The dreadful tragedy suffered this past week by Rohingya asylum seekers trapped at sea prompted an eventual softened response from Australia’s neighbours.
But there was no change from Australia’s PM, who resolutely declared late on Thursday: ‘I'm sorry. If you want to start a new life, you come through the front door, not through the back door.’
The week’s events provide a fresh challenge to Labor to rethink its support for the Abbott Government’s Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) ‘stop the boats’ policy, which has successfully used strong-arm methods to stop boat people reaching Australia or entering Australian custody, by means that so seemingly has not involved loss of life.
The current government’s record stands in sharp contrast to that of Labor Governments between 2007 and 2013, when around 1100 people died while trying to reach Australia or Australian custody. We need to ask ourselves honestly how and why this happened, and if Labor in government could prevent it from happening again?
If, on regaining government, Labor did what most of its supporters would like it to do – instruct OSB to end its regime of aggressive, secret, internationally illegal forced returns of all asylum-seeker boats or their passengers to Indonesia, and close down the offshore detention camps now housing around 1500 men, women and children in terrible punitive conditions in Nauru and Manus, and letting those people out into the Australian community – what would be the consequences?
Clearly, the Abbott Government, for as long as it is in power, will continue to run Operation Sovereign Borders maritime operations under the present forced return protocols, and will keep everyone now in offshore detention locked up there indefinitely. The latter is a dreadful prospect which Labor must oppose vigorously.
But I would like Labor, as a first step towards fruitful public policy discussion of this issue, to be more honest about why those 1100 people died in the years of Labor in power. They only have to study the history of each awful drowning event in our adjacent waters. Those 1100 people did not die because they were sent in unsafe overcrowded boats by ruthless irresponsible people smugglers – the 97 per cent who arrived safely were sent by the same kinds of people smugglers in the same kinds of boats.
The three per cent who died, did so because Labor’s operational model for border protection and rescue of people in distress at sea, which tried to be consistent with international and Australian laws and maritime rescue best practice, broke down.
By the end, a demoralised and confused Australian border protection and maritime rescue system had lost the plot of what it was supposed to be doing out there in that 200 mile wide strip of international waters between Java and Christmas Island. Under Labor, Australia finished up with a failing model of irresolute maritime border control that encouraged people smugglers to keep sending out boats, and a failing model of second- class rescue at sea that mostly worked but sometimes broke down.
How could Labor prevent the same patterns repeating themselves? And what would Labor for Refugees want Bill Shorten and Richard Marles to advocate, as they seek government in the next election?
I don’t see how a Labor government could ever again responsibly put itself in the situation as it was in 2013 – where it could credibly be accused of running a system of second-class Australian rescue response to asylum-seeker distress atsea. I would not wish it on Labor to go back to the conflicted, irresolute policy environment it sustained in those awful three years 2011-13, when so many people drowned at sea who could have been saved if available rescue options were more swiftly and decisively exercised by Australia.
Of course, Labor must robustly call for immediate closure of the offshore detention camps and release into Australia of their inmates. But I am tending to the view that Labor should quietly live with the present operational protocols for OSB. As long as OSB goes on working, there is no need for or logic in the superfluous deterrent of offshore detention. Offshore detention should never have been initiated by Labor. It was a cruel and reckless policy. It needs now definitely to be abandoned.
Looking further ahead, Labor must commit now to working hard for regional diplomatic solutions to refugee flows like the present one out of Burma. Australia must soften its now notorious hardline policies towards boat people, if it is to have any hope of joining the ASEAN regional dialogue now getting underway on ways to help them. Labor must commit to detaining any future maritime arrivals not offshore but within Australia, and for as short a time as possible. Labor should put in place workable in-community monitoring systems. And Labor in government should let OSB get on with the job it is doing now.
Tony Kevin is author of Reluctant Rescuers. A longer version of this article is available here. Tony is indebted to the research of Marg Hutton that is available on her website sievx.com