NO ONE comes away with clean hands from debates about asylum seeker policy in Australia. Those who advocate to push asylum seekers away from our shores condemn those people to potentially life-threatening fates in other countries. Those who take a hands-off approach to arrivals are accepting that trauma and sometimes death at sea will be the inevitable outcomes. It is a least-worst-option scenario that leaves the moral high ground well beyond anyone's reach.
The debate our politicians lead us into in Australia is not about the lack of resettlement places available for the world's refugees, nor is it about the diabolical environments people often find themselves in when they flee their homelands. Instead we engage in a political debate from which honest reflection and long-term strategies for assisting other human beings are largely excluded. It is the debate we pretend to have so that we don't actually have to engage in any genuine debate at all.
Both major parties treat the public as a prize to be won by whichever best manipulates public perception. Both have positions riddled with contradictions and untruths. Realpolitik is now the only game in town, and ethical or ideological considerations are simply a nuisance, especially when trying to deport little kiddies to Malaysia.
Labor won office in 2007 promising to bring truth and decency back to a policy area long tarnished by the demonising of innocent people and by the harsh attitudes of those creating the policies. But when the boat arrivals increased, Labor lost its nerve, and its knee-jerk, politically motivated responses have since been painfully similar to its predecessors.
On the opposition side the dialogue is mostly nonsensical. Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison condemns the government for sending people to inhumane conditions in Malaysia, but his party did the same when it was in government. In 2006, the Howard government's unsuccessful attempts to negotiate the forced return of Burmese asylum seekers to Malaysia from Nauru led to pressure being placed on the men to return under a voluntary agreement, and without any concern for the conditions they would face. Would a Coalition government still send asylum seekers to Malaysia from Nauru? Has anyone asked?
Morrison is currently not saying that he wouldn't send children to Malaysia, only that it is problematic to make exceptions. And when he says that if children were sent to Nauru he would know where they were ''every single hour of every single day every minute of the day'', this is because they would be locked up behind fences.
And how is it that the Coalition can talk up Nauru as a more humane option than Malaysia but still claim that it would stop the boats? And isn't the Coalition planning to push back boats containing children before they even set foot on Christmas Island? But why even try to make sense when no one seems to care if you don't?
The truth is that there is little difference between the policies of both major parties, and the substance of the so-called public debate we endlessly engage in is filled largely with speculation and assumptions that have been repeated enough times to sound like they might be facts. And on it goes.
One of the arguments we commonly hear is that refugees on boats are taking the places of others without the money to travel. But being able to find or borrow the money for a boat journey does not make one person less deserving or less traumatised than another, and Australia's decision to withdraw resettlement places based on boat or plane arrivals is the consequence of our priorities, not theirs.
The human comparisons we should be making are between those of us with a sense of exclusive entitlement to a safe and secure life and those we turn away to a precarious existence ''somewhere else''. In the company of other wealthy countries, we are the ones who are denying places to the world's most vulnerable.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees currently has only 80,000 resettlement places to work with each year but estimates are that the number of refugees in need of resettlement over the next three to five years will be 780,000. The head of UNHCR's resettlement service, Wei-Meng Lim-Kabaa, said last month: ''If states do not come forward with more places, almost 100,000 vulnerable refugees in need of resettlement will remain without any solution this year. It is of paramount importance to understand that these people have no alternative solution and failure to resettle them means these people remain in an agonising limbo.''
As executive director of Oxfam Australia Andrew Hewett said recently: ''We need to start talking about how effective, well-targeted resources can be used to build consistent standards of treatment and rights for asylum seekers and refugees across our region.''
The uncomfortable truth is that second only to the perpetrators of violence causing people to leave their homelands, we are the problem that needs solving. We are the ones leaving people stranded for years in hostile and dangerous environments. We are choosing to fund short-term fixes to relieve our anxiety instead of focusing on long-term strategies that will result in a more level playing field and less need for dangerous boat journeys.
It is our behaviour as a wealthy Western country that needs to change and no one can walk away clean while we avoid facing the human consequences that have resulted from our unspoken inaction.
Susan Metcalfe is the author of The Pacific Solution (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2010).
Email a friend