Nine timeless Paddy McGuinness articles on immigration:
1. We must not surrender to boat people blackmail (1992)
2. We need locks on immigration gate (1994)
3. Boat people and the law (1994)
4. Laying down the law on refugee status (1998)
5. Why Amnesty has lost its way (2000)
6. Open-door refugee policy is a recipe for destruction (2001)
7. Why misdirected sympathy can do more harm than good (2002)
8. Misdirected sympathy for illegal arrivals masks Howard’s success (2002)
9. Labor being dragged back to the ’60s by ideologues on high horses (2002)
1.
Padraic P. McGuinness,
“We must not surrender to boat people blackmail,”
The Weekend Australian, May 9-10, 1992, p. 2.
Although the treatment of illegal immigrants, boat people, who have been kept in custody for many months is cruelly bureaucratic, I am at a loss to understand the hypersensitivity which surrounds the problem of dealing with these unfortunates.
The Government’s legislation this week to clarify its own right to keep such illegal immigrants in custody was ham-fisted. But the criticisms of its policy with respect to illegal immigrants, and above all the demands that people without legal right to be in Australia on any basis should be given the right to extend their stay by a series of legal manoeuvres and at the same time go freely in the community, are completely wrong-headed.
They derive as far as the churches are concerned from what can only be a complete contempt for the law when it clashes with woolly emotion, with compassion always taking precedence over justice.
The lawyers are easier to understand. The issues surrounding the administrative discretions of the immigration authorities and the degree to which these can be subject to review by tribunals and courts are complex in the extreme. They are a useful and lucrative source of employment for lawyers, especially those who like to think of themselves as advocates of human rights.
And the Human Rights Commissioner, Mr Brian Burdekin, has taken up the cause with great enthusiasm, taking the high moral ground of international conventions that quite properly declare the right to due process and the right of judicial hearing to justify detention. Surely it must be the case that illegal immigrants have the right to benefit from such protections?
In principle, yes. So long as they are on Australian territory they should have the right of access to Australian courts. While there is an international convention dealing with the status of refugees, yet (outside the Americas) refugees have no formal rights. And there is no doubt that most of the boat people are not refugees in the traditional sense. They arrive on Australian soil by what is tantamount to invasion, and do so only because of the impossibility of preventing their landing. That is, the only way to prevent their coming under Australian law would be to sink their boats or take them off the boats at sea and transport them directly back to their place of origin. The first would be murder and the second often would amount to much the same thing.
There is an awful policy dilemma in the treatment of the boat people and similar people fleeing their own countries in the hope of a better life elsewhere. They are effectively exercising moral blackmail on the rest of the world by throwing themselves on its mercy: give us what we want, or we will die. If we give them what they want, that is safe refuge and residence, the message that this is the way to gain access to Australia will percolate back to their countries of origin and we will lose control over our immigration policy. Large-scale movements of people from poor countries in our region to Australia will result.
If we are to retain control over immigration into Australia, fairly draconian measures to deal with illegal immigration are necessary. Above all, it is necessary to make clear that there is not a network of domestic support available to the illegal immigrants, that they will not be able with the assistance of Australian citizens with the oddest of motives to launch a chain of appeals and delaying actions against administrative decisions to deport them, and that they will not be given every opportunity to disappear into the community in the hope of escaping detection, and perhaps benefiting from amnesties in the future.
The alternative, which is what the churches and the immigration lawyers are in effect advocating, is to abandon any effective control over immigration into Australia. Perhaps this is what will happen eventually anyway.
Large-scale population movements are clearly one of the major problems of the world today, as corrupt communist regimes are collapsing and the people who were once kept at home by force are looking for a better life which the successor regimes will not be able to offer for years. Migration from Central and Eastern Europe, from North Africa and from the Middle East is destabilising politics across the whole of Europe and provoking strong popular feelings and anti-immigrant movements which are often appalling in their xenophobia and racism.
If we are to open up, either as a result of policy or as a result of naïve emotionalising, to uncontrolled and illegal immigration, there will be a backlash here also. It is all too typical of the type of people who advocate extensive legal defences for illegal immigrants that they also believe in all kinds of laws to control the racist backlash they are so determined to engender.
It may be, of course, that Australia has no long-term future as a white enclave at the bottom of Asia, and that we will inevitably by swamped by Asian immigration. It is neither racist nor hostile to Asia to suggest that this is not at all what the vast majority of the Australian people want — like every other country, while change is acceptable we would not want our national identity totally to disappear. And while Aborigines might claim that this is what happened to them, it is quite certain that they would want Australia in the future to be more like it is at present in racial terms than that they and the descendants of the European settlers and immigrants should both be swamped.
Inevitably, the ideologues of rights for illegal immigrants will at this stage start muttering about fear of the “Yellow Peril”. It has to be remembered, however, that while in the 19th century such fears had little real foundation, in these days the technical possibilities of migration are far greater than they have ever been.
But the immediate issue is not the fear of large-scale and uncontrolled immigration but the undermining of our own national migration policies by illegal immigration.
In this the courts and tribunals have enthusiastically co-operated clearly having their own agenda for the extension of the powers of judicial and administrative review. They are interfering in policy matters for which they do not have to take total and ultimate responsibility.
Of course it is terrible that the boat people at present detained should continue in detention. Some solution to the rapid turnaround and deportation of such people has to be found. But if deportation is as terrible a punishment as sinking their boats in the first place would have been, some means has to be found for transmitting the message that blackmail by compassion will not work as a substitute for proper application for refugee or immigrant status.
This is what the Minister for Immigration, Mr Hand, is trying to achieve. He is in a no-win situation since nothing he does can meet all the criteria of humaneness which those who do not carry any responsibility for Australia’s future can easily embrace. The Opposition, pretending to be bipartisan in its approach, is trying to cash in on Mr Hand’s dilemma. He is trying to freeze the present situation while drafting legal amendments which will put the whole thing on a better basis. He is right; the professional bleeding hearts are wrong.
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2.
Padraic P. McGuinness,
“We need locks on immigration gate,”
The Australian, January 28, 1994, p. 13.
Hard cases make bad law. This applies just as much to the law dealing with immigrants and refugees as to any other area of life; and while recent events have drawn dramatic attention to the plight of Cambodian refugees who have entered this country illegally, the situation is altered not one whit by that.
These refugees are in custody awaiting deportation or successful appeal against decisions of the Australian immigration authorities and courts to deport them. In some cases their attempts to use every legal angle and emotional appeal which can be discovered or invented by lawyers and religious advocates purporting to act on their behalf have led to an unconscionable extension of their detention.
It is impossible not to feel compassion for these people. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the legal arguments, in sheer humanity an amnesty and residency should immediately be granted to those whose detention has lasted several years. This is not because there is any moral obligation to accept them. They broke the law by entering Australia illegally and have no legal status within the country except insofar as we accept the international convention of the treatment of refugees.
There has grown up around these victims of circumstance a substantial lobby group who no doubt from the best motives are determined to deny that Australia has any right to run an immigration policy or a policy on entry into Australia. That is, they want to deny our Government the right to say who, how many, from where, and under what conditions, shall be allowed to enter Australia.
Entry restrictions operate in all countries where there is a government sufficiently constituted to be in control of its own territory. Often they are extremely difficult to police effectively, as the United States has found with the many Hispanics who cross the Mexican border. However ineffective, such restrictions are necessary if the government of the country is to maintain the right to govern within its own territory.
The many lawyers who have devoted their time to helping, as they think, the illegal Cambodian entrants, have done so by means of searching for technical complications, ambiguities and loopholes in the Australian law, and by advising their clients on ways of circumventing the law. (For example, in one of the best-known cases boat people about to land in Australia without permission were advised of the fact that the law provided that they should be deported in the same boat in which they arrived, and hence were advised to burn their boat on disembarkation to defeat the law, which they did. Sharp practice, indeed.)
The various priests and other professional moralists who have become involved seem to care for the law not even in technical terms. They are sufficiently arrogant to believe that their own prejudices, emotions and theological shibboleths are sufficient basis to ignore the law, or encourage its flouting.
There certainly is every reason to treat Cambodian refugees, especially those fleeing the Pol Pot regime and its aftermath, with compassion and to accept some of them. The same applies to the refugees of the communist conquest of Vietnam, of the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, of African apartheid and poverty, of wars, murderous regimes and famines everywhere. To these will have to be added the wave of white refugees from South Africa when the situation collapses into a bloody shambles and the wave of Chinese refugees from Hong Kong likely to result from British bungling of the handover to China in 1997.
So far, it is true, there has not been a large number of Cambodian or Vietnamese boatpeople and there is not at present a threat of a large further influx. The great practical help of all to the Cambodians has been rendered, of course, not by the domestic compassion-mongers but by the work of Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Gareth Evans, and his predecessor in laying the foundation for the Cambodian elections. That kind of thing requires hard, patient and tedious diplomacy, much of it out of the public eye, not pharisaical breast-beating.
But the fact that there has not been a downward sweep of Cambodian hordes is not, as many propagandists like to claim, particularly relevant to the fundamental issue of whether Australia is to run its own immigration policy or merely to passively accept whoever turns up on our doorstep (or, indeed, inside the house without asking). No one ever feared a mass invasion.
However, we have accepted a pretty substantial number of Cambodian, Vietnamese and other refugees, and our record by international standards is not a bad one. It could indeed be better, and there is an arguable case for taking more of the refugees from holding camps in various parts of Asia, and being less fussy and bureaucratic about those we do take. There is certainly a case for spending more on their treatment and reception.
It is true that Cambodian refugees at Port Hedland and Villawood are being treated shabbily, this is indeed a scandal. We are not a poor country, and offenders though they may be, they are not criminals, and certainly should be treated at least as well as remand prisoners. Least of all should they be treated meanly as far as food and clothing are concerned; and the children should be allowed to attend normal schools.
But what is the alternative to internment of adult refugees who arrive illegally, however desperate? If we are to simply accept them, then we have no immigration policy and no consistent legal basis on which to deny anyone anytime, from anywhere entry without even asking. If they are to be released on bail or surety (and these would come only from those deliberately intending that the law should be evaded) into the community, large numbers will simply disappear into the woodwork — and who could blame them?
Unless we are prepared to abandon one of our most treasured liberties, the right to go about our business without identity cards or dogcollars which would instantly identify our status as legal residents, there is no alternative but to insist on legal and strictly enforced entry procedures.
Of course there are many in the compassion industry who have little respect for individual human liberty. Are we, for the sake of salving a few people’s consciences, to go the whole way to a society in which everyone is a fully registered ant? The refugee flow might then be in the other direction.
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3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Boat people and the law,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, November 22, 1994, p. 16.
There was the usual amount of tut-tutting when a group of Vietnamese boat people was forcibly taken aboard a plane last week for deportation back to a refugee camp in Indonesia, and it was indeed an unpleasant business, with some of the deportees having to be tied up to overcome their resistance.
Nobody can be entirely happy about the treatment of illegal entrants to Australia claiming to be refugees, nor can their claims to compassion be lightly ignored.
Nevertheless, it has to be said that a large share of the blame for the whole problem has to rest firmly on the shoulders of the lawyers and the refugees’ rights advocates, the churches and do-gooders, who have struggled through the courts for years in an attempt to make it impossible for the Australian Government to operate an effective policy on refugees. At the same time, the bungling bureaucrats of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs have a lot to answer for also — their insensitivity to the issues and the wilful maltreatment of detained illegal entrants have served to confuse the issue totally.
This was emphasised also, last week, when the High Court handed down a unanimous judgment rejecting the Government’s appeal against a ruling by the Full Bench of the Federal Court which said that the Government was misapplying the provisions of the Migration Act on the limits of the period for which illegal immigrants could be held in custody. The act provides that boat people arriving illegally could only be held for nine months (273 days) but that periods in which their fate was in effect out of the control of the department should not be counted. This was designed to prevent delaying tactics being used on behalf of detainees so that they would have to be released into the community. But as its wont, the department stuffed it up, and claimed that even their own unnecessary bungling delays were sufficient to extend the maximum detention period, so that in effect the period became arbitrary.
The group deported last week was not connected with this particular bungle, but did involve yet another ad hoc amendment to the increasingly complex legislation which covers the boat people. They had discovered yet another loophole — they had been interned elsewhere, and had gone through the refugee vetting process there, where it was decided that they were not political refugees but “economic refugees”, and therefore had no claims under the international agreements regarding refugees. But they had discovered, or someone had advised them, that if they could make it to Australia they could go through the whole vetting process again and so engage the Australian courts for another interminable series of appeals and counter-appeals.
The Migration Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 4) was hustled through Parliament earlier this month, and immediately it was proclaimed into law last week the hapless boat people were bundled onto the plane; a desperate attempt by their lawyers to have the plane turned back failed in the courts. What this law is about is implementing the “comprehensive plan of action” for the handling of Indo-Chinese refugees, which provides that people processed according to the criteria approved by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in one country shall not be entitled to move on to another country and have another go — “forum shopping”, as the minister put it.
Despite any amount of denigration by the domestic lobbyists on behalf of the boat people of the Indonesian administrators of the Galang camp, with allegations of favourable determinations of refugee status in exchange for bribes, sex, etc, the UNHCR representative for Australia has declared himself satisfied with the processes in Indonesia. So there really was no case for any further litigation on their behalf in Australia. (Even so, three of the latest group of 17 were found to be refugees on the basis of new information.) Now what is going on here? Is there a genuine issue in which the Australian immigration authorities are at fault, or is somebody else to blame for the incredible mess of refugee detentions, appeals, extended litigation, and now even claims for compensation for wrongful detention by people who never had any legal right to be in Australia in the first place? (This is also the subject of amendments to the act.) What has to be realised is that the argument is not about political refugees as defined by law. That is, it is not about refugees as such, but about people who, unable to prove such status, nevertheless want to seek refuge for other reasons, having left their miserable conditions in their homelands. They have not gone through any process of applying for entry visas into Australia, both because it is not easy for them to do so, and because given the queues it is doubtful whether such applications would be successful. Having arrived in Australia, illegally, they claim the protection of our laws and the activities of lawyers and lobbyists here who believe that the very act of arrival entitles them to stay.
There is no legal basis, no logic, for any of this. Indeed, it seems to be something of a dialogue of the deaf. The compassion industry argues in effect that anyone who arrives on our shores in a needy state is by that fact alone justified in demanding entry and permanent residence. In other words, they argue that Australia has no moral right to protect its own borders against illegal incursions.
So they employ every means, whether lies, propaganda, moral blackmail, or appeals to compassion to try to prevent any one of these arrivals being sent back to his or her jumping-off place, whether in Indo-China or an intermediate port. There is a substantial number of high-minded lawyers who search for every quirk of our legal system in order the defeat the intentions of the Government, and the clear intentions of the law — which has often enough proved to be sufficiently sloppily drafted to allow loopholes. The industry is fed by the Policeman Plods of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, who seem unable to handle any of the issues with sensitivity and discrimination. There is, for example, absolutely no excuse for depriving the detainees of reasonable food, clothing, medical treatment, facilities and education for their children.
But to support the whole battery of priests, lawyers and other do-gooders who have engaged themselves in this issue would mean accepting the proposition that vague moral precepts are a sufficient basis for abandoning the legal basis for any immigration policy whatsoever. By all means let them put themselves at the disposal of their chosen moral exemplars — but they have no moral or legal right to demand that their judgments should negate the law and negate the right of Australian citizens to reject illegal immigration. Or will they defend the moral claims of the European invaders?
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4.
Padraic P. McGuinness,
“Laying down the law on refugee status,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, October 3, 1998, p. 35.
Immigration and race have, happily, not been central issues during the election campaign. Win or lose, this should be held to the credit of John Howard who, by taking an enormous risk with his GST proposals and pushing through his Wik amendments to the Native Title Act, defused them. The only people playing the race card have not been on Howard’s side.
But nothing will be settled in this election with respect to either of these issues; in both cases they are better treated as areas of bipartisan consensus — but there has to be a genuine consensus, not the imposition of an orthodoxy by the political elites, as has been the case over the past 15 years.
Both the major parties are in favour of immigration without any discrimination on racial grounds. Where the differences arise, they are about practicalities and covert favouritism. Thus it is sensible to devote a great deal more effort to ensuring that social tensions are not exacerbated by high rates of immigration at times of high unemployment; it is not sensible to turn immigration to political ends, as Labor has so often done. Even less acceptable is to allow ethnic lobby groups to make immigration policy.
Where, perhaps surprisingly, there has been the greatest degree of bipartisanship has been on refugees. First of all, both parties agree that in principle we should, for humanitarian reasons, accept a substantial number of refugees from civil war or ethnic persecution. More to the point, both parties agree that policy towards refugees who have been accepted after genuine displacement (as in Vietnam or former Yugoslavia) should be different from that towards those who, without permission, arrive in Australia and then claim to be refugees. These have fairly tough tests applied to them, and they are subject to detention until their status is resolved. A distinction is drawn between refugees from actual persecution and those who are unhappy about their home country and think they would be better off in Australia.
But there are those in the community who believe that anyone who turns up in Australia claiming to be a refugee is in need, and we should be open and charitable towards them. A fine principle, but not a workable one when, as it must, it becomes known and the numbers of self-styled refugees arriving without prior permit swell to huge proportions.
A new attack on the bipartisan approach to refugee policy has just been published by the Centre of Independent Studies. It is a paper by two political academics, Chandran Kukathas and William Maley, called The Last Refuge — Hard and Soft Hansonism in Contemporary Australian Politics (available at http://www.cis.org.au). They accuse the policies of Labor and Coalition governments towards illegal refugees as being a kind of racism, tantamount to “soft Hansonism”. They, along with some religious and legal lobby groups, consider that mandatory detention is unacceptable.
They have a point. It would be better if illegal immigrants were released on bail while their claims to be refugees are investigated. But the policy of detention is based on the simple reality that, once released, the illegal immigrants are likely to disappear into the woodwork. Again, the word would soon get back, especially to those who run a profitable trade in boat places, and the problem would quickly burgeon.
This is especially the case since many lawyers have argued that people who are not permitted to have more than one child under China’s population policy thereby qualify as persecuted and, therefore, legitimate refugees. The sheer irresponsibility of treating Australia as a safety valve for China’s population is mind-boggling. Of course, the majority of detainees will be Asian, for geographical reasons. It is no kind of racism or Hansonism to apply a consistent non-discriminatory policy to all illegal immigrants.
Why are the would-be refugees detained so long? (In one notorious case, more than four years.) Does the Government want to punish these people? No, the fault is with the lawyers and do-gooders who engage in interminable litigation as they try to drive holes through our immigration policy. The CIS authors complain that attempts to interfere with the judicial function of the courts so as to limit their discretion is an attack on the rule of law. They are wrong — rather, it is one aspect of the struggle for power between the judicial and executive arms of government, in which the courts have continually been conquering new territory. This itself fails to distinguish between the rule of law and the rule of lawyers.
At present, the Federal Court is clogged with cases of would-be refugees appealing against deportation decisions. Something like 40 per cent of all cases coming before the court are immigration-related, and the Government has to spend tens of millions of dollars a year fighting them. The main beneficiary is, of course, the legal profession on both sides, and the main losers are the Australian taxpayer and the detainees who are the gun fodder for the lawyers’ high principles.
If the detention of claimants is too long, it is unacceptable. If the detention is under bad conditions, the same is true. But make no mistake about it: the main fault lies with the people who would impose their own beliefs about race, immigration and population policy on the rest of the community. It has nothing to do with Hansonism of any kind.
We are entitled to decide how many immigrants we want, and to lay down at the very least the requirement that they ask first. Genuine refugees are a different matter, but no-one is helped by the ingenious attempts of lawyers to classify the rest of the world as potential refugees.
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5.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Why Amnesty has lost its way,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, April 20, 2000, p. 19.
Amnesty International is threatening to expel Philip Ruddock, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, and Minister assisting the Prime Minister for reconciliation, for wearing his membership badge when his (and the Government’s) policies do not suit the organisation. This is a declaration of partisan bias which ought to call into question the good faith of Amnesty itself. It is impossible to recall any occasion on which it has ever made this threat, at least in Australia, before.
It suggests that Amnesty, which once enjoyed widespread support and approval for its campaign to draw attention to political prisoners (hence its symbol of a candle surrounded by barbed wire) has lost its way and joined the chorus of political advocates of a particular approach to human rights which has little if anything to do with wrongful detention of “prisoners of conscience”.
While its activities in this respect are still praiseworthy, there was even from the beginning a certain selectivity in Amnesty’s concerns. Like many such organisations, it early on began to be infiltrated by those on the Left who had a kind of double vision — political prisoners in the former communist states were somehow less likely to be the centre of attention than those in apartheid South Africa, or even in democratic countries.
This political bias is the direct opposite of Amnesty’s stated aims. The selectivity of vision can be seen still in the relative neglect of the most appalling events in, say, African countries by comparison with those in respect of which it is easier to take a “progressive” condemnatory stance.
Events in Zimbabwe right now, for example, should certainly be treated as a sinister and alarming development. Malcolm Fraser, when prime minister, once embraced the murderer Mugabe and now is remarkably silent on how the state which he assisted to independence is behaving; the pretence of democracy has been long abandoned and it is destroying its own economy in a wave of racist action against its remaining white citizens. No doubt that will become yet another reason for demanding forgiveness of its international debt.
Equally, dictatorial leftist regimes elsewhere are treated as somehow less objectionable than others: Castro’s prisons are full of political prisoners and yet Cuba is still somehow singled out for praise by Amnesty members and supporters.
It seems that Amnesty’s discontent with Ruddock springs from the allegedly bad treatment of claimants to refugee status in Australia, even those who have obviously arrived illegally as part of a commercial racket. There are probably some genuine political refugees, some members of persecuted minorities, among these. Australia, under past and present governments, has taken great care to consider the claims of such people. But the view of Amnesty and the chorus of hearts-on-sleeves lawyers, priests, nuns and other such, seems to be that anyone who arrives by whatever means in Australia should immediately be treated as worth of acceptance, legal aid, and release into the general community into which they can disappear.
They have a point — we should treat even illegal immigrants, and even rapists and murderers on the run, with elementary humanity. If it is true that some of the illegal immigrants at the Woomera detention centre are being denied communication with their relatives, it is unacceptable. But if it is just a matter of being denied communication on the terms demanded with the lawyers who make a business of this kind of thing, that is a different matter. And certainly they should be fed, housed and clothed reasonably, and their children educated, until deportation. The long periods involved are usually the work of legal representatives who try to find ways around Australian law, tying up courts and bureaucrats in unending rounds of appeals and campaigns.
There is a fundamental dishonesty of approach to the refugee issue amongst the do-gooders. By no criterion do humanitarian considerations require the abolition of immigration controls. Nor do they involve constantly changing standards of control.
Consider the case of the Kosovars who came to Australia for relief from the war at the worst time in their own history. In Kosovo, as in East Timor, the actual nature and extent of their suffering and even of the war itself are being questioned — and in both cases there is an increasingly desperate search for bodies to justify the wild claims made by war correspondents at the time.
But it was an act of charity at the time of which most Australians thoroughly approved. What can we make, however, of the claims of those who came here on the explicit understanding that it was a matter of temporary refuge to become permanent residents? It is not hard to sympathise — who would not rather be in peaceful, democratic and tolerant Australia than in the turbulence of the former Yugoslav federation? (Itself, it has to be remembered, once widely admired by the Left.)
Ruddock is simply insisting on the terms of the voluntary agreement, and on the laws approved by both sides of Parliament. Yet Amnesty, instead of being honoured by the fact that a government minister of high integrity wears its badge, is trying to impose a party line. How many supporters of Amnesty are aware that the organisation feels itself able to dictate what its members must do and believe, even when they are imprisoning no-one illegally or for political or minority status, and to expel those who do not toe the line?
Clearly Amnesty, like many other advocates of human rights, has lost its way. It is bringing the enormous amount of good work it has done in the past, and continues to do, into disrepute. Perhaps Amnesty ought to examine its own conscience, and consider whether it is not in fact a prisoner of its own conscience and self-righteousness. Maybe we need an organisation to protect the targets of those whose conscience has become so arbitrary and so selective. Its symbol could be a candle hidden under a bushel of bulls—.
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6.
Padraic P. McGuinness,
“Open-door refugee policy is a recipe for destruction,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, August 30, 2001, p. 12.
Hypocrisy and sentimentality are the most significant aspects of the debate about the treatment of unauthorised arrivals claiming to be refugees, especially those arriving by boat, and they have blossomed in the case of the Norwegian ship off Christmas Island. As is all too common these days, they are disguised by protestations of humanitarianism and compassion.
Not that there are no reasons for genuine concern. In the case of the MV Tampa, the Norwegian container ship which did entirely the right thing by rescuing a boatload of “refugees”, the dilemmas of rational policy-making are all too clear. So is the bottom line.
If Indonesia will not accept that the Tampa should proceed to the container port where it was originally intended that its accidental human cargo should be taken, then Australia will have to land them, give them food, shelter and medical care, and then process them through all the expensive legal hoops and detention centres. No lesser standard of humanitarianism is acceptable in a society like ours. Even those who talk tough about extreme measures, like throwing them to the sharks are, happily, just blustering.
But the Prime Minister’s initial response was nevertheless completely correct. The captain of the ship found himself under duress from his unsought charges to change his course and proceeded instead towards Christmas Island. It seems that up to that point Indonesia was ready to accept him. That is, we are faced with an act comparable to piracy (boarding and seizure by subterfuge is hardly new), since its motive was not just survival but a preferred outcome.
Furthermore, these people had not come directly from Afghanistan (at present their claimed country of origin) but most recently from Indonesia. That is, they have already had the opportunity to claim refugee status — but instead were engaged in “destination shopping”. They should have been returned to Indonesia, but instead preferred to head for Australia in the expectation that their ultimate prospects are better here.
This is the point at which humanitarianism has to be tempered by commonsense. As Howard says, they are taking advantage of the decency which characterises Australian behaviour. If they are permitted to do this, there will be a huge incentive for the people smugglers who are profiting from this trade to bring more and more boatloads from every country in the world where the relatively wealthy — the cost of the journey eliminates any poor would-be travellers — decide they would be better off in Australia.
It is right to put pressure on the Indonesian Government. This trade is largely mediated through Indonesia, though probably as the result of local bribery rather than consent of the central authorities.
So far there is no evidence of any regional government tacitly endorsing the trade as a means of embarrassing Australia. But Indonesia is an immense archipelago, and is certainly not easily governed. The Indonesian Government at central or local levels clearly does not want to take responsibility, as agreement to receive embarkees back would involve.
Australia has a short period in which it can pressure the Indonesians with respect to this particular boatload, since sickness and other distress among them already exists, and landing at least some of them, by small boat or by helicopter, will become more and more urgent. Friday is probably the decision date, since that is when the frigate Arunta is due to arrive. Since the boatpeople have already shown that they are willing to use the threat of numbers, military or police supervision of transfer will be necessary.
Then there is the problem of accommodation of such a large number on Christmas Island, and the on-transfer to properly equipped holding centres.
It is typical of the deliberate confusion of all the issues coming from the sentimentalists that these centres are now being referred to as concentration camps. And the abuse of language has even extended to comparing the attempts to stem the flow of self-styled refugees with the maltreatment of Jews fleeing Nazism in the 1930s.
This is yet another stage in the trivialisation of the Holocaust and its use as cheap political currency in modern arguments. While there is much that is wrong with the administration of the detention centres, they are not designed for humiliation, overwork to death or elimination of a whole people.
The existence of the detention centres and the long detainment of some occupants can be sheeted home directly to the Australian legal profession and the courts. The problem can only get worse if there is no continuing effort to prevent the arrival of more and more boatloads of people who have been encouraged by the money-grubbing of people smugglers and their Australian legal allies (how many lawyers’ incomes in Australia derive from this unsavoury trade?) to think that their chances of gaining residence are good.
Then there are the sanctimonious preachers, who tell us that we should take in the poor of the world. Apart from the fact that most of the people concerned are not poor (though the Tampa people are certainly in temporary danger, which should be relieved), this is like saying to one of the comfortable moralists that they should throw open their houses to the homeless. Only when we see one of them actually doing it, will we believe them to be really sincere. No doubt their children will welcome the superior morality of their parents. Give the people on the streets your house and car keys, won’t you?
During the next 50 years the population of the world will increase by at least four billion. There is little enough hope of an Australia which looks anything like the present one surviving in any case. But it is neither moral, humane nor honest to advocate an open-door policy without admitting that that is a recipe for the destruction of our society. Fortunately, the Australian people are not fools, so neither is it politically possible.
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7.
Padraic P. McGuinness,
“Why misdirected sympathy can do more harm than good,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 10, 2002, p. 11.
Morality figures prominently in the debate about refugees, unauthorised arrivals and detention; so does compassion. Both terms have been appropriated as if by right by those who are opposed to the Federal Government’s policies — but it is not at all clear that they have got the issues or the morality right.
There is, in fact, no argument about the right of refugees as defined in the 1951 convention to arrive without authorisation and claim asylum in the first country at which they arrive. Few such people actually arrive in Australia and claim asylum. Our boat people comprise two main groups: those with a genuine claim for asylum who should, according to the convention, have sought it in the first possible country but who preferred to try to move on to Australia where they think the prospects are better; and those with no genuine claim at all but who are determined to seek a better life in Australia than they anticipated in their countries of origin. Both groups are clearly much worse off than most of us.
Clearly both groups have a claim on our compassion. That is why so many people are impatient with the distinctions drawn between their claims. But as so often in complicated matters, it may be the case that compassion (which often enough is mere sentimentality) is not enough unless it is properly directed.
What is clear is that those who avail themselves of the people smugglers are those able to mobilise considerable amounts of capital (in terms of their country of origin), are better educated than others, and have skills and motivation well above average. If we welcome and encourage such people to come to Australia, or anywhere else, are we not depriving their country of the talent and capital which are necessary if they are to improve their lot? In the case of genuine refugees there is no such conflict of interest. Their country of origin has decided it simply does not want to allow them to employ their talents freely. But economic migrants have decided that for purely selfish reasons they want to take their capital and talents elsewhere.
The real issue is whether it is either moral or compassionate for wealthy countries to encourage such transfers. Are we doing poor countries a favour when we take advantage of investments they have made in their people by creaming off the best of them? For example, when we go out to recruit nurses from poor countries (as Britain is doing on a substantial scale) the danger is that we are going to actually harm the health levels of those countries, as well as discouraging them from further training of nurses, which they only expect to lose. Equally, when Australia boasts proudly of the high proportion of skilled migrants in our migrant intake, we are really boasting about how successful we are at creaming off the talent of the Third World.
In other words, emigration is inimical to the solution of poverty in such countries. We would do better to spend more on promoting education and training in those countries.
The more compassionately we treat illegal arrivals who are purely economic migrants, the more harm we do to their countries of origin, and the more we help perpetuate the poverty at source. Rather than being compassionate to a few who are willing to bribe and lie their way into Australia, genuine compassion must involve a refusal to allow them to steal their talents and their capital from their home countries.
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8.
Padraic P. McGuinness,
“Misdirected sympathy for illegal arrivals masks Howard’s success,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 17, 2002, p. 13.
While Australia has had a good experience of immigration, moral problems remain. It is understandable that the Government should argue that we have a high overall quality of immigrants and that there is a net economic benefit (other than the dubious benefit of population growth), but when these migrants come from poor countries the benefit is all on our side. Hardly a moral position.
There is undoubtedly a moral argument that we should accept more genuine refugees, even if the overall immigration rate stays at its current level (which has been lifted by the Howard Government).
To make bona fide refugees the main component of our immigration intake would involve far more genuine compassion than the policies of the compassion peddlers; it would also be of less clear immediate economic benefit and would certainly be more costly in the short term.
One of the great achievements of the Government’s firm stance on border controls, which has in general been effective and humane (despite propaganda to the contrary), is that it has made higher immigration rates more acceptable to the community. This is why the Government has had no hesitation in lifting the targets for those who will be accepted through the proper channels. But this would create the possibility of lifting the acceptance rate of refugees (not economic migrants employing people smugglers). The community has always been open to persuasion on honest moral grounds; at the same time it is perfectly entitled to ask for some assurance that national borders and internal security are being adequately policed. When that is assured, we can afford to shift our immigration policy away from the importation of skills, which our education system ought already to be delivering adequately to our own people, towards a higher intake of refugees who can be offered education and training as well as refuge.
To achieve this transition the system of compulsory detention of unauthorised arrivals is essential. Of course it is far from perfect and ought to be improved. But it is simply not true that Woomera, for instance, is in effect a place of torture and deprivation. The testimony of those who work there, and those who have approached the issues without preconceived intentions of discrediting the system of detention, has shown that.
The troubles of Woomera derive chiefly from the fact that most of those at present detained there have had their claims to asylum properly investigated and rejected. This procedure has in many cases been prolonged because so many arrivals have deliberately destroyed any documentation which might help to confirm their claims. Discontent among the vast majority of detainees who have been rejected springs from knowing that their time and money have been wasted or stolen from them by the criminals whose services they employed in the attempt to enter and remain in Australia without permission.
The compassion and humanity of those concerned with the unauthorised non-refugee arrivals would be better directed towards improving the system of detention, especially as it affects children, rather than manufacturing propaganda against the Government or promoting cynical stunts and escapes from lawful detention.
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9.
Padraic P. McGuinness,
“Labor being dragged back to the ’60s by ideologues on high horses,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, December 10, 2002, p. 11.
Ageing baby boomers nostalgic for the excitement of the anti-Vietnam War movement see the refugee issue as a chance to relive their youth.
Carmen Lawrence is casting herself as the Jim Cairns of the contemporary Labor Party, and the Left and its children hope history will repeat itself, and a small unpopular cause will grasp the imagination of the people and allow them once again to ride to victory and a repeat of the Whitlam Government.
Well, as Karl Marx once said, great events of history occur first as tragedy and secondly as farce; and in any case their history is shaky. The Lawrence farce is significant only in that it is finally convincing even the most obtuse observers that the Labor Party has lost contact with its electoral support base. Instead, its traditional supporters are increasingly flocking to the detested John Howard, while the extreme Left is lining up with the amorphous irresponsibility of the Greens.
Lawrence’s remarks about her leader and her party when she announced her departure from the front bench made her alienation from the electorate clear. She wants the Labor Party to become once again an ideological party which will advance the causes embraced by the sanctimonious Left, regardless of the feelings of the community.
The idea is that eventually the great unwashed will come around to the correct position and will consent to be led into the glorious idealistic future. However, as the realists of the Labor Party (including Simon Crean and his shadow immigration minister, Julia Gillard, who is emerging as a tough and effective policy maker) know, this kind of party will languish in opposition until the great conversion takes place. And it never will.
The consensus to which the Government and the Opposition are converging is that undocumented and uncheckable arrivals who have asked no prior permission should be held in mandatory detention while their claims to be refugees are verified or invalidated.
The defects of this system (created, it must always be remembered, by Labor) are matters of humanity — the treatment of children in particular. Everybody agrees, and has done from the beginning, that conditions must be better.
Most people agree that whatever the numbers of refugees we accept, and we could well be more generous, an open-door policy is not acceptable. The rate of immigration by all means is to be determined by Australia, not be prospective immigrants.
The Leninist notion of leadership by an elite which purports to represent a mass base, but which takes no account of the actual feeling and preferences of that base, is alive still — both in the Labor Party and the Greens (many of whom have Stalinist backgrounds — they are “red nappy” babies).
One of their favourite slogans, “power to the people”, depends on a very narrow concept of who are the “people”, and excludes most of the community. The reality of the present day Labor Party was made clear enough in the news pictures of Lawrence’s resignation, with, lurking behind her in the background, figures such as Anthony Albanese and George Campbell, factional leaders of the NSW Left.
They, like the rest of their faction, did not have the guts to resign from shadow cabinet also, but they have made it clear that they are prepared to put factional before party loyalty at all times. Their role in the Labor Party is like that of parasites who destroy the health of their host.
They may succeed, to the extent of keeping Labor out of power so they may be pure. Crean is not strong enough to deal with the ideologues who would, as Milton put it, rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.
Howard will become the true representative of Labor’s erstwhile base. What a victory for socialism!
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Further reading for Economics.org.au readers
Padraic P. McGuinness, “A serious politician takes up cudgels against selective moralisers,” The Sydney Morning Herald, March 23, 2004, p. 11.
