Seeking a solution

February 1, 2012

Weekend West, Page: 29
By Paul Murray
Saturday, 28 January 2012


nfortunately for everyone involved, the debate over asylum seekers in Australia doesn’t show any signs of getting more sensible. The political parties all have entrenched positions: Labor won’t budge from its unprincipled Malaysia Solution, the coalition can’t see past Nauru and the Greens think everyone who wants to come here from the other side of the world is a bona fide refugee in need of a big hug.

And there’s little sign that the media is prepared to look beyond any of the old rhetoric to the seeds of the problem.

Last weekend, veteran Canberra journalist Paul Kelly wrote a report based on an interview with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott which has sparked another round of the repetitive debate.

Kelly chose to lead his report with a line saying that Mr Abbott as prime minister would instruct the navy to turn around asylum seeker boats at sea, a practice which has been part of Liberal policy since the early days of the Howard government.

In fact, the Liberals say it was done successfully on at least seven occasions and the navy owns up to three.

A week full of sound and fury over an old coalition policy’s merits wilfully ignored the real message in Kelly’s story "If elected prime minister, the first nation Mr Abbott will visit is Indonesia," Kelly wrote. "He will go as a committed friend, but tell Jakarta that Australia will no longer passively accept the arrival of asylum-seeker boats from that country "This is a radical policy departure that has far-reaching and unpredictable consequences for Australia-Indonesia relations.

"In recent talks with his colleagues on this issue, Mr Abbott has said: This is a test of wills and Australia has lost. What counts is what the Australian Government does, not what it says. It is time for Australia to adopt turning the boats as its core policy’." Now, it beggars belief that no one in the press gallery recognised the core of Mr Abbott’s argument.

The key to it is the line about a test of wills. He’s not referring to the will of the asylum seekers. It’s Indonesia’s.

The threat to turn the boats was not an invitation for another turgid debate about safety at sea.

It is a semaphore for telling the Indonesian Government that Australia believes it is directly responsible for our problem with asylum seekers.

Turning the boats around is nothing more than turning the issue of border control back on to Indonesia.

Unspoken in the Kelly story was the reality that Indonesia’s borders are totally porous to anyone on the way to Australia via the illegal people smuggling networks.

Whatever diplomacy the Gillard Government has undertaken on why the Indonesians allow thousands of people from just a small number of target countries through their immigration system has been a failure.

If Indonesia was interested in being a good neighbour to Australia in return for the many billions of dollars we pour into the country in foreign aid, it would be demanding to know the intentions of all arrivals at its border holding documentation from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

Does anyone honestly think that Indonesia would receive big numbers of visitors from those countries in the normal course of events?

Indonesian law says that of that group, which makes up the bulk of asylum seekers bound for Australia, only arrivals from Iran are entitled to a 30-day tourist visa issued in Indonesia. But they are also required to have onward or return tickets.

Passport holders from all four countries are eligible to apply outside Indonesia for cultural and business visas which run from two to three months, but they ostensibly come with a range of strict conditions such as requiring in-country sponsors, evidence of sufficient funds and obligatory return tickets home.

Obviously none of this is being required at the border for those people who are intending to make their way to Australia to claim asylum. And the evidence that many of them remain in Indonesia for long periods while waiting for a boat suggests that a blind eye is not only being turned at the immigration desk.

Argy-bargy over whether the navy wants to turn back boats or the Government’s dodgy Nauru costings has taken precedence this week over the real live issue of Indonesia’s regional responsibilities.

The key to Mr Abbott’s new approach lies in the fact that Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees and has no refugee laws of its own.

That means it has no responsibility to accept anyone claiming asylum at its borders and is completely at liberty to put any suspicious arrivals back on the next plane to their departure point.

And that’s exactly what we should insist Indonesia does.