Australia’s first piece of legislation, sign of the times and its lack of assuredness, was the Immigration Restriction Act. From the Commonwealth’s birth, it was clear that some people would be welcome, and others not. Such a divide was made clear with racist bellicosity in the masthead of The Bulletin: ‘Australia for the White Man.’
While Australia has developed into a multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan state based on immigration and humanitarian intakes, the country has never gotten away from the sense that some are simply more welcome than others. Be they migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, preferential treatment abounds.
Historically, the attitude was exemplified by the infamous position taken by Australia at the Evian Conference in 1938, held to consider the international Jewish refugee crisis caused by the policies of Nazi Germany. Canberra’s delegate, one Thomas W. White showed no willingness to open the doors to persecuted, stateless Jews: ‘as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration’.
Even the advent of the Holocaust did not soften the heart of Australian authorities. Between 1947 and 1950, Australia, took in 170,000 displaced persons (DPs), funded by both Canberra and the United Nations. Strikingly, Jews were largely excluded. Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell, facing a hostile press accusing him of favouring Jews over Anglo-Celts, went out of his way to prohibit the International Refugee Organization (IRO) from supporting the migration to Australia, based on family reunion, of individual Jewish survivors.
An explicit example of preferential treatment in refugee intake — both here and in Europe — is presented by the Ukraine refugee crisis. The Russian attack on Ukraine risks precipitating a refugee crisis even greater than that from the Syrian Civil War. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that up to four million may leave, while the European Union adds a further three million to the figure.
Reports of generosity in Europe are frequent. But even here, instances of selective treatment can be found. Those of African, Indian and Middle Eastern background, many of them students, have faced rather different treatment at the Polish-Ukrainian border — if and when they have gotten there. The number of accounts of obstructions and violence both within Ukraine and at the border, are growing.
'In Australia, being good to Ukrainians even as Canberra maintains an indefinite detention regime for other refugees, is now fashionable.'
This is hardly surprising given the hostile campaign waged by the Poland’s governing party against arrivals from the Middle East. In 2021, the Minister of the Interior Mariusz Kaminski, and the National Defence Minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, went so far as to suggest that irregular arrivals from the Middle East were immoral types tending towards bestiality. To make their point, a grainy video of dubious provenance was shown to the press.
Countries across Europe have deployed a heavy-handed, policing approach at their borders to asylum seekers from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Batons, tear-gas, stun grenades, and attack dogs have featured. Anti-refugee vigilantes hunt for vulnerable quarry along the borders of Bulgaria and Hungary. Steel and concrete walls have been and are being built.
This contrast was pointed out by migration and asylum specialist Michela Pugliese earlier this month. ‘While European countries welcome Ukrainian refugees and provide them with official and safe transit routes, seven asylum seekers of non-European ethnicity died yesterday as their boat sank in the Mediterranean off the coast of Greece.’
This did not strike the Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov as odd. The Ukrainians were ‘intelligent’ and ‘educated people’. They did not constitute the ‘refugee wave we have been used to’, individuals with uncertain identities, ‘unclear pasts [and] who could have been even terrorists.’
In recent years, Australia has proven to be no exception, sorting the appropriate and the approved from the supposedly maladjusted. In 2015, under pressure to receive a larger intake of Syrian refugees and increase that year’s humanitarian intake, the Abbott government made its position clear: Christians would be prioritised. At the time, certain Coalition backbenchers reminded the Prime Minister that there should be, ‘No more Muslim men.’ Christians, argued Senate Leader Eric Abetz with little context, ‘are the most persecuted group in the world, especially in the Middle East’.
In 2018, then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton suggested that white South African farmers allegedly facing ‘persecution’ by an expropriating majority black government should be placed ahead of the queue of admissions. They were the ‘sorts of migrants that we want to bring into our country’, had an excellent work ethic and demonstrated a keenness to ‘contribute to a country like Australia.’
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is now taking a leaf out of the Dutton manual, ‘fast-tracking’ Ukrainian refugee applications. This is despite his government presiding, in the words of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC), over ‘the dismantling of Australia’s refugee intake, leaving Australia unable to adequately respond to emergencies’, with 2022 ‘marking the lowest refugee intake in nearly 50 years.’ The pandemic did not help matters, but COVID-19 had little to do with the initial decline in refugee places. Australia’s refugee intake cap was lowered from 18,750 persons in 2018-2019 to 13,750 in 2020-2021.
Abbott, in an echo of his 2015 policy towards Syrian Christians, has also urged the prioritisation of Ukrainian applications. But in an interesting riposte, the conservative Australian Christian Lobby has disagreed, arguing that preferencing Ukrainian refugees made an awful statement ‘to those fleeing the horrors of the Taliban in Afghanistan’. In the views of ACL’s national director of politics, Wendy Francis, ‘We don’t need a pile. We can continue to offer shelter to those fleeing the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, as well as processing visa applications swiftly from Ukrainian citizens.’
The structure of international refugee and humanitarian law is intentionally universal, non-punitive and non-discriminatory. There is nothing in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention to suggest otherwise. But international law leaves it to States as to how best to implement such principles. In its implementation, they have chosen to circumvent the right to asylum and discriminate and penalise groups while favouring others. In Australia, being good to Ukrainians even as Canberra maintains an indefinite detention regime for other refugees, is now fashionable. It is, after all, an election year.
Dr Binoy Kampmark is a former Commonwealth Scholar who lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Main image: People who fled the war in Ukraine walk towards a humanitarian train to relocate refugees to Berlin on March 15, 2022 in Krakow, Poland. (Omar Marques / Getty Images)