My Say - North Edition
Australia’s Cynical Policy
Islands Open Doors to Refugees for Oz Cash
Australia’s efforts to discourage, divert, delay and dilute the sea-borne flow its way of illegal immigrants from Asia by dumping some in the Pacific Islands is not an edifying spectacle.
By early November it had succeeded in unloading about 800 at Nauru and about 300 at Manus, unlike Nauru a large, verdant, luxuriant but also isolated island north of the Papua New Guinea mainland.
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Kiribati was of offering to take 500 at the very isolated and stark atoll of Canton.
The Fiji cabinet was in a quandary over whether to accept a thousand, or even more, with the former leper hospital island of Makogai being mentioned as a possible location. The Fiji president Ratu Josefa Iloilo, said no to the plan.
Nauru and Papua New Guinea were already having trouble with its guests, people Australia swears within a year will either have been admitted by it as acceptable immigrants or sent back home — mainly Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.
But as human rights protection vigilantes were stressing, United Nations law on refugees, which is what the boat people claim to be, and which Australia disputes, declares that refugees must not be returned to places at the risk of persecution by the regimes they claim to be escaping from. If they are refugees, what will happen to those rejected as being unfit for a legal lifestyle in Australia?
Australia’s motives in deflecting the real difficulties it has about people it doesn’t want to have called refugees are understandable, but also partly suspect.
The present Prime Minister, John Howard, previously exhibiting little interest in the micro nations floating North East of Sydney, was felt by Australian commentators to be cynically using the refugee issue as one for getting re-elected in November. Keeping Afghans and others out was of great political appeal to the majority of the electorate being courted by him.
The rival Australian Labor Party was attacking Howard’s stand and professing sympathy for the would-be arrivals. What would the ALP policy have been had it been in power and, like Howard, unsure of surviving the election?
If Howard remains Prime Minister will his policy towards the refugees become more liberal? Wait and see. Whatever happens, it is quite likely that those Pacific Islands accepting what they have been promised is “temporary” presence will eventually regret their decision.
Impecunious Nauru plainly opened its door for the money. Papua New Guinea did so probably out of a sense of obligation to Australia, a vital source of aid. Kiribati’s motive is probably a mix of hopes for economic and political gain, including a catalyst for the development of lightly inhabited but very remote Canton.
In Fiji, commentators give little credence to the government’s denial that any decision to assist would be spurred by Australia’s lifting in October of aid and other sanctions imposed after the May 2000 coup, by other economic considerations, like garment quotas.
New Zealand and the European Union are refusing to lift sanctions before a court decision next February about an opposition constitutional challenge to the legality of the new government’s cabinet.
The Howard government’s move in using the Pacific Islands as an escape hatch has been roundly condemned jointly by the Pacific Conference of Church and numerous other concerned organizations.
The Australians, proclaim the churches, are flouting moral and legal principles and possibly endowing the islands with long-term difficulties they are ill equipped to deal with.
Yes, Pacific Island critics of the arrival in Nauru and Manus and soon who knows where else themselves exhibit more than a trace of hypocrisy in slating Australia. The Australians insist that the unwelcome streams of people heading their way are economic refugees, not political ones. They are people intent on escaping the destitution of their homelands and are really ruthless queue-jumpers.
As for economic refugees: Isn’t this a category that can be applied to the tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders who in search of greater economic opportunity for themselves have settled in Australia, New Zealand and the United States? Many live there illegally as permit overstayers. Another economic refugee is quietly becoming established in the Pacific Islands.
Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Nauru have in recent years acquired substantial numbers of settlers from mainland China. Does anybody in Fiji really know how many are illegally in Fiji? Some police officers say thousands more than officially admitted.
Tonga has a problem with them. Also PNG and perhaps now Vanuatu. As for Australia’s dilemma, given the present way of the world it is one that will not soon fade away.
Contact Robert Keith-Reid at rkeith-reid@ibi.com.
