SYDNEY, 6 March 2004 — The arrival this week of a boat with 15 asylum-seekers aboard underscores Australia’s success in repulsing refugees.
It was only the third such arrival in more than 18 months.
When Prime Minister John Howard announced his controversial “Pacific Solution” in September 2001, mostly Middle Easterners were getting off ramshackle Indonesian fishing boats along Australia’s northern beaches and claiming asylum at a rate of 1,000 a month.
The Pacific Solution involved preventing would-be migrants from engaging Australia’s legal system by excising outlying territories, setting up offshore immigration detention centers, and making life more difficult for those who got over these hurdles and were allowed in as genuine refugees.
The nine women and six men who made landfall this week did so on Ashmore Reef, an uninhabited sandbar closer to Indonesia than any Australian city. As Ashmore Reef is now not recognized as part of the migration zone, those who landed there will be taken away and processed offshore.
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone reckons that taking the knife to what’s classified as the Australian mainland has been a big help in turning the tide on unauthorized arrivals.
“If you can excise islands you can ensure that anyone trying to come here illegally is dealt with offshore,” she said. “That is the single most successful policy we have to deterring the people-smugglers.”
Setting up offshore detention centers in the tiny South Pacific nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea has also proven its worth as a deterrent.
Though Canberra pays for the Nauru camp, it’s run by a United Nations body and those granted refugee status are no more entitled to enter Australia than any other country. The camp in PNG has now just one resident, hapless Palestinian Aladdin Sisalem, and is soon to close.
Some held offshore have tired of waiting for a welcome from Australia and taken up offers of new lives in New Zealand. Some who are told they haven’t passed muster as genuine refugees have accepted money from Canberra to go back to their country of origin. Around 280 remain on Nauru.
The third plank of the Pacific Solution was making Australia more unattractive as a target destination for those eager to shift to a rich country.
For more than a decade the embrace of what’s called mandatory detention has meant anyone arriving in Australia without a visa and claiming refugee status has been locked up pending the adjudication of that claim. Dotted around the country are detention centers where both the hopeful and the hopeless bide their time. Most of the 200 or so asylum-seekers still held in detention are there because their appeals against being refused a visa are still being heard in the courts.
