Australian Federal Election: The day after

[samaranth]

I ...
They didn't check what the initials spelled out? Where are the marketing people for these parties?

There were rather too many of them, being rather too clever. Mind you, over the life of the campaign it became 'Real Action Plan', then 'Action Plan', then just 'Action'. Everyone kind of ran out of oomph by the end.

Currently (and depending on which news source you read) Labor has 73 seats, Liberal 72, there are 4 'other' and one last one in doubt. That is the seat which had hitherto been thought of as Ken Wyatt's. It's still likely to go his way (Liberal), but it's not actually confirmed.

I went back to check the vote numbers mentioned above. The 600K+ figure was mentioned in coverage on Saturday night, and it's not clear what the breakdown is between donkey and informal votes. It is inordinately high either way, and no doubt will be looked into by the Electoral Commission at some stage.

[Inanna]

very interesting, thanks Sam and Prim... (speedos!!)

[axordil]

no doubt will be looked into by the Electoral Commission at some stage

I would say it's the downside of mandatory voting. You can make people show at the polls, but that's not the same as making them buy into an imperfect process (which is the definition of politics, really).

In the US people still occasionally write in Mickey Mouse for office as a way of indicating their displeasure with the proffered candidates in a race.

[Túrin Turambar]

So are the Greens going to have the seats to play kingmaker?

I’ve been MIA for a while (I didn’t even find out about the result of the election for two days, as I was in Utah without internet access) but I can now provide an update.

The current composition of the Parliament is Labor 72, Coalition 73, Greens 1, and Independents 4. The new Green MP for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, will support Labor. Similarly, one of the independents, newly-elected Andrew Wilkie in Dension, is a former Greens candidate and has also announced his support for Labor. That gives Labor 74 seats, still two short of a majority.

Somewhat eccentric North Queenslander, Kennedy MP Bob Katter, has released a list of policies he wants in exchange for his support. They’re mostly in favour of rural and regional interests, for example, he wants monetary policy directed at reducing the value of the Australian dollar by about half to make exports like wheat and wool more competitive. It seems highly unlikely that either party will play ball with him, although he could probably be expected to support the Coalition if pushed (although he’s been clear that it isn’t a certainty). The other two independents, Bob Oakeshott in Lyne and Tony Windsor in New England, seem to be playing their cards close to their chest.

In the end, though, I think that Labour stands a slightly better chance of forming a Government than the Coalition. They need two of the three undeclared independents, while the Coalition needs all three. That’s probably to the Coalition’s advantage, in fact. They have the momentum working towards them. Six months ago everyone had written them off, and they’d be considered lucky not to lose any seats. For them to actually overtake Labor would have been a result beyond the wildest dreams of all but their most ardent supporters, and governments rarely survive being forced into a minority. No matter what, the Government is crippled. If there was another election soon, the Coalition would be the favourites to win.

As far as the technicalities go, the Parliament must meet. No new election can be called otherwise. The vote to elect the Speaker of the House of Representatives will be the key.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

Looks like my Lib Dems are done for. *Sigh*

[Túrin Turambar]

Looks like my Lib Dems are done for. *Sigh*

Turns out that they picked up a 0.1% swing, but yes, they have a fair way to go. I voted for them in the Senate, though.

At the moment we’re waiting with bated breath for the decision of the three independents, due any hour now. In the meantime, the results have become pretty clear. I didn’t notice it too much at the time, but this has been a really peculiar election.

The Greens have definitely made a breakthrough. They’ve won Melbourne, the first time a minor party has won a House of Representatives seat in a general election. They’ve pulled into second place in Grayndler and Batman, ahead of the Liberals, and seem to have won a Senate seat in every state for the first time. They won almost 12% of the vote on a swing of almost 4%.

There’s a few interesting MPs who apparently won’t be returning for the new Parliament. Steve ‘Fiskal’ Fielding, Family First Senator for Victoria, has been narrowly defeated (why he was only narrowly defeated I’m not sure – my only theory is that the voters of Victoria find him entertaining). There’s about a dozen little stories I could tell about him, but I’ll settle with this one. He kept talking for ages about ‘physical’ policy, and no-one knew what he meant. In the end a journalist figured out that he meant ‘fiscal’, and asked him for clarification. “Yes, fiscal” Fielding replied. “F-I-S-K-A-L”. Plus there was the appalling strip-tease act in the middle of Melbourne in broad daylight.

His seat has gone to Democratic Labor Party candidate John Madigan. The DLP is more or less the political wing of the Catholic right. The Labor Party has traditionally been far more Catholic than Protestant (and visa-versa for the conservative parties), but in the 1950s a number of more right-wing ALP MPs left the party claiming it was insufficiently opposed to Communism. They formed the DLP, which collapsed in the 70s but has since risen from the dead. These days, though, they talk more about abortion than communism.

In the House, Liberal Wilson ‘Iron Bar’ Tuckey has lost his rural Western Australian seat of O’Connor to the National Party. The Nats have lost a few rural seats to their coalition partners of late, so they’ve managed to get one back (although they only won it on a redistribution). Tuckey held the seat for over twenty-five years, and is remembered for once beating a man with a piece of steel cable, earning himself his assault conviction and his nickname. He is well-known for being the arch nemesis of former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who referred to him in Parliamentary debates as a ‘useless nong’, a ‘piece of criminal garbage’ and ‘what would you know, you boxhead, you’re flat-out counting past ten’.

And in my own state, James ‘End Times’ Bigood has failed to hold the North Queensland seat of Dawson, which he won in 2004. The seat was National Party heartland held by a National Party Minister, and Labor wasn’t considered to have a chance. As such, they didn’t bother to pay too much attention to whom they nominated as a candidate, and when Bigood put up his hand, he got onto the ballot without too much trouble. Against all expectations he won, and when he got to Canberra began embarrassing the government by talking about the apocalypse and the end of the world and such things. Queensland, and North Queensland in particular, is known for politicians with idiosyncratic views.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

On the Australia front an interesting development.

Tea Party comes to Australia

An anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party has set up shop in Australia, inspired by the US-based movement that has turned the Republican Party upside down.

The Australian T.E.A. Party (an acronym for Taxed Enough Already) will be targeting pre-selections across the country and heavily promotes its links to "our friends" in the United States.

Reluctant spokesman David Goodridge - "just call me the website editor" - says the grassroots movement has no plans to register as a political party, won’t stand candidates and won’t accept politicians as members.

[Túrin Turambar]

Not hugely significant, but the Australian dollar briefly hit parity with the Greenback for the first time ever since it was floated in 1983.

Shame it didn't do this two months ago when I was actually in the U.S...

[Túrin Turambar]

Some random Australian updates:

Federal Labor has two big problems – the State Labor Governments of New South Wales and Queensland. Both states swung savagely against the Government in the recent Federal election, nearly costing them office (they were saved by Victoria).

The Government in New South Wales has become something of a running joke. It has recently reached previously unheard-of low levels of support in opinion polls. The most recent one had the government behind the opposition 62-38, NSW Labor’s worst showing since 1904 and the lowest ever seen for a sitting Labor Government Federally or in any State in Australia. The thirteen (IIRC) minister who have been forced to resign for various types of misconduct have probably had a lot to do with that. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but mine would probably be the Police Minister, who had to resign after four days in the job when he danced on a table in his underwear to techno music in a ‘sexually provocative fashion’ while making explicit remarks to female MPs. The goes to the polls in March next year.

Across the Tweed the situation is a little better, but the hopes of progressives have, if possible, been dashed ever more. The Sunshine State is well-known for its conservatism, but the elevation of Anna Bligh to the Premiership in 2007 was hailed by many on the left as a sign of a new Queensland. They stopped cheering once the government (along with its counterpart in New South Wales) began privatising the state’s infrastructure. Then, as I’ve already spoken about, they revived a Victorian-era law to prosecute a young couple for having an abortion. Now the Premier and Treasurer have apparently sold the Port of Brisbane to themselves. I give up.

The ultimate beneficiary of all this have been the Greens. Following the 2007 Federal Election, their support has risen sharply. They are now within striking distance of forcing Labor into a coalition in Tasmania, their strongest state, have won a seat (Melbourne) in the Federal House of Representatives, are expected to perform very strongly in inner-city Melbourne in the upcoming state election in Victoria, and can have high hopes for New South Wales and Queensland given the flight of progressives from Labor in those states. And as of July next year, they will hold the balance of power in the Senate.

[Túrin Turambar]

Up to fifty asylum-seekers are feared drowned after their unseaworthy boat foundered on the rocky shores of Christmas Island. 44 people were rescued by the Australian Navy, customs officers and the islanders themselves, but over a hundred may have originally been on the boat.

This particular incident is, sadly, nothing new. In October 2001, a 20-metre (60-ft) wooden fishing boat carrying 421 asylum-seekers attempted to make a dash from Indonesia to Australia. It sank in a storm in international waters with the loss of 353 lives.

Asylum seekers and border security are perennial issues in Australian politics that never go away. They’ve popped up again and again for as long as I’ve been following current affairs. It is, after all, illegal to simply turn up to Australia in a boat and land without a visa or any authoritsation by the government. The debate is a long and complex one. Basically, the Gillard Government’s political opponents on the right suggest that the tragedy is the result of soft border protection policies. They argue that tough measures are needed to deter both asylum seekers and the people-smugglers whom they pay to take them to Australia. And it is true that the number of people arriving by boat has jumped since the Howard Government’s ‘Pacific Solution’ was scrapped in 2008.

The entire issue is also one of deep contention between the Labor Government and progressives. Labor introduced mandatory detention laws when in government in 1994, and has broadly stuck with them since. Under Australian law, anyone in Australia without a valid visa must be detained (there’s exceptions for people overstaying tourist visas). As such, people who arrive in Australia seeking political asylum are detained while their claims are processed. Likewise, people in the community found to be in breach of immigration laws are also arrested and detained while their situation is resolved one way or the other. Controversially, this policy includes children, and the sight of children behind barbed wire is one of the more disturbing images of Australia’s immigration policy. Progressives argue for more compassionate laws for asylum-seekers, including allowing them to live in the community while their claims are processed. Supporters of tough border protection laws say that will open a floodgate of illegal arrivals, compromise Australia’s border security, and result in more disasters like the one we saw this week. And so far every new boat seems to harden the public resolve.

Although most of the boats are Indonesian and depart from Indonesia manned by Indonesians, the asylum seekers themselves are usually Iraqi, Iranian, Sri Lankan or Afghan. And while, under international law, anyone can claim asylum in any country, I have to be suspicious of people who travel through half a dozen other countries in order to seek asylum specifically in Australia. The worst part of the whole sorry business, though, is the lies that people smugglers and others tell these people, including claims that they will be given houses and farms when they reach Australia. Instead, those that survive the crossing face months or years of imprisonment in detention centres.

Still, as uneasy as the whole thing makes me, I have trouble seeing an alternative. Most of the people who land in Australia are genuine refugees, but I have no idea what sort of increase in arrivals that softer border protection policies would bring. So far we’ve managed to avoid the divisive issues that simple illegal immigration has created in the U.S. and Europe. It’s probably more due to the simple difficulty of reaching Australia, but who knows what role tough policies on unauthorised entrants have played?

Anyway, that’s my musing for today. It’s obviously a parochial issue that has little interest outside Australia (and many people would probably misunderstand it if they did hear of it) but I like to keep this thread updated now and again.

[nerdanel]

My two very unpolished cents: I've long believed that Australia is not in compliance with its Refugee Convention obligations. As a side note, you guys HAVE to stop the detention of child asylum seekers and other child immigrants. Yesterday. (The UK is also wrestling with that issue right now, btw.) More broadly, there has been a disturbing trend amongst western(ized) nations over the past 15-20 years: to profess strong substantive compliance with their Convention obligations, whilst making it nearly impossible procedurally to bring a claim.

I think that Australia is one of the worst offenders because of particularly egregious interception and detention policies, but I'm not sure other countries lag far behind. The United States has done its bit with the shameful addition of procedural bars and removal of much non-constitutional judicial review, via our Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (un-lovingly known as IIRIRA) and the REAL ID Act of 2005. Although I'm just starting to research this now, I'm discovering that the UK is not so far behind both with respect to the procedural bars and the deprivation of judicial review. The United States, Canada, and the nations of the European Union have all done much to hinder refugees from bringing claims via the addition of "safe third country" agreements. These agreements were created for the very reason you profess - "suspicion" of people who do not seek asylum in the first theoretically "safe" country away from the persecution that they are fleeing. As you can guess, the agreements return refugees to the "safe" country that they first entered to seek asylum (usually only if that "safe" country is also a signatory to the same agreement). The reasoning literally seems to be - how genuine could your fear be as a refugee if you are "cherry-picking" your asylum forum? This ignores the realities of the lives of many refugees.

To apply for asylum at all, you're one of the lucky ones, no matter what you've gone through. Since you have to be within the borders of the host nation to apply (part of the reason for Australia's elaborate off-shore detention policies), this means you had the resources to pay someone - often a smuggler - to get you to that country. Many genuine refugees have heartbreaking tales to tell about using their entire (family's) life savings for this purpose. Some economic migrants masquerading as refugees have less sympathetic stories, of course. Often, the smugglers will not give the refugees any choice of country. The smugglers may not be able to, because their networks will only extend to particular countries. This means that a refugee may arrive to a first "safe" country in which they are ill-equipped to live. For instance, in a high-profile mid-1990s case, we in the US granted asylum to a west African woman who fled to the US by way of Germany. Her mother and sister had given their life savings to the smuggler, whose agreements were only with German passport control officers. When she got to the US, our Board of Immigration Appeals accepted her narrative that she spoke English but not German. She had been unable to support herself in Germany and had been living on the kindness of a complete stranger (as she documented). She also had cousins in the US who were able to help her a bit, including using THEIR life savings to pay for an attorney for her. She was otherwise genuinely fleeing persecution in her country of origin. The bottom line: if our countries are to welcome refugees at all, it makes sense for them to go to the country where they can most easily integrate - where they can speak the language, where they have relatives who can support them until they get on their feet, etc. This behavior should be encouraged rather than viewed with suspicion. Asylum seekers with no language fluency and no family members are far more likely to become a drain on the public purse, if granted relief.

Another issue with the safe third country concept is that even though we're all bound by the same Convention, we interpret it differently. But, in general, a refugee is only allowed one bite at the apple - that is, if Australia refuses their claim, they won't generally be able to come to the US and try again. (This is becoming particularly true in Europe as immigration becomes more centralized on the Continent, and authorities are able to verify whether multiple asylum attempts have occurred.) So it becomes important for refugees to make their first application in a country that will recognize the harm that they are fleeing as persecution. For instance, Canada has recognized as refugees women who are fleeing severe domestic violence, so long as the government of their home country is unwilling or unable to protect them for reasons relating to the "role" or "status" of (married) women in society. The United States has a very spotty track record on these claims, although we are getting better. So for years, it was common for immigration attorneys in the United States to recommend that such women, if possible, attempt to go to Canada and pursue their claims there - for the simple, perfectly valid reason that they were likely to find protection in Canada that was unavailable to them in the US. (As nefarious motives go for changing countries, that's just not one of them.) Unfortunately, post-9/11, under the guise of "border security," Canada and the US concluded a safe third country agreement, so Canada now returns these women (and all other asylum seekers who first came to the US) back to the US. All the more incentive for us to get our darn caselaw in order. My point: if an asylum seeker travels from a country that will not recognize her claim to refugee status to one that will, this should not be seen as undermining the legitimacy of her "well-founded fear of persecution" (the Convention standard for protection).

This is way more than I had intended to write, but I wanted to note that asylum seekers are not a divisive issue in the US. Economic migrants are a divisive issue. Any of my fellow Americans here are welcome to correct me, but it is *incredibly* rare for asylum seekers specifically to get much news coverage at all. And when they do, it's often positive - people who flee to the US for a better life, and who are covered by our immigration laws such that they can do so legally, are by and large welcomed by most Americans. In fact, multiple immigration hardliners have said to me, in discussing successful asylum seekers, "See, these are the immigrants I have no problem with - they're complying with our laws!" So I don't think, based on our experience, that you're correct that Australia's very-problematic asylum detention and interception policies can be justified because general illegal immigration is controversial in the US. I also note that asylum seekers are not necessarily illegal immigrants, although they sometimes can be. It is perfectly legal to present yourself at an entry-point into a country and demand asylum. Other asylum seekers enter legally on a non-immigrant visa and apply for asylum as their visas are expiring - also a perfectly legal thing to do.

You're right that asylum seekers specifically are a much more controversial issue in Europe. I don't have much insight as to why that's the case in mainland Europe yet. As for the UK, I think it's for a couple of reasons. The UK usually gets more asylum applicants on an annual basis than any other country. Part of this is because Commonwealth asylum seekers apparently see the UK as their best bet; some of my southern African classmates tell me that they were raised with this mentality - "If things get bad enough, the UK is where we need to go." It may also be because the UK has certain very generous policies towards asylum seekers, including providing them with housing and health care at the public expense, as well as a small living stipend. From having read accounts of UK asylum seekers living in such housing, I wouldn't want to oversell it. It's minimal. But it's still more than we do in the U.S. And I think this is part of why asylum is not as "politically expensive" for us to provide in the US. We get fewer asylum seekers than the UK. We give them few public benefits while their applications are being processed (if their applications are delayed for more than six months, we give them a work permit and tell them to go support themselves...) We also detain some of them (but not usually children, AFAIK). We grant asylum in a politically expressive format (more usually when we want to express condemnation of the practices of the state of origin than otherwise). Lastly, we're fairly good - though imperfect - at removing failed asylum seekers. I'm not really praising these actions of the US - I don't agree with many of them, as I'm completely a bleeding-heart liberal on this issue - but they have allowed asylum to be a less politically charged issue here than elsewhere.

Anyway, I'm sorry that I haven't focused as much on Australia in this post. It's hard to discuss only one country when it comes to Refugee Convention issues, because the Convention IS a function of international law, and it's most fun to compare the countries' implementation of their Convention obligations. But I recently spent a day reading about Swedish and Australian policies on detention of asylum seekers, so I can come back and post specifically about that later.

[Túrin Turambar]

My two very unpolished cents: I've long believed that Australia is not in compliance with its Refugee Convention obligations. As a side note, you guys HAVE to stop the detention of child asylum seekers and other child immigrants. Yesterday.

As I said above, as distasteful and distressing as I find the situation, I see no practical alternative. If they are not detained, then they are living in the community. And as children can’t live alone, the affect would be to allow their parents to avoid immigration detention as well. The upshot of it all would be that setting foot on Australian soil with a dependent child in tow and claiming asylum would be an automatic ticket to living and working in Australia. Which would not only create far more business for people smugglers and compromise our own ability to determine our immigration policy, but would lead to far, far more disasters like the recent one on Christmas Island. And having asylum-seekers living in the general community would make it far more difficult to remove them if their claims are found to be invalid.

That said, I think that the slowness of the processing is shameful. I can tolerate having children in detention, but not for years. The current government has made some noises about having a ‘regional processing centre’, which I think is a good idea. There was talk of putting it in East Timor and having an ‘East Timorese Solution’, which might work, but I suspect it would need to be in Java where most of the departures are from.

To apply for asylum at all, you're one of the lucky ones, no matter what you've gone through. Since you have to be within the borders of the host nation to apply (part of the reason for Australia's elaborate off-shore detention policies), this means you had the resources to pay someone - often a smuggler - to get you to that country. Many genuine refugees have heartbreaking tales to tell about using their entire (family's) life savings for this purpose. Some economic migrants masquerading as refugees have less sympathetic stories, of course. Often, the smugglers will not give the refugees any choice of country. The smugglers may not be able to, because their networks will only extend to particular countries. This means that a refugee may arrive to a first "safe" country in which they are ill-equipped to live. For instance, in a high-profile mid-1990s case, we in the US granted asylum to a west African woman who fled to the US by way of Germany. Her mother and sister had given their life savings to the smuggler, whose agreements were only with German passport control officers. When she got to the US, our Board of Immigration Appeals accepted her narrative that she spoke English but not German. She had been unable to support herself in Germany and had been living on the kindness of a complete stranger (as she documented). She also had cousins in the US who were able to help her a bit, including using THEIR life savings to pay for an attorney for her. She was otherwise genuinely fleeing persecution in her country of origin. The bottom line: if our countries are to welcome refugees at all, it makes sense for them to go to the country where they can most easily integrate - where they can speak the language, where they have relatives who can support them until they get on their feet, etc. This behavior should be encouraged rather than viewed with suspicion. Asylum seekers with no language fluency and no family members are far more likely to become a drain on the public purse, if granted relief.

All true, and 90% of our asylum-seekers arrive by air under circumstances like these. But reaching Australia by any other means is difficult, and you really need to go out of your way to do it. As far as I know, people-smugglers only disembark from Indonesia, so any Iranian or Iraqi who gets onto an Australia-bound boat has passed through multiple countries and travelled thousands of miles.

My concern is that the letter of the law (that someone may present themselves at a country and apply for asylum) is trumping its intention (that persecuted and displaced persons should have a refuge). That’s why I’m far more sympathetic to local asylum-seekers like West Papuan dissidents than to those who have apparently picked Australia as a destination to immigrate to from halfway around the world and decided to make it happen through non-conventional means.

This is way more than I had intended to write, but I wanted to note that asylum seekers are not a divisive issue in the US. Economic migrants are a divisive issue.

I wasn’t referring to asylum-seekers, but to the political difficulty surrounding having a large undocumented population of economic migrants. My concern is that lax border protection could see a similar thing in Australia, although obviously a long voyage in a fishing boat and a weeks-long walk to anywhere is much harder than jumping a fence. People-smugglers do not see the complex legal distinctions that we do, and I believe that tough policies are needed to deter them and their potential clients.

My other concern is, of course, that many people do apply for asylum in Australia from refugee camps overseas, and having people simply show up in boats complicates things. That’s the origin of the ‘queue jumpers’ complaint I often hear. That’s part of what I like about the regional processing centre – any arrivals by boat could simply be transported back there.

[River]

As far as I know, people-smugglers only disembark from Indonesia, so any Iranian or Iraqi who gets onto an Australia-bound boat has passed through multiple countries and travelled thousands of miles.

There're a lot of Third World between Iran or Iraq and Australia. Are any of those countries going to be safer for the refugees than Australia? Could the refugees expect any form of integration and comfort there? Any hope of a new start? If you can pay the smuggler, why run to what could just be another hell when you can go to Australia?

[Túrin Turambar]

Timely article in The Australian on why I (and any other people) have issues with the current state of affairs:

Jumping asylum queue pays off

HUSSEIN knows about 100 people who have taken their chances on smugglers' fishing boats in the past two years.
In that time he has relocated to Puncak from another refugee program in Lombok.

All made it safely, as far as he knows. None was caught in the SIEV 221 horror last week. Hardly anyone he knows would be discouraged if they had already decided to go. One of those who went is Hussein's cousin, Ahmad, some are friends, most were just recent acquaintances: "I meet them in the market, it's good to talk to other Arabs, and they say in two days they will go to the boats; it's like hello-goodbye."

Hussein (whose real name has been withheld so not to further diminish his visa prospects) came from Baghdad where he worked as a video news cameraman.

He said he was threatened too often in the course of his work and, apparently, there was also a blood feud between his family and another. He arrived in Jakarta in early 2007 with a proper passport, about $US1000 and the intention of getting to Australia, but through the front door. "We have a saying that if one man knocks on the door and the other answers, both should be happy. I didn't want to sneak in like a thief.

"I say to the others 'you shouldn't go on the boats' and they say 'you are stupid to be staying here'." On his bad days, the 33-year-old thinks his transitory friends must be right. They can get from Baghdad to Christmas Island in four or five weeks by paying $5000 to $7000 per head, half-fare for children, and up to $2000 extra for those needing a passport.

But after almost four years in the UN High Commissioner for Refugee system, Hussein has moved no further than from Lombok to Puncak, a traffic-choked straggle of markets, shabby hotels, high-end resorts and mosques along 25km of the main road from Jakarta into the rain-drenched mountains.

Here the Office of International Migration and an inter-church agency supervise a constantly churning population of UN-registered refugees and asylum-seekers.

They live among the locals rather than inside one of the country's 13 overcrowded migration detention centres run by corrupt managers.

Their nationalities are in roughly the same proportions as those in the boat traffic: mainly Afghans, Sri Lankans, Iranians and Iraqis.

Puncak serves as a base for dozens of traffickers, and is a gathering point for their clients to be transported to fishing boats waiting at jumping-off points along Java's south-facing coastline.

The smugglers' agents recruit among the discouraged and dismayed waiting in the refugee queues.

They have good cause for dismay about their prospects, especially relative to the boat travellers.

To illustrate: Hussein's chance of getting an Australian visa by applying last year from UNHCR's Indonesian queue was nominally one in 11 - about 70 places offered among 798 registered refugees, with a further 1773 asylum-seekers trying for refugee certification.

This year, about 100 Australian places have been offered and the queue is only a little longer, but the odds against Hussein's visa have lengthened.

Eight months ago, he says, an Australian official told him that subject to health and security assessments, he should have a determination within six months. The silence since tells against his chances.

However, the odds were dramatically more favourable, seven chances in 10, when cousin Ahmad arrived on Christmas Island late last year, though without refugee status and very much unwelcomed by the Australian government.

Roughly 70 per cent of boat arrivals in the past decade have been granted refugee status and allowed Australian residency.

Hussein says when Ahmad phoned him recently he was already out of detention, living in Sydney and working as a men's hairdresser.

As the odds predicted, Ahmad jumped the queue and was rewarded by the system.

Hussein stayed in his place and fell further behind.

There couldn't be a better advertisement for the traffickers' service.

Or the mess that Australian refugee policy has now got itself into, with the niggardly distribution of visas in Indonesia - 550 between 2001 and last year - overwhelmed by this year's surge of more than 6230 boatpeople.

For the first time this year, boat-borne asylum-seekers in Australia will outnumber those coming by aircraft.

But whereas only about 20 per cent of aircraft arrivals are accepted as refugees, the success rate for boatpeople is 70 per cent or greater.

And when they succeed, asylum-seekers occupy places in the overall humanitarian intake - currently 13,750 annually - that might have been taken by other displaced and victimised people, usually poorer and often more downtrodden.

When Julia Gillard and her ministers talk about "smashing the people-smugglers' business model", they neglect to acknowledge that these perverse consequences of Australia's current system are the key to the traffickers' success.

"The current approach massively disadvantages the people who are playing by the rules, firstly, and, secondly, those who don't have finances to be as mobile as the asylum-seekers," says Mirko Bagaric, a Deakin University law professor who spent five years as a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal.

Writing in The Australian this week, Mr Bagaric argued that boatpeople benefited unfairly at the expense of other refugees because of an undue reverence in legal and political human rights circles for the outdated asylum provisions of the 1951 Convention Relating to the State of Refugees.

However, he said yesterday, modern asylum-seekers claim preferential treatment "by having the temerity to force themselves on us, though you can't blame them for that . . . and having sufficient money to be mobile enough to do so".

Now, however, Mr Bagaric warns, boat arrivals are in such volumes that they threaten to overwhelm the country's whole refugee process.

In August, the UNCHR's Jakarta representative, Manuel Jordao, disclosed to the ABC's 4 Corners a secret Australian promise to lift refugee resettlement to 500 places a year.

As with many other politically sensitive aspects of this problem, Canberra refuses to verify. However, the pace appears to be lifting, with refugee circles buzzing this week with reports of 70 visas to be issued in Jakarta for resettlement in February.

But where will they all fit, together with Australia's other refugee obligations, within the current humanitarian quota, if boat arrivals continue to grow beyond control?

"By the end of next year, at the current rate of increase, all 13,750 places will be filled by people who have forced themselves on us," says Mr Bagaric. "The whole quota will be filled by people who have self-selected."

He has proposed a dramatic solution: more than doubling the offshore refugee intake to 30,000 annually while at same time permanently refusing refugee status "to any person who arrives on our shores unannounced".

People-smugglers are currently succeeding, Mr Bagaric says, because their clients have the will and financial wherewithal to impose themselves on Australia's refugee system ahead of all the other claimants.

"Fine, but that's not the basis for enhanced moral concern or preferential treatment - in other areas of life, the fact that one person is more pushy than the others shouldn't qualify them for better treatment."

link

While taking the boat trip is a far better prospect for getting a visa to Australia than applying from a foriegn country like Indonesia, then people smugglers will make money and people will die at sea in large numbers.

[nerdanel]

L_M: I've not forgotten about this thread; it just deserves a more substantial response than I've been able to give it. For now, I'll just say that I REALLY have a problem with the idea that someone who arrives on Australia's shores seeking asylum is "pushy," seeking "preferential treatment," or demanding "enhanced moral concern." That conception defeats the entire import of the Refugee Convention. Mr Bagaric, of course, professes no regard for the Refugee Convention.

Of course, he would be right to question some aspects of the Convention system - the prioritizing of victims of certain forms of civil and political persecution. But I don't sense that he has any interest in broadening Convention status in order to serve the more-downtrodden as well, from his language such as "force themselves upon us."

Assuredly the traffickers need to be stopped. But I don't suspect that folks like Bagaric are either going to contribute constructively to that problem -- or to the need for the international community to provide nonrefoulement protection to victims of persecution.

[Túrin Turambar]

At the moment national focus is on the severe flooding in Queensland. Large parts of the state, including the city of Brisbane itself, are flood-prone, and floods are traditionally our most-feared natural disaster. Coming into the tropical wet season, rainfall for December in parts of central Queensland have been high as six times the monthly average. The figures are astounding – an area the size of France has been flooded, 38 towns and shires have been declared natural disaster areas, and upwards of 200,000 people have been affected. The situation is not likely to improve, and evacuations are continuing.

It is fortunate that the floods haven’t hit the heavily-populated South-East of the state, and so far the Wivenhoe Dam is holding back the Brisbane River (even though it’s at 122% of capacity and all five of its spillways are open). It was built for such a purpose after Brisbane was severely flooded in 1974 when the river burst its banks.

[Impenitent]

Yes, L_M, the weather has been all over the shop in Oz this year. So much rain, and the floods in NSW late last year and now in Qld. There will be economic consequences, of course, as well as the human suffering.

[Túrin Turambar]

I read this article in the paper last week, and it ties into our current discussion of Australia’s border security and some other issues that I’ve been interested in for a while. It’s fairly long, but here’s an excerpt:

Up north, there's another boatpeople issue

INSIDE STORY: Michael McKenna

FROM his dingy, overcrowded cell in Port Moresby's Boroko prison, Jonathan Baure is already plotting his next assault on Australia's border.

It has been 10 days since he stood on the shore of Daru Island, along the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea, to see off 16 dinghies, carrying 119 PNG nationals - including 13 children - headed across the Torres Strait to reclaim their "birth right" of Australian citizenship.

Baure, a former tile salesman, had planned and openly promoted the voyage for weeks.

There was no shortage of willing passengers.

Despite November's cholera outbreak on Daru, which killed 32 people, more than 400 supporters from all over the country flooded the island, paying Baure to join the unwieldy flotilla of banana boats.

Leader of an emerging group of "Australian Papuans", Baure has for a decade waged a losing battle with Canberra to recognise that people from the former Australian territory of Papua were not given the choice to remain Australian when PNG gained independence in 1975.

Two High Court cases have been lost in Australia over the issue, and Baure unsuccessfully launched his own case in PNG, which was thrown out in 2009.

Several months ago, Baure and his group, which claims to have 700 registered members, decided to take the fight to the Australian mainland. "I was born in Papua in 1967, before independence, and like many others, my birth certificate is stamped 'Australian'," Baure tells The Weekend Australian after his arrest on fraud and immigration charges this week. "Nobody has listened to us, so our plan was to go to Australia, get arrested, raise awareness of the issue and have our cases heard in the courts like the asylum-seekers. We knew they couldn't stop us."

He was right.

On December 22, as the boats were about to leave, Australian and PNG customs and immigration officials rushed to Daru, alerted by the influx of people who had emptied the local shops of diesel and other supplies.

One Australian official from the high commission in Port Moresby pleaded with Baure and his supporters, warning they would be flown back to Daru without seeing the inside of a courtroom and the boats - the source of income for scores of families - confiscated.

Undeterred, Baure, who stayed behind to "handle the media", and the authorities then watched as the packed boats disappeared over the horizon. Within hours, the vulnerability of Australia's northern borders was exposed again.

Last year, Torres Strait councils told a Senate inquiry PNG nationals were pouring onto the islands to live, flouting immigration laws, running drugs and overwhelming health services in the region.

Long story short, the Papuans were apprehended when they made landfall on Cape York, and have been flown back to PNG at a cost of some half a million dollars.

The Australian is playing this story on a border security angle, hence the rather dramatic choice of the term ‘assault’ in the by-line. It also blurs the distinction between asylum-seekers and economic migrants, something which is typical of commentary on boat people in the Australian media.

I can see how it’s fairly easy to enter Australia via the Torres Strait Islands. In the Western Province of PNG, you have Papuans living in villages on subsistence agriculture. And six kilometres away on Boigu Island, you have Torres Strait Islanders, closely related to mainland Papuans, living in a village on subsistence agriculture. But the Boigu Islanders are Australians. Australia, specifically the state of Queensland, retained sovereignty over the Torres Strait Islands, and the Torres Strait Islanders are considered, along with the Aborigines, to be indigenous Australians. Technically they’re a separate people and are referred to as such in an official context – eg. ATSIC, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. They also have their own flag. And given the remoteness of the region, the close kinship between the TSIs and mainland Papuans and the closeness of the islands to both PNG and Cape York, I can see how border control in the area is an issue. The islands basically form a chain of stepping-stones from PNG to the mainland, and a canoe could easily make the crossing in stages.


The bigger issue, though, is Australia’s broader relationship with its former colony. PNG was administered by Australia from 1919 until 1975. And while Australian administration wasn’t harsh or exploitative, Papuans have little to show from being de jure Australians for fifty years. And since then, Australia has given aid to Port Moresby but otherwise we pay little attention to the country and many others in our region. That, I think, is a major failing of Australian foreign policy.

It’s an interesting issue in itself to consider what responsibility a country has towards its former colonies. Or, indeed, what it could practically do for them. What, for example, could Belgium do for the DRC?

PNG’s ruggedness and tribal divisions have made the spread of technology and central government very slow. The Highlands were only reached by white people in the 1930s, and even today many tribes in the interior continue to wage traditional warfare and pay no heed to the country’s national government. Still, I have to wonder whether some sort of small-scale Marshall Plan couldn’t promote development, economic growth, healthcare and education in the southern coastal areas at least, and maybe these things would eventually make their way slowly into the interior. I might be on a flight of fantasy, but I can’t help but imagine PNG as a growing economy, a trading partner, an ally, a market for Australian goods, and a source for tourists to visit Australia and students to study at Australian Universities. Ditto with East Timor, although it’s a different case altogether.

Regardless, I think that we should stop pretending to be a significant player on the world stage and focus our efforts closer to home.

[Impenitent]

Regardless, I think that we should stop pretending to be a significant player on the world stage and focus our efforts closer to home.

Agreed. We have so much to gain (and so much to give) from fostering the ties in our region, but we have traditionally been so Euro-centric from back in the day when England and the Continent were the seats of world power, it seems we can't shake the habit. Just like many other nations, we are attracted to the powerhouses, deluding ourselves that it will somehow rub off on us, I think.

[Inanna]

Very interesting - as usual, I had no idea of the relationship between Australia and PNG.