Pacific gulag

excellent smh editorial:

When is Australia not Australia? When Papuans want to
land on it. The Howard Government is planning yet
another contortion of the immigration laws and refugee
treaties.

It's no longer enough to excise outlying islands and
reefs from Australia, now we must excise Australia
from Australia. Any asylum seekers who lob anywhere in
Australia will be treated as outside Australia's
migration zone and put behind barbed wire, probably on
the baking, mineral-stripped plateau of Nauru, now too
destitute to afford even a telephone service.

And all this to save Australia the embarrassment of
embarrassing the Indonesians.

The Immigration
Minister, Amanda Vanstone, makes it clear this
exercise in nastiness is to prevent future asylum
seekers from Papua using Australia as a "staging point
of protest". That is, to prevent them putting their
case to any audience other than immigration officers
assessing their application. Senator Vanstone also
seems to think there's something wrong and suspect
about Australia becoming a country of first asylum.
That's for countries a long way from Australia, she
implies. However, Australia's territory is a
relatively easy canoe journey across waters that have
been traversed by local peoples for centuries, and,
moreover, in Papua there are widespread and continuing
human rights abuses, as well as a strong separatist
cause. If more seek to follow the 43 who landed on
Cape York in January - 42 have so far been assessed as
having well-founded fears of persecution if they
return - it will be because of the actions of
Indonesian authorities in Papua.

Senator Vanstone also tries to convince us the
"Pacific solution" provides a quicker, more fair
hearing of asylum claims. People with a "legitimate"
claim would find it easier to win an Australian
protection visa because the process is shorter
offshore, she says. This is disingenuous: it's shorter
because asylum-seekers outside Australia's
jurisdiction are denied the appeals available inside
the country. Claims are not always immediately clear,
and interviews are subjective. By removing reviews and
appeals, the Government seriously weakens our
adherence to treaty obligations to assess asylum
claims thoroughly, as well as making harsh confinement
and isolation the first experience of our system.

At least the Government seems to have dropped its
earlier notion of asking the Indonesians what they
think, and identifying applicants to them. But it
still plans joint patrols in the Torres Strait to head
off further arrivals. What will be the rules of
engagement for our armed forces and civilian agencies?
If boatloads of people are turned back, or into the
custody of Indonesian authorities, what will happen to
them?

The original "Pacific solution" may have helped police
forces stop people-smuggling but it also caused a lot
of suffering and trauma. Most of those shipped off to
Nauru and Manus Island were eventually assessed to be
refugees. Australia was soon at war with two of the
regimes involved, and may yet go along with a war
against the third. The policy's revival looks even
more dodgy and repugnant, and the Government deserves
its excoriation by church and legal figures. It should
be dropped.