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Commentary on: Refugees and Asylum Seekers »
Prof Andrew Jakubowicz.
Text Commentary
Refugees
Australia has provided refuge for people seeking escape from brutal or intolerant regimes since early in our European history. Whether groups of Protestants were escaping Catholic Europe, or vice versa, religious differences have often been at the heart of the reasons for refugee flight.
These religious reasons have often affected the reception that people have been given, or even if they would be accepted at all to Australia.
Refugees have been a feature of the political life of nations since time immemorial. Yet it wasn't until the 20th century that there was the first attempts made for an international scheme to protect refugees. That was by the League of Nations before the Second World War. That move failed, but in the wake of the Second World War, with the millions of people made refugee both before and after that time, the United Nations passed a convention in 1951 to protect the rights of refugees.
Over 140 nations are now signed up to that convention.
The convention defines a refugee as a person who is outside his or her own country of nationality, and has a well founded fear of persecution, because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or their political opinion, and they can't return to their country of origin because they fear persecution if they do so.
A huge refugee crisis that Australia has been involved in in the last 70 years, was the arrival in the 1930s of Jews fleeing Hitler, particularly from Germany and Austria. There was debate at the time about whether they should be accepted, and if so, what would happen. Also, the post war refugees fleeing Stalinism, and also those refugees who were the survivors of the Nazi death camps.
Later on in the 1950s and 60s came people trying to get away from Hungary and Czechoslovakia to escape the Soviet response to uprisings there.
In the 1970s, South Americans, particularly Chileans, after the US backed overthrow of the government in Chile; the East Timorese who came to Australia after the Indonesians invaded East Timor in 1975; the Vietnamese and Indo-Chinese, who fled from Indo-China after the Communist victories of 1976; and the Lebanese who fled the civil war in the 1980s.
In the last generation we've seen large numbers of refugees seeking entry from various parts of former Yugoslavia, often from a number of different sides of the battles there, and from the Middle East, from Palestine, from Iran in a long period from the late 1970s on and particularly after 1980, and Iraq, particularly after the first Gulf war in the early 1990s. Since then Australia has opened up its acceptance of refugees, from Africa, from Myanmar, and from many other societies.
So, Australia has been quite responsive to refugees, but it's also been concerned to redraft the refugee convention, to try and reduce the pressure on countries like Australia to take refugees.
And so we seem to have a curious tension between our humanitarian concern, for refugees we believe are legitimate and who follow the "rules", and our defensive intolerance to those who we think are breaking the rules, trying to get into Australia in ways we find unacceptable.
The refugee story lies at the heart of modern Australia, and the contribution that refugees of every generation have made has been central to our development.
Asylum Seekers
An asylum is a place of refuge. Asylum seekers are people who are seeking a safe place, where they can find protection form persecution and torture until they are able to return safely to their countries of origin, to their own homes.
Asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants if they declare their status on arrival in Australia and make a claim for refuge. When this is done their claim will be tested, but to make the claim is not illegal; there is nothing in Australian law which makes this an illegal act.
When asylum seekers get to Australia, they enter a process which will try and assess their circumstances, and whether they are telling the truth about what has happened to them, and whether therefore, they have the right to be deemed to be refugees, or for a period during the 1990s and up until 2007, to be given temporary protection visas - short term visas which allow them to stay in Australia and have their situations reviewed every three years.
Asylum seekers have a legal status under international law for protection, until the country where they are seeking refuge rejects their application for refugee status.
The Australian government, while accepting the refugee protocol of the United Nations for the time being, tries to ensure however that no unauthorised people actually make it to Australia to claim asylum.
It does this in a number of ways:
- It pushes people back into the sea
- It tries to disrupt the gangs that provide the leaky boats that bring people to Australia
- It intercepts people and sends them somewhere else to be processed
- It even "cuts off" bits of Australia, so that if people arrive at the islands at the edge of Australia, they aren't in an immigration zone and so they can't claim to have arrived in Australia and gain refugee status
If they do manage to get through they are immediately seized and held in detention, often in intimidating and violent camps, where they are isolated from their friends, their families and the community.
We're going to explore some of the key issues in the asylum seeker debate, including the story of the Tampa, the Norwegian ship that was pushed back to sea when it tried to land refugees on Christmas Island in 2001, and the SIEVX, a boat that disappeared on its way to Australia with a great loss of life.
The asylum seekers have become a touchstone around which debates on human rights, and Australia's position on human rights are debated. As the boats started to arrive again after 2007 and the end of the "Pacific solution" (the camps on Nauru), public opinion has again become divided on the best way to both meet our international obligations, to ensure the human rights of asylum seekers,and to calm the political rhetoric and hysteria associated with the issue.