end, this is not its decision to make – and Labor knows that if it did try to override the Commission it would be opening the way for a future Coalition government to do the same, with serious consequences for Labor’s clientele.

The policy would be plausible, if not for two things. First, from Bill Shorten down, Labor has gone out of its way to tell us it will “protect” penalty rates, when its real policy is to ask an independent commission to please do so. Second, while Shorten held to this “hands-off” policy under pressure, some of his frontbenchers, including shadow industrial relations minister Brendan O’Connor in an interview with 3AW’s Neil Mitchell, have tried to have it both ways, pledging that Labor would protect existing rates, yet confirming that the Commission would make the call. The result is legitimate doubts about what Labor would really do in office.

But Labor’s problems were blown out of the ring by immigration minister Peter Dutton’s tirade against refugees, in an interview on Sky with Paul Murray. Here is the minister, after Murray had attacked the Greens’ plan to take 50,000 refugees a year, and claimed that 90 per cent of Afghan refugees “don’t have a damn job”:

For many people, they won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English, and this is a difficulty because the Greens are very close to the CFMEU, as obviously the Labor Party is, and their affiliations with the union movement obviously are well known.

Now, these people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that, and for many of them that would be unemployed, they would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare and the rest of it.

So, there would be a huge cost, and there’s no sense in sugar-coating that, that’s the scenario.

Leaving aside the bizarre reference to the CFMEU, it seems that the minister thinks refugees cost us whatever they do. If they succeed here, they will be “taking Australian jobs.” If they don’t, they will languish on welfare at “a huge cost.” Yep, Pete, that pretty well covers the field, apart from a few who have independent means of support.

But to the extent that that is true, it is true for all migrants. If you think successful refugees “take Australian jobs” then that necessarily implies that you think migrants, too, “take Australian jobs” when they do well.

The reality, as study after study has found, is that migrants generate demand for goods and services – and hence, jobs – as well as supplying labour. Years ago Judith Sloan did a fine report at the Productivity Commission on the economics of immigration, which concluded that for all the passionate arguments from both sides, immigration generally makes little economic difference to the rest of us. As Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, himself the son of refugees, put it recently, the main benefits of immigration go to the migrants themselves.

What makes refugees different from other migrants, according to a major study by the late Professor Graeme Hugo, is that they are less likely than skilled migrants to arrive with workable English, or with work skills that can be readily translated into Australian jobs. And that means they can spend long periods in unemployment before eventually finding a niche.

A Bureau of Statistics study in 2013 found that only 20 per cent of refugees who had arrived in the previous ten years had a job, and 59 per cent were living on welfare benefits. By contrast, 55 per cent of migrants on student visas had a job, as did 73 per cent of skilled migrants and 64 per cent of the Australian-born.

But the decision to become a refugee, Hugo argued, is “selective of risk takers, people who question the status quo, recognise and take up opportunities… humanitarian migrants have made, and continue to make, a distinct contribution through their role as entrepreneurs.” Other studies agree that refugees do find work, even if it takes time.

Getting the budget back into shape will not only take time, it will take more hard decisions than either side of politics has so far been prepared to make. Treasury secretary John Fraser and Finance secretary Jane Halton put it bluntly on Friday in their Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, or PEFO:

The medium-term projections show that, without considerable effort to reduce spending growth, it will not be possible to run underlying cash surpluses, say in the order of 1 per cent of GDP, without tax receipts rising above 23.9 per cent of GDP. Even if payments were reduced from the levels projected at the 2016–17 Budget to the long-term average of 24.9 per cent of GDP by the end of the medium term, tax receipts would still need to rise to around 24.2 per cent of GDP by 2026–27, well above the average of the past 30 years, to achieve a surplus of one per cent of GDP.

Reducing spending growth has proved difficult in practice… The indicative net impact of all unlegislated policy decisions included in forward estimates in the PEFO is around $18 billion in underlying cash terms and updated for parameter changes, over the five years to 2019–20.

Australia has a relatively strong fiscal position by international standards. However, Commonwealth Government debt levels are projected to reach recent historical highs, both on a gross and net basis. These debt levels are not an immediate concern given historically low interest rates and a growing economy. But should Australia experience a significant negative economic shock or increased interest rates or debt levels rise above current projections over the medium term, the debt burden will impose an increasingly significant cost on the fiscal and economic outlook. It is crucial for Australia to maintain its top credit rating to ensure the Commonwealth’s borrowing costs, and those across the economy more generally, are kept as low as possible.

More generally, the medium term outlook also shows the crucial importance of increasing productivity. This will require renewed vigour in encouraging and delivering structural reform across all parts of the economy.

Sensibly, PEFO makes virtually no change to the budget’s underlying assumptions and forecasts. It notes that many parts of the jigsaw could shift in one direction or other, and adds a warning that “the business cycle is unlikely to have been consigned to history… relying on a rebound in world growth in the medium term could be a dangerous strategy.”

It puts the focus instead on those medium-term projections. Even if spending were to be reduced significantly as a share of GDP, despite our ageing population forcing it higher, they argue, we would still need to embrace higher taxes – back to roughly the same levels as the Howard government had from 2000 to 2006 – to generate the kind of surpluses we ran up in that time.

Yet post-budget polling by Fairfax/Ipsos and Essential Research shows virtually no public support for either spending cuts or higher taxes. The Fairfax polling found the public supported every new spending initiative in the budget but only one savings initiative: hiring more tax investigators to tackle tax avoidance. The Essential poll found support also for higher cigarette taxes and the crackdown on tax breaks for superannuation, but the message of the two polls is that while the public wants the deficit to be closed, they want it to be done only by taxing the rich and the tax dodgers.

To get us out of this stalemate will require a new approach to politics, which looks to bipartisanship, not conflict. After the election, setting up a very high-level parliamentary committee on tax reform, with a directive to come up with unanimous solutions, could provide a start.

A second area where we desperately need conflict to make way for bipartisanship is climate change. In debate, the two sides present themselves as polar opposites, yet Tony Wood and David Blowers of the Grattan Institute and other analysts point out that the alternative frameworks are potentially compatible. If the political will is there, they could become the basis for a bipartisan policy that would give investors the certainty they need to put their money behind solutions.

Of course, there was little bipartisanship on display at the National Press Club this week when Hunt and Butler debated climate policy. They couldn’t even agree in public on past facts, let alone future trajectories. And yet I came away with the sense that they were really much closer than they pretended to be.

The key to potential agreement is the “safeguards” mechanism in the government’s Emissions Reduction Fund, which in theory would make polluters pay if they increase emissions above their baseline. In the sketchy framework the Coalition has announced to meet its 2030 target to reduce Australia’s emissions by 26 to 28 per cent (from 2005 levels), this mechanism would be ramped up to make industries meet increasingly tight reduction targets. The details are as yet undecided, but one way to make this work would be to allow them to buy credits from those who have reduced emissions with room to spare.

That would be a close cousin of what Labor is now proposing for the electricity sector: not another carbon tax, but a scheme that would force generators with excessive emissions to buy credits from those with low or zero emissions. Note that such a policy would not impose any new costs on the electricity sector overall.

The extra costs would come from Labor’s related policy of requiring 50 per cent of electricity generation to come from renewable sources by 2030. That would require the industry to invest heavily in renewables in the 2020s. The International Energy Agency reports that the cost gap between renewables and fossil fuels has shrunk markedly, and further development of storage technology could see it close completely. But Labor’s policy risks forcing generators to choose technologies before they are commercially viable, with higher power prices as a result.

It is futile to expect bipartisanship in an election campaign. We can just hope that both sides somehow hold back from any campaign commitments that would block the way to future bipartisan agreements to do the things that really matter: fixing the budget, repairing the tax system, and reducing our impact on the atmosphere. •

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The electorate reacted positively, and the new PM and his government were soon enjoying big opinion poll leads. Had the honeymoon continued through 2016, the dignified Malcolm would probably still be with us, but instead the surveys tightened and Turnbull morphed into a commodity intimately familiar to Australians: a prime minister running for re-election. This has always involved prosecuting, front and centre, a ferocious scare campaign against the opposition and the supposed calamities that would befall the country if it ever took power.

In 2016, the “be very afraid of Labor” message ranges across housing policy, an emissions trading scheme, boats and union influence. Most of all, though, it’s about economic competence: debt and deficits and the perceived disaster of the Rudd–Gillard years.

Earlier this week Turnbull gave a measured speech on the importance of border protection, wrapping it up with economic security and the success of Australian multiculturalism. Then, on Tuesday night, immigration minister Peter Dutton leapt out of the trenches in a friendly Sky News slot, thundering about illiterate and innumerate refugees who not only take Australians’ jobs but also “languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare [at] huge cost.” The denigration of people arriving under humanitarian resettlement sits uneasily with the Coalition’s longstanding position that refugees who join an orderly line are good, and queue-jumpers are bad, but such distinctions are always lost on this emotive issue.

Perhaps that morning’s strategy phone hook-up had included a pep talk on borders, but Dutton’s extravagance was surely more stuff-up than conspiracy. It put Turnbull in the uncomfortable position of having to pretend Peter had actually been saying something altogether different.

The entire political class is convinced that “boats” are a powerful driver of votes at elections, as if all the Coalition ever has to do is flick the switch and success is theirs. I don’t believe that, and have written about why.

Post-hocery saturates our political analysis – if an issue was high-profile in the campaign, it must have decided the result – and fifteen years after the Tampa and children overboard Australian politics remains cursed by those events. Party pollsters can wave around their research “showing” the “salience” of boats, refugees and immigration, but these results are never free of researchers’ value judgements and in-house effects.

Back in 1988 Howard as opposition leader came up with the hugely popular idea of slowing the rate of Asian immigration (a Newspoll had more than three-quarters support) but it ultimately shrivelled his stature and contributed to his first downfall the following year. The politics of immigration, and that proxy, boats, is complex. Something can be hot-button but not ultimately a clear vote-winner.

In 2016 the growing club of Labor candidates (in mostly unwinnable seats) publicly umming and aahing about boat turnbacks and/or offshore processing is very unhelpful to Bill Shorten and the opposition. At a general level it indicates disunity and fuels the theme that this outfit is not yet ready to govern. More directly, one of the reasons that asylum seekers are (in my opinion) grossly overstated as an electoral issue is that Labor and the Coalition have always been, policy-wise, approximately as one.

(In 2007 Labor promised to abolish offshore processing, while retaining onshore mandatory detention. It ultimately facilitated a big uptick in boat arrivals, but at the time the change meant little to the bulk of voters.)

Liberal spear-carriers might have popped corks yesterday at their side’s comprehensive “win of the day,” but ultimately the turmoil was a distraction from their campaign. Voters are essentially much more interested in the economy, and that’s an issue the Coalition owns. Labor’s economic credibility has been so shredded that the Coalition looks at least tolerable by comparison.

In a rational, strategic world the government would not wander down these dead ends. Why then would a senior minister produce what amounts to a sugar hit?

An article by Tom Switzer in the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend provides an insight. Switzer hosts an ABC program on foreign policy, Between the Lines, which showcases his impeccably realist credentials. But he is also a long-time Liberal player, a former staffer and sometime aspiring preselection candidate, and in the big tribal divide of today’s Liberals he sits deep inside Abbott territory. That is, he is against Turnbull. And that means he’s heavy on the cultural combat gear and highly partial to ideological bells and whistles.

Switzer’s article was a full-on attack on Turnbull’s leadership style and contained this empty threat: “I know many life-long Liberal partisans who won’t vote for the Coalition on July 2. Most will even put Labor above Liberal on the ballot paper.” (It’s empty because a large phone box will be big enough to hold the number of Liberal rusted-ons who will preference Labor ahead of their party on 2 July.)

Turnbull’s crime, apparently, is that he “won’t prosecute the case against Labor’s ETS [emissions trading scheme] on 2 July nor will he unashamedly defend tough border protection.” This amazing alternative reality provides a glimpse into the mindset of the self-proclaimed Liberal base: policies and even electoral success come second to prosecuting the ideological war.

Howard legitimised anti-refugee rhetoric in Australia’s centre-right party, and a portion of the Liberal movement remains attached, emotionally, at the level of personal identity. It’s driven by sense of self: on border protection (and on climate change) they see themselves sitting with the mass of “ordinary” Australians against inner-city elites. And they insist a government campaign drips with these elements.

The conservative Dutton, in friendly company, chatting among friends, gave Sky News viewers what they wanted to hear. It was for the true believers, not the voters. This side of the election, Turnbull lacks the authority to pull colleagues like the immigration minister into line.

Meanwhile, other Liberals just want to remain in government after 2 July. And that, inevitably, will mean returning to what really matters, economic security. Though the base will continue to do its best to drag them off course. •

The post Pushing the wrong buttons appeared first on Inside Story.

For three-and-a-half years, Papua New Guinea has been a central pillar of Australian immigration policy. Under a series of agreements, the Pacific nation not only consented to Australia’s building and operating an immigration detention centre in its territory, but also offered the possibility of permanent settlement in Papua New Guinea to those men found to be refugees and willing to stay.

Until recently, this second offer distinguished Papua New Guinea as arguably the most crucial component of Australia’s offshore asylum architecture. With the apparent collapse of the Cambodia deal, the Australian government’s rejection of New Zealand’s resettlement offers, and no other country putting its hand up to take the 2000 people waiting offshore for a solution, Papua New Guinea was the only viable settlement country (other than Australia) for the foreseeable future.

Late last month the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea threw this arrangement into disarray. In a unanimous ruling, the panel of five judges held that the detention of asylum seekers and refugees in the Australian-built centre was unconstitutional and illegal. The Supreme Court ordered both the Australian and PNG governments “forthwith” to take all necessary steps to cease and prevent this unlawful detention, and the continued breach of the detained men’s constitutional and human rights. The judgement left no ambiguity: detention in Papua New Guinea must end immediately.

Within twenty-four hours PNG prime minister Peter O’Neill issued a press statement declaring that the centre his country had hosted since 2012 would close. Noting that he welcomed the court’s judgement and had never anticipated asylum seekers being detained for so long, O’Neill announced that he would “immediately ask the Australian government to make alternative arrangements” for the men still there.

What these arrangements may be remains to be seen. Anyone found to be a refugee may still be invited to live in Papua New Guinea if they want to, but the others will have to go elsewhere. Meanwhile, the two countries could find themselves liable for more than $1 billion in compensation claims from the people they illegally detained – some for as long as almost three years.

So what were the arrangements for offshore processing in Papua New Guinea, and how did it all go so wrong?

Stretching out into the blue of the Bismarck Sea, almost reaching the equator, lies the string of islands known as Manus Province. The smallest and least-populated of Papua New Guinea’s twenty-two provinces, some 800 kilometres due north of Port Moresby, Manus is mostly jungle and tropical rainforest. The area is known as one of the most peaceful and beautiful parts of the country. Remote, with temperatures into the forties and 100 per cent humidity some days, it is visually gorgeous.

Manus Island, the largest in the province, is commonly referred to as the location of Australia’s regional processing centre in Papua New Guinea, the Manus RPC. In fact, the centre sits on the same site as it did during the years of John Howard’s Pacific Solution: inside the Lombrum naval base on Los Negros Island, immediately adjoining Manus Island but separated by a narrow stretch of water.

Australian Defence Force engineers were sent in to reclaim the site from the jungle, and assess the remnants of the Howard-era detention centre, within days of prime minister Julia Gillard’s August 2012 announcement that Australia would resume offshore processing. The site as they found it was uninhabitable – overgrown, dilapidated and ridden with termites. Video footage of an early walk-through showed broken flyscreens, splintered wood, exposed wires and broken machinery. This was where families and children as young as seven would sleep. Single men would be housed in tents, erected wherever space could be found.

The arrangements for operating the Manus RPC were governed by a memorandum of understanding between Papua New Guinea and Australia, using similar terms to a sister agreement for processing on Nauru. Australia would transfer, and Papua New Guinea would accept, an unspecified number of people who had reached Australia by boat and sought asylum. Papua New Guinea would “host” these asylum seekers in an “assessment centre” while their claims were processed, and then they were all expected to leave Papua New Guinea as soon as “reasonably necessary.” The Australian government would pay for everything.

These were the days of the Gillard government’s elusive “no advantage” policy. The plan seemed to be that everyone who was a refugee would resettle in Australia one day, but when that might occur was anyone’s guess. Figuring out a timeframe, and indeed an endgame, would be problems for the future. The Gillard government’s immediate priority was getting the offshore centres open and operational as quickly as possible. Those in charge wanted to send as firm and fast a deterrent message as possible to those who might be in Southeast Asia contemplating a boat journey to Australia: do not come here; we will not accept you.

Before it even began, problems with local land and business owners threatened to derail the Manus project. The Australian immigration department had wasted no time lining up a series of Australian companies to operate and provide services at the Manus RPC, and by October 2012 there were rumours that the first asylum seekers could be arriving any day.

The Manusians, meanwhile, had never been given a chance to tender for the lucrative contracts Australia was awarding, and had been shut out of discussions about how their land would be used. Their early protests and threats to boycott the project would eventually be subdued, most notably by the arrival of PNG paramilitary riot squads, notorious for their brutality in the face of dissent. But underlying tensions lingered.

The first planeload of asylum seekers bound for Manus – seven families, including four children – took off from Australia shortly before midnight on 20 November 2012. They arrived early the next morning, accompanied by Australian Federal Police officers and with the full PNG riot squad at the ready on the ground. The show of force was not for the families’ sake. “They were frightened, bewildered, confused, sad people,” recalled John Vallentine, an Australian doctor deployed to the RPC at the time. “A number of them said to me, ‘What is this place? Where are we? Where have we come to?’ They hadn’t been told.”

These families, and those who followed them, would remain on the island until July 2013, when they were shuttled back to Australia without having been processed. They had been sent to Papua New Guinea before any systems were in place for refugee status determination, to a detention centre far from ready to accommodate them. Their transfer had been a message, a warning of sorts. Even women and children would be sent offshore. There would be no exceptions.

The transfer of single men and families to the Manus RPC was controversial from the outset. After a mission to the centre in January 2013, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, reported that asylum seekers were being arbitrarily detained in violation of international law, and in harsh conditions likely to damage their physical and psychological health. The situation of the youngest detainees was particularly concerning. UNHCR called for the detention of children on Manus to be terminated as a matter of priority.

Prime minister O’Neill had said from the very beginning that he didn’t want asylum seekers to be detained out on Manus “too long.” With speculation that Australia’s no-advantage policy could see refugees languishing in detention for as long as five years, Manus MP Ronny Knight likened such a term to a jail sentence. “Anybody would go stir-crazy for five years there,” he warned, “and I think that’s wrong.”

Belden Norman Namah, Papua New Guinea’s opposition leader at the time, also took issue with the arrangement. In January 2013 he announced that he was heading to court to “challenge the right of the government to force people seeking refugee status in Australia to enter Papua New Guinea to be illegally and indefinitely detained under inhumane conditions.” He sought an injunction preventing the transfer of any further asylum seekers from Australia until the case could be decided. Justice David Cannings of the PNG National Court, while “impressed” by Namah’s arguments, decided against making this order. The arrangement with Australia remained on foot.

From its hopeful origins, the Namah case quickly became bogged down in the PNG court system, progressing haltingly as the parties fought over procedural matters. Meanwhile, in the absence of any court order to the contrary, asylum seekers continued to arrive from Australia and be detained at the RPC, in circumstances that would not be recognised as unconstitutional and illegal until years later.

On 19 July 2013, just seven weeks before the federal election, newly reinstated prime minister Kevin Rudd appeared at a press conference in Brisbane, with prime minister O’Neill by his side, and made a stunning announcement. From that day onwards, no asylum seeker who arrived by boat would be given the chance to settle in Australia. Instead, offshore processing would continue, and anyone found to be a refugee would have only two options: settle in Papua New Guinea (or some other country that would take them), or go home.

For the first time in Australian history, the country was closed off completely to refugees arriving spontaneously at the border by sea. Responsibility for processing and settling these refugees shifted entirely to other countries in the region. There would be no exceptions, not even for children or refugees with immediate family members already living in Australia.

Rudd’s new policy was initially recorded in a “regional resettlement arrangement” with Papua New Guinea, then formalised over the coming weeks in new bilateral agreements with that country and Nauru. The new deals kept much of the existing arrangements in place – apart from the issue of what would happen to refugees after they had been processed. They appeared to suggest that all refugees processed in Papua New Guinea would be permitted to settle and remain there forever. Reality would unfold very differently.

In the weeks and months following Rudd’s announcement, the Manus RPC, like the facility on Nauru, would gradually be emptied as the asylum seekers who had been held there since the previous year were taken back to Australia, unprocessed. The move was intended to make space for the new cohort of asylum seekers – all adult men this time on Manus, all subject to the new rule of no resettlement in Australia.

But space was in short supply. By the time the federal election rolled around in September 2013, the population of the Manus RPC had ramped up from 130 to 723 men – an increase of almost 600 per cent in seven weeks. By the end of the year, under Tony Abbott’s new government, the number of men held on Manus had grown again to 1200.

As the centre heaved under the pressure of the new arrivals, its outer limits remained fixed. The space grew increasingly cramped, and living conditions rapidly deteriorated. The men’s health and safety – already under threat – inevitably suffered.

Life in detention on Manus had always been difficult, but by late 2013 it reached extreme levels. Most men were still housed in converted shipping containers and old tin buildings, sleeping on tightly packed double bunks. “P Dorm” was among the worst: a forty-metre-long building with a curved corrugated iron roof where more than one hundred men were forced to live. In some parts the bunks were so close that a grown man would need to shuffle side-on to get through. The heat was unbearable, as was the stench of so many men crammed into tight quarters, in a tropical climate, with no ventilation. Sometimes the residents of P Dorm found snakes inside, and the building flooded in the rain. One guard and former firefighter described it as a “death trap” and “a hazard to everyone who lived there.”

Elsewhere in the RPC, heavy rains would wash rubbish into the areas around men’s living quarters, causing a putrid stench as it rotted in the heat and humidity. Fresh food was a rarity, and the meals men did get kept the sick bays in frequent use with regular outbreaks of gastroenteritis. There were acute shortages of clothing, underwear and basic hygiene products. Few men had proper shoes, and it was nearly impossible to keep clean – the toilets were eternally filthy, and one compound had just a single washing machine for the 400 men detained there.

No matter how bad the conditions got, though, they were never the primary concern of the men detained on Manus. Above all else these men wanted just two things: to be processed, and to know what plans were in place for their future. Neither was forthcoming.

By early 2014 the Manus RPC was on the verge of a meltdown. Many of the staff did their best within a broken system – trying to manage the situation, repeatedly raising concerns with the Australian government about the inadequacy of existing infrastructure and security. Yet men continued to arrive, faster than capacity could grow to accommodate them. Service providers pleaded with the Australian government to engage with the men’s concerns about their future, and provide some clear answers. Their pleas went unanswered. No one was processed. No one knew what would happen next.

As anger, frustration and anxiety grew, hostility and misunderstandings between the detained men and the local population added fuel to the fire. The two groups had never been properly introduced to each other. Most Manusians knew nothing about the men hidden away behind the high fences of the RPC. On the other side, among the men, understanding of the country in which they found themselves was a mixture of fact and fearful conjecture. To keep them in line, some of the expatriate guards whipped up terrifying stories of Papua New Guinea as a country of barbaric, cannibalistic tribes who practised witchcraft and vigilante justice. As the men’s fears for their future deepened, so too did the antagonism between them and the people outside the fence.

In February 2014, this perfect storm erupted into a violent and deadly riot that rocked the RPC, leaving one young man dead and scores more seriously injured. One man had his throat slit open from ear to ear, another was shot, and many more were beaten. This riot would prove to be a turning point in the RPC’s history. From this point forward, the majority of men detained in Manus would never again trust the country that had hosted them, and where they were later expected to make a home.

Alongside various other inquiries in the wake of the Manus riot, Justice Cannings decided to launch his own judicial probe into the treatment of the men held inside the RPC. Using his constitutional power to investigate whether they were freely enjoying their rights in detention, he began gathering evidence about the inner workings of the facility. He didn’t get far. The inquiry was shut down almost immediately, with PNG foreign affairs and immigration minister Rimbink Pato citing judicial “bias.” Pato described the move to block the investigation as a “joint effort” between Papua New Guinea and Australia. Justice Cannings launched a second inquiry as soon as the first was suspended. This too was shut down.

The judge may have been stonewalled, but the Namah case continued – slowly. Just a few weeks before the riot in February 2014, the PNG Supreme Court had confirmed that Namah had standing to challenge the constitutionality of the arrangements between the Australian and PNG governments regarding the transfer of people who had sought asylum in Australia. But it would still be more than two years before a judgement was reached reached. A few dozen men were released into the PNG community during this time, but most remained in detention. These would be bleak years.

Men began to “disappear” into a secret compound, re-emerging days later with incredible stories of having been locked up, beaten, threatened and tortured. Chauka, known formally as the “managed accommodation area,” did not appear on any of the official maps. Described as a specialised isolation unit for men who “misbehaved,” it consisted of three converted shipping containers arranged in a triangle with only one route in or out; it was away from the other accommodation areas, guarded at all times, and the containers had no windows or ventilation – just a single bed in each.

By the end of 2014, records would show that teenage boys and men were being sent to the shipping containers and held there at an average rate of three per week. The Australian immigration department denied that there was anything exceptional about the area in question. There would never be an independent inquiry into the allegations of what went on there.

Elsewhere around the Manus RPC, minor ailments escalated into serious health conditions. In the remote, hot tropics, with cramped and unhygienic living conditions, infections were quick to develop and potentially fatal. Adequate healthcare simply was not available on site, and recommendations for medical evacuation were staunchly resisted by the Australian immigration department, who had the final say on all health matters. The tragic case of Hamid Khazaei, dead at the age of twenty-four after an infected cut was left untreated and urgent calls for medical evacuation were ignored, did little to change procedure.

Men were shattered psychologically. One, thirty-one-year-old Mohammad Albederee, began a hunger strike so long, and so devastating in its impact on his body, that it morphed from a voluntary protest into a critical health condition. Sources close to Albederee said he had tried to cut open his stomach to prove it was empty. Later he reportedly had a fit and bashed his head against a wall until he lost consciousness.

Mental health staff at the RPC said people were “off the ledge and in a downwards spiral,” with a large number requiring strong psychiatric medication on a daily basis. Men had nothing to do to the pass time: no work, no school, no skills training, no cultural sensitisation. Depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide attempts were rampant.

As the first anniversary of the February riot approached in early 2015, there was a brief and intense flare of protest within the centre, but it was quickly quashed. By the second anniversary, most men in the Manus RPC had been detained there for several years. They barely stirred. They were broken.

Almost three-and-a-half years after Namah first filed his case challenging the detention of asylum seekers at the Manus RPC, the verdict finally came in. The detention of asylum seekers on Manus had been illegal all this time, and Australia and Papua New Guinea together were ordered to make things right.

Perhaps the men inside the centre were euphoric when the first whispers of the judgement reached them. Perhaps they were fearful of being sent somewhere even worse. It is hard to know, because there they have stayed, locked away behind the gates of their remote detention centre.

Detention has not ceased forthwith on Manus. Public and media access has continued to be restricted, and there has been no word on when this illegal detention might end. Most importantly, there is no word on what might be in store for them next. The broken men of Manus, like other men, women and children in Nauru and Australia, are still stuck – waiting, perpetually, for a safe place to call home. •

This article is based on ’s new book, Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru, available now from NewSouth Books.

The post Manus Island: behind the wire appeared first on Inside Story.

To his credit, Turnbull at least expressed sympathy for the misery and mental anguish of refugees and asylum seekers in Manus and Nauru. Unlike his immigration minister, Peter Dutton, he has not stooped to blaming “advocates and others” for encouraging self-harm as a way of pressuring the government to change its policy. But Turnbull held fast to the line that these refugees can never be allowed to settle in Australia. When Kelly posed the obvious question in response – “So what will we do with them?” – the prime minister floundered.

According to the government’s transcript of the interview, Turnbull answered, “The people that are on Nauru and on Manus will have the opportunity of settling.” But if you listen to the audio, this was an unfinished sentence. What he actually said was, “The people that are on Nauru and on Manus will have the opportunity of settling in…” Then he realised he was heading for the rocks and abruptly changed tack. Leaving the thought unfinished, he instead reminded Kelly that people found to be refugees in Nauru are free to move about the island, and that people assessed as refugees in Manus are free to settle in Papua New Guinea. These statements may be technically correct, but they are a manifestly inadequate response to Kelly’s question of what will happen to these refugees in the long term.

The memorandum of understanding signed between Australia and Nauru in August 2012 holds out the possibility that an “agreed number” of refugees will be settled in Nauru, but if any such number exists it seems not to have been made public. For now, the refugees are on temporary visas, and another clause in the memorandum requires Australia to “make all efforts to ensure that all transferees depart the Republic of Nauru within as short a time as is reasonably necessary…”

In Papua New Guinea, meanwhile, prime minister Peter O’Neill says that the Manus processing facility must close following the Supreme Court ruling that the detention of asylum seekers is illegal. Refugees who want to settle in Papua New Guinea are welcome to do so, but – recognising that most don’t want to – he asked Australia to make “alternative arrangements” for everyone else.

In other words, Australia needs to find somewhere else for both groups of refugees to settle. But the only third-country resettlement option tried so far – Cambodia – has proved an expensive failure.

This explains why Turnbull’s initial response to Kelly’s question remained unfinished. The government can’t say what it will do with the refugees in Manus and Nauru because it doesn’t know. Yet it steadfastly continues to rule out the only available, practical and safe option of New Zealand.

In 2013, as Inside Story reported late last year, NZ prime minister John Key offered to help out Australia by resettling up to 150 refugees each year over two years. In the wake of the decision to close the Manus detention centre last month, the office of New Zealand’s immigration minister confirmed that this offer is still on the table. While places for this year and the previous year have been allocated to humanitarian migrants from Syria and Iraq, New Zealand could make another 150 places available to Australia in the new financial year – that is, as soon as July.

Turnbull says Australia will not take up the offer because settlement “in a country like New Zealand would be used by the people smugglers as a marketing opportunity.” Dutton ran a similar line, describing New Zealand as “a back-door way to get into Australia.”

The idea that migrants can use New Zealand as a back door to Australia has a long and ignominious history. As an argument, it doesn’t stand much scrutiny. It’s certainly true that New Zealand citizens can enter Australia and live and work here as long as they want under what is known as the “special category visa” issued on arrival, and it’s true that they can also qualify for Medicare under reciprocal arrangements between the two countries. But to describe this as back-door migration is absurd. It suggests that refugees will simply step onto the tarmac at Auckland airport, do a quick turn through the transit lounge, and end up in Sydney or Melbourne.

The first thing to remember is that a refugee resettled in New Zealand can only move to Australia after becoming an NZ citizen, a process that takes a minimum of five years. It is quite a stretch to call this process, as Dutton does, a “green light” to people smugglers.

On top of that, it’s highly unlikely that a refugee-turned-NZ-citizen would decide to come to Australia after five years. Apart from healthcare, they would have almost no access to government services and payments. Under changes introduced by the Howard government in 2001, New Zealanders who move to Australia really are in a “special category” – the category of long-term migrants on temporary visas. They can’t get access to unemployment benefits, youth allowance, sickness benefits, sole parent payments, carer payments or special benefits. They are generally excluded from public or community housing under state and territory rules, and they must pay full up-front fees to study at university (unless they arrived in Australia before the age of eighteen and have been living here for at least ten years). Regardless of how long they live in Australia, New Zealanders can’t vote and have only restricted options for becoming permanent residents and taking out Australian citizenship.

It seems highly unlikely that refugees, having settled in New Zealand and gained access to its social safety net, would choose to bolt across the ditch the moment their Kiwi passport arrived in the mail. If they did end up coming here, it would be because, like other New Zealanders in Australia, they are in demand from Australian employers to fill gaps in the local labour market.

Since 1973, Australia and New Zealand have agreed to unrestricted trans-Tasman travel to promote the closer integration of the two countries’ economies. In this sense, it is a front door, not a back door, and both countries have decided that it is in their interests to keep that door propped open. If the Australian government thinks that the benefits of unrestricted trans-Tasman travel are outweighed by letting in tiny numbers of refugees who once tried to come here by boat, then it can kick the door closed again any time it wants.

If refugees in Manus and Nauru have aspirations to be resettled in New Zealand rather than Cambodia or Papua New Guinea, that is because it offers them a safe and secure future where they might rebuild their lives, not because it offers a circuitous route to Australia.

So if the government claims that we cannot allow refugees to be resettled in New Zealand because this encourages people smuggling, then the same argument must apply to settling these refugees in any other third country that could offer an enduring and dignified solution to their plight. This logic leaves us with only two options: either we keep these refugees in misery and mental anguish in Nauru and Manus indefinitely, or we send them to another country that offers them an equally uncertain and precarious future. Any other solution would be a green light to the people smugglers. •

The post Why not New Zealand? appeared first on Inside Story.

With the agreement on the return of refugees from Greece to Turkey now operational, the Union hopes it has found a solution to the flow of migrants trying to enter Europe. The crisis gave Europe one of its greatest challenges by combining two potentially explosive political problems: rising opposition to the idea of European integration among citizens and the slow and cumbersome decision-making processes within European institutions. Combined, they have made it almost impossible to come up with an effective common approach to the challenges of migration.

The citizen revolt against the European Union

The European Union has always been an elite project, driven by politicians, diplomats, civil servants and interest groups that saw the benefits of closer cooperation. The attitude of most citizens reflected what political scientists Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks dubbed a “permissive consensus”: the project was supported by most citizens not so much out of warm feelings but out of a sense that European integration was acceptable as long as it delivered results without impinging too much on people’s lives.

This attitude has changed profoundly. To be sure, there has always been opposition to the European Union, both from left-wing parties that saw it as a neoliberal ploy and from right-wing parties that wanted to protect national identities. But these are usually fringe players in European politics. The large, centrist parties supported European integration; even if their voters tended to be more split over the issue, the permissive consensus allowed them to ignore these divisions.

Over the past two decades or so, this has changed, though the exact causes are difficult to pinpoint. One reason may be that the European Union itself has developed spectacularly, from a free-trade zone with some auxiliary policies in the early 1990s to a political union with a common currency and shared policies in sensitive areas such as crime-fighting, immigration and foreign policy. And it has grown from twelve (Western European) member states before 1995 to twenty-eight members in all corners of the continent.

Studies of Euroscepticism also show that opposition to the European Union is closely linked with a range of other identity-related issues, such as opposition to migration, to Islam and to globalisation in general. This package of issues forms the core platform of a range of right-wing “populist” parties that have made spectacular gains across Europe over the past years. Even European countries that for a long time seemed immune to this type of political sentiment, such as Germany and Sweden, have seen these parties win significant results in recent elections.

The rise of these parties and the political sentiment they represent has put considerable pressure on governing centrist parties, which are losing voters to openly Eurosceptical parties. As a result, they are increasingly forced to confront the issues their voters are split over. As Hooghe and Marks put it, popular attitudes towards the European Union have gone from a permissive consensus to a constraining dissensus. With their every step scrutinised by opponents at home, political elites can no longer hammer out compromises at European Union level without giving much thought to their voters.

In this context, the refugee crisis is an issue from hell. Politically speaking, opposition to (Muslim) migrants is closely linked with opposition to the European Union. The influx of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and countries in Northern Africa has given a tremendous electoral boost to the same right-wing parties that oppose further European integration. This has put the leaders of many EU member states in a catch-22 situation: in order to stem the flow of migrants, EU-level solutions are needed, but every move to strengthen the European Union will run into opposition from Eurosceptics.

A most imperfect Union

On top of this, the European Union is extremely ill-equipped to take (let alone implement) far-reaching decisions at short notice. It is a highly peculiar political experiment that combines two political logics. On the one hand, it is an organisation formed by sovereign states, and without those states no decision can be taken. On the other hand, it shows a number of state-like features itself, such as a quasi-government (the European Commission), a directly elected parliament and an independent (and powerful) Court of Justice, which all play a role alongside member-state governments.

This has led to a complicated institutional entity that looks like a state in many ways but also involves a lot of interstate diplomacy. No wonder, then, that the former president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, once called the European Union an “unidentified political object.” Neither state nor organisation, it hovers in a postmodern political space.

In many cases, this system works remarkably well. Complex and arcane it may be, but it has come up with shared solutions in a range of areas while carefully balancing the various interests at stake. The end result may not always be pretty or easily understood, but this is the case in many domestic political systems as well.

But there are two caveats to this institutionalised political balancing act: speed is not the forte of the system and enforcement normally takes a back seat to decision-making. These two factors are making themselves felt with particular force in the refugee crisis.

Since the European Union has no clear political centre of gravity, quick and decisive action is rare. During the recent financial crisis, this was demonstrated by the (unintentionally) ironic title of a report on the future of the euro named The Five Presidents’ Report: Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union, written as it was by the presidents of the European Council (which brings together the heads of state and government of the member states), the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the “Eurogroup” of member states within the eurozone. There’s even a sixth president in the equation: the top position in the Council of Ministers, which rotates among member-state governments every six months. This proliferation of presidents exemplifies the highly dispersed nature of political authority in the European Union, which leaves everyone, and no one, in charge.

Given sufficient time, this apparatus is able to come up with quite impressive advances, especially in comparison with other regimes. During the financial crisis, time was bought with ad hoc financial support measures by national governments that kept (virtually) bankrupt banks and member states afloat while discussions on more permanent solutions continued. Even though these support measures ran into the hundreds of billions of euros and austerity measures wreaked social havoc in debtor countries, popular opposition never reached the point where political leaders were forced to abandon the strategy.

The refugee crisis seems different. Citizens all across Europe have reacted intensely to the prospect (or reality) of (tens, hundreds of) thousands of refugees coming to their countries. Reactions have included local (and sometimes violent) resistance to the location of refugee camps, large-scale demonstrations against migration and the “Islamisation” of Europe, and a dramatic rise in support for right-wing populist parties across the continent. For others, this brings back ghosts of Europe’s dark past, with nationalist and xenophobic sentiments seeming to carry the day and dominating the debate. And for political leaders, the citizens’ response has had the practical implication of limiting the scope to buy time. They need to act now or they may face civil unrest and political defeat at the next elections.

The limits of enforcement and implementation

That’s not to say that action hasn’t been taken at the European Union level. But this is where another of its weaknesses comes to the fore: its limited capacity to implement and enforce decisions.

In the northern autumn of 2015, several decisions were made in an attempt to handle the flow of incoming refugees. Most significantly, a system of relocation was envisaged that would “redistribute” 160,000 refugees from Greece and Italy to other EU member states – with each state being assigned a quota. This was meant to offer some relief to Greece and Italy, where most migrants from the Middle East and North Africa – around 880,000 in 2015 – have entered the European Union. Although these migrants mostly want to move on to countries in northwestern Europe, under EU rules they are obliged to apply for asylum in the country in which they enter the European Union, and this has put huge pressure on the (already non-functioning) asylum systems in the two countries.

The decision to assign quotas to all EU member states met with strong opposition from a number of member-state governments, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe, which openly resisted admitting Muslim migrants. In the end, the plan was pushed through the Council of Ministers, but several governments immediately announced they would not accept any of the relocated migrants.

In order to make this system work, a number of “hotspots” were to be set up in Greece and Italy to receive incoming refugees and process their applications. Moreover, member states were to provide the expert staff needed to make the whole system work.

So far, the results of these decisions have been meagre, to say the least. By mid March 2016, no more than 937 refugees had been relocated from Greece and Italy to other member states – a far cry from the 160,000 originally envisaged, which itself is only a minor portion of the total number of people who have entered Greece and Italy. Although most hotspots envisaged in Greece and Italy are now operational, the Commission reported in early April that the two EU agencies responsible for coordinating the process had received only 1197 pledges of experts from member states, out of the 2380 that had been requested.

Enter Turkey: the deus ex machina?

The inability to come up with effective solutions to the refugee crisis led to a climate of rising tensions among EU member states earlier this year. Several member states unilaterally decided to close the borders with their neighbours, leading to the reintroduction of internal border controls and trapping large groups of refugees in front of the fences that some member states physically erected to keep them out.

It is in this context that political leaders turned to an external solution involving Turkey, with which an agreement on resettlement of refugees was reached in early March. The idea is simple: all refugees entering Greece through Turkey would be sent back to Turkey, thus alleviating pressure on Greece and discouraging refugees from trying to cross the Aegean in the first place. In return, Turkey would receive financial compensation (eventually up to €6 billion). Moreover, for every refugee returned, the European Union would accept one Syrian refugee from a Turkish refugee camp.

If it works out as foreseen, this deal offers a number of benefits to the European Union. To begin with, it will turn the irregular flow of migrants into a regulated flow. Moreover, it will allow the European Union to accept refugees displaced because of the war in Syria while keeping out migrants from other parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Finally, with fewer migrants attempting to go to Greece, it is believed that total numbers will eventually decline.

Creative as the agreement with Turkey may be, it is also an admission of defeat on the part of the European Union. Unable to shore up its own borders and develop a workable approach to dealing with refugees once they are in Europe, it has effectively contracted out the solution to an external party. It is now up to Turkey to control the European Union’s borders.

One crisis too many?

With the agreement with Turkey now operational, new and troubling questions have arisen. Will the European Union be able to organise the return of refugees from Greece to Turkey? Will the regulated entry of Syrian refugees from Turkey work in practice? With the route through Turkey cut off, will migrants return to alternative routes, for instance from Libya to Italy across the Mediterranean? These questions are accompanied by protests from NGOs and the UN refugee agency about human rights violations, both in the process of returning refugees to Turkey and in their treatment in Turkish refugee camps.

For now, though, the agreement has served one important political goal: it has bought the time needed for EU political leaders to come up with more enduring structural solutions. Several proposals are already on the table. In December 2015, the European Commission released a proposal for a European Border and Coast Guard, which would be able to intervene when member states are not able to protect their own (and thereby the European Union’s) borders. This is part of a broader package of proposals to develop a more integrated approach to migrants in the European Union.

As in earlier crises, the refugee crisis may provide the impetus needed to accept these proposals. At the same time, it is not self-evident that member states will go along with them. The breathing space offered by the agreement with Turkey will give political leaders some time to reflect, but they will still feel the pressure from anti-migrant and anti-EU sentiment among their voters. Many of the Commission proposals are highly controversial among the member states, which is likely to lead to protracted decision-making and watered-down compromises.

It is a process that has worked in the past, as the European Union has been built up in bits and pieces, adopting pragmatic solutions for pressing problems. It remains to be seen, however, whether this will be one more crisis too good to waste or whether it will prove one crisis too many. •

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