Tony Abbott's address to the Institute of Public Affairs on Friday — 'The Coalition's Plan for more secure borders' — restates the well known mantra 'stop the boats'. Its simplistic announcements do not consider the serious human rights issues, nor add much to discussion in this complex area.
Abbott's solution has one potentially good idea, of increasing the program to 15,000 with some community sponsorship of refugees. The old Community Refugee Support Scheme (CRSS) of the 1980s and early 1990s was a good way of encouraging community involvement in refugee resettlement.
The speech's bad ideas include reinstating temporary protection visas (TPV), reopening Nauru, forcing back the boats where possible, and denying refugee status to those 'transiting through Indonesia who lack identity papers'. Each point needs to be considered in turn.
There is no evidence that the TPV deterred anyone. In fact, what it did was cause major stress for refugees because of enforced family separation, and made the only option for family reunion for women and children to board boats — which is what happened in 2000 and 2001.
The psychological harm was documented by mental health professionals at the time. Administratively, it caused a major backlog of cases in both Immigration and then the Refugee Review Tribunal. In the end most people on TPVs were granted permanent residence, anyway. The TPV was flawed and in my view cruel.
Nauru was also never a 'solution', but a warehousing of refugees, many of whom were later resettled in Australia because they could not be sent anywhere else. It was different to the camps established under the Comprehensive Plan of Action for the mainly Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s; under that system, there was international agreement about resettlement of cases.
Who is going to sign up to a Nauru deal for an issue which is considered 'Australia's problem'?
Turning back the boats is also highly risky because the boats could be scuttled thus endangering the lives of the refugees and naval personnel.
The final idea is even more worrying — a presumption against refugee status for boat arrivals transiting through Indonesia who lack identity papers. What will be needed to rebut such a presumption and what protections will there be to ensure there is no refoulement of a refugee?
The Refugee Convention provides in article 31 that a receiving country cannot impose penalties on people arriving without lawful authority. A presumption against refugee status because you do not have documents is an even more serious breach of the Convention.
Abbott criticises Labor for being 'more compassionate' but he need not worry about the same allegation being made against him. There are problems with the current system from a human rights and human dignity perspective, and certainly the Malaysian idea would be a major step away from these principles. However, there is little in the Opposition's policy that is better.
In fact, the term 'human rights' does not appear anywhere in Abbott's 3000 word speech. 'Illegal' appears 11 times and 'asylum' once. The failure to even acknowledge that human rights are relevant is disturbing but not surprising. The Government's own rhetoric continues to push for the flawed Malaysia solution, but this seems even less likely given the numbers it controls in the House.
In February this year, Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, gave a 3000 word speech to the Lowy Institute. He counselled against populist approaches to solving refugee movements and encouraged Governments to look at regional, not national solutions. A search of that speech found 'human rights' five times, 'asylum' 21 times and no use of 'illegal'.
The tone and style of both speeches are quite different but sadly for the refugees, the speech that will affect them is that which talks more about 'illegals' than asylum and human rights.
Kerry Murphy is a partner with the specialist immigration law firm D'Ambra Murphy Lawyers. He is a student of Arabic, former Jesuit Refugee Service coordinator, teaches at ANU and was recognised by AFR best lawyers survey as one of Australia's top immigration lawyers.