At the press conference announcing his hard-line policy on asylum seekers Tony Abbott declared himself ‘a big risk to people smugglers’. While he claimed that ‘if I get elected, people smugglers will go out of business’, Abbott stressed that ‘my argument is not with desperate people who want a better life’.
If only it were that simple. The reality is that the Opposition’s policy constitutes a grave risk to traumatized people who will, if the policy is implemented, be traumatized further.
Temporary protection visas will be reintroduced for irregular maritime arrivals who are found to engage Australia’s protection obligations, as well as for others.
TPVs will be granted for periods of between six months and three years. They will prohibit family reunion and any person who travels out of Australia during this period will have no right of re-entry. The ‘Pacific solution’ will be revived, with the Coalition pledging to negotiate an agreement with ‘another country’ to take all asylum seekers attempting to ‘enter Australia illegally by boat’.
These proposals are an unwelcome return to Howard-era practices. But in a significant way, what Abbott is proposing is worse than the Coalition’s policy failures in government.
The Howard Government was wrong to introduce these measures the first time. It did so against all reasoned advice. But at least it could then be argued, if nothing else, that the methods were being tried for the first time. By contrast, the Opposition proposes to repeat earlier mistakes after notching up a lamentable record of failure to achieve stated objectives and causing much avoidable suffering.
Temporary protection visas failed to deter boat arrivals. 3,103 persons arrived by boat in the five years prior to the introduction of TPVs, and more than 11,000 in the five years after their introduction.
The great majority of TPV holders were eventually granted permanent protection – 9,800 out of 11,000. There is no reason to think it will be any different this time around. Indeed, Abbott himself acknowledged that TPV holders under the Coalition’s proposed scheme ‘might be given permanent residency’. But not before forcing them to endure the denial of family reunion and substantially heightened risks to their mental health.
The uncertainty of temporary protection exacerbates and perpetuates the impact of traumas suffered by people who have been persecuted.
People who have been recognised as refugees meriting protection but granted only temporary visas cannot lead a normal life, cannot manage their affairs with any confidence and are unlikely to successfully engage in the difficult process of recovery. It is difficult to imagine how the protection we grant to those found to be in genuine need could be made more grudging or less hospitable. A permanent visa is the only basis on which refugees can rebuild damaged lives and reconstitute fragmented families.
Similarly, the ‘Pacific solution’ was both futile and harmful.
No one ever pretended that Nauru and Manus Island were better equipped than Australia to process the claims and look after the welfare of asylum seekers. Deterrence was the only argument advanced for the ‘Pacific solution’, and it was a false argument. 70% of the people processed at Nauru and Manus were found to be refugees. Of these, 61% were settled in Australia, with a further 34% taken by New Zealand. Third-country processing did not prevent refugees from eventually settling in Australia.
It did, however, put many asylum seekers in situations where their mental health was seriously harmed.
In 2005, 25 asylum seekers who had spent four years on Nauru were granted visas to Australia after a psychiatrist warned the then government that each was at extreme risk of suicide. The psychiatrist described an ‘environment and atmosphere of consistent hopelessness’. A team of mental health experts were subsequently sent to Nauru by the immigration minister of the time. They reported that ‘[a]ll cases are considered vulnerable to further deterioration’.
TPVs and the ‘Pacific solution’ are failed experiments and poor public policy.
The rationale underlying both measures – tough treatment of asylum seekers and refugees to deter boat arrivals – is ethically problematic. Bluntly, it is not acceptable to knowingly harm some people in order to influence the behaviour of others. It is not acceptable that vulnerable people will be knowingly re-traumatised in pursuit of a policy objective – deterrence of further boat arrivals.
Australia, in cooperation with other countries, should certainly do all it reasonably can to end the reprehensible practice of people smuggling. Significant progress in the national debate about the appropriate response to unauthorised boat arrivals is only possible when policy and practice in relation to the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees are conceptually uncoupled from the worthy goal of preventing people smuggling.
In promising that he will ‘stop the boats’ Abbott is promising what he cannot deliver.
The last time TPVs were introduced boat arrivals increased. But even if the policy of TPVs and some version of the ‘Pacific solution’ could stop the boats it should still be rejected.
The announced measures would do grave and entirely foreseeable harm to the well-being of vulnerable people. This Opposition policy proposal has no merit and must be firmly resisted.
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