When the Australian senate failed to pass the Oakeshott bill before the parliamentary winter break, many observers were quick to lambast the Greens for opposing it.
During those emotionally charged few days, a law enabling federal government to transfer asylum seekers to third countries somehow took hold in the public imagination as the best way to keep people from drowning. The rejection of the bill was thus seen as a failure of politics or even a moral failure.
But in exposing the difficulty of crafting a morally coherent and legal response to seaborne asylum seekers, the debate probably served the issue better than the assorted catchphrases peddled by federal leaders on both sides. We may finally be grappling with the nuances of a situation that has always been complex and broad.
This is evidenced by the astonishing tear-shedding in both parliamentary houses over people drowning near our northwest coast (as if no boat had previously capsized there). It was a peculiar but important reversal in a decade that has seen asylum seekers demonised and psychologically brutalised by our policymakers.
The reversal is so palpable as to be nearly comical: asylum seekers, it turns out, are human beings to whom we have obligations. It illustrates how poorly the question of asylum has been discussed since 2001.
It was sentimental behaviour, of course, but some spark of leadership may be detected. Elected officials finally signalled to the public that such deaths are not negligible — that we must reckon with the desperation that puts people into boats. We can only hope parliamentarians will be able to hold on to their belated compassion when sitting resumes next month.
We can also hope they will return with cooler heads to consider how partnerships may be cultivated in the region to address asylum seeker movements separately from people smuggling.
The recent debate should have alerted them to this distinction. There is no sense in discussing offshore processing without a multilateral framework in place that disentangles the right to asylum from people smuggling. By now our legislators should already be educated on the nature of this right: it is not negotiable, deferrable, or conditional on the circumstances in which it is claimed.
Asylum, not deterrence, should always have been the starting point for discussion about boat arrivals. This is why the problem-solution approach ultimately fails: the wrong problems keep being identified. If anything good is to come out of the debate over the Oakeshott bill, it would be the shedding of an insular mindset that fixates on border control, people smuggling, and deaths at sea as problems requiring domestic legislation.
The real question — and the deeper problem to which all these issues may be traced — is how to respond to hundreds of thousands of people in our region needing long-term solutions to their displacement.
It is a complex challenge that must be treated as such. A Lowy Institute analysis in 2010 pointed to a comprehensive approach, including 'capacity-building in origin and transit states; engagement with international efforts to address root causes in primary origin countries ... and building partnerships including through consultation with civil society within the state and cooperation with other states in the region'.
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, a civil society organisation in Australia with considerable grassroots experience and expertise, has made a submission to the expert panel convened by Prime Minister Gillard in the wake of the Oakeshott bill.
The submission includes emergency measures such as the immediate resettlement of a combined 5000 assessed and approved refugees in Indonesia and Malaysia, and increasing our refugee intake to 25,000, with a significant portion to be taken from within the region.
It also sets out long term measures: pursuing a regional refugee protection framework underpinned by the Refugee Convention; supporting reforms in countries in the region including granting legal status to refugees and asylum seekers, affording right of stay, work permission, and protection against arrest, detention and deportation; establishing a formal multi-party parliamentary committee to begin 'the process of de- politicisation of the issue'; increasing funding to the UNHCR and regional neighbours to build capacity for human rights protection; and formally instituting community processing as an alternative to detention centres.
These are patently challenging pursuits because they introduce variables beyond our control, such as the pace and cost of reforms in the region. But there have always been variables beyond our control, including but not limited to the dire conditions that compel people to leave their homeland in the first place.
It is time for Australia to lead on this issue instead of working from behind through ad hoc bilateral agreements like the Malaysia solution. It is also time to let go of the idea that we can somehow turn the tide of humanity. In a world where humanitarian space is shrinking, we cannot long deny our part when 15.4 million refugees need to be resettled, when violent conflicts continue to simmer.
It is complicated business and approaching it as such will test our national maturity. When parliament resumes — aptly, the spring sitting — we will see who is ready to grow and who will remain stunted.
Fatima Measham is a Melbourne-based writer, and tweeter.