Can Someone Bring Us to Justice Over Our Treatment Of Refugees Already?

​Yesterday morning Australia's Immigration minister gave an interview to ​ABC radio. He discussed the government's most recent change to its refugee policy. Asylum seekers registered with the UN in Indonesia—including those who have been processed and found to be genuine refugees—will no longer be eligible for resettlement in Australia if that registration took place after June this year.

"Scott Morrison," the interviewer asked, "can you tell us what you're doing and why?"

"We're taking the sugar off the table."

Oof. That's got to be a low point for a government public relations team. Throughout the interview Morrison kept returning to it—"we're taking the sugar off the table"—so you know it was a sound bite he wanted to stick. Amongst the staff whose job it is to look after would-be refugees this phrase was actually discussed, toyed with, and possibly even focus-grouped. This lame and cruel phrase was their best effort.

Because what exactly is the sugar in this metaphor? Is he calling the life improving (and often life-saving) Australian visa, the one we agreed to supply when we ratified the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees in 1954, a fucking sweetener?

The purpose of the new policy is to make Indonesia an unattractive place for asylum seekers who want to get to Australia. Why? Scott Morrison explains, "Indonesia is not a refugee generating country, it's a transit country and it's used by smugglers." So what about the people that aren't trying to employ people smugglers? The interviewer asks, "Are there any exceptions post July one?"

Scott Morrison, "No."

The generous version of this position is that the world has changed since Australia ratified the refugee convention in the 1950's. That convention wasn't built to deal with people fleeing their country for a safer country, only to secure passage to yet another country. This practise is troubling because sometimes people choose perilous modes of transport, and they die.

The less generous view is that we put on airs of righteousness, and focus on the perilous mode of transport and those who seek to profit from its use (people smugglers), in order to disguise a national tendency towards xenophobia.

Proof that the second view is more accurate is our habit of calling asylum seekers on death-defying journeys, "queue jumpers." And the nasty name we apply to refugees who stop off in another country before coming to ours, "shoppers".

In the interview Morrison called them "forum shoppers" which is interesting. "Forum shopper" is an informal legal term for a person who flees for a safer jurisdiction – one where they're more likely to get favourable judgement.

It's not as though people smugglers have always been the pretext for our harsh asylum seeker policy. We may have essentially dismantled the White Australia Policy in the 60's but very recently it was smart politics for P​M John Howard to say, "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come."

Then at some point before 2007 this attitude and the Pacific solution became ugly to us. We voted in Rudd and Labor who delivered a flawed, but more liberal approach. Since that point politicians, including Rudd and Labor, have overseen severe reversals to our asylum seeker policy but have been wary of using the old justification. They've fixated on the last clause of the famous quote, "We will decide… the circumstances in which they come." And so they diminish the plight of "shoppers" and scold the evils of people smugglers.

They are particularly unkind descriptions, "shoppers" and "queue jumpers". Both labels imply that the people who've escaped persecution are leisurely considering their options, and not frantically scrambling. And neither term accurately captures the mindset of a refugee.

Personally, to flee a life where the people I love face deprivation, oppression, and a high risk of being tortured or raped for something as basic as genetics or harmless as faith, I would be willing to risk death. Taking that risk I would want to maximise the chance of my new life not being like my old life and I would be focused on the opportunities for my children. I would think about some of these​ issues and try and make my way to the richer, healthier, and more educated nation.

In 1938 at the Hotel Royal in Évian-les-Bains, an international conference was organised by US president Franklin Roosevelt to discuss the increasing number of Jewish asylum seekers fleeing Nazi persecution. Many of the would-be refugees were in transit countries, like Switzerla​nd, that made explicit they were not willing to settle them long term. Almost unanimously all countries at the conference failed to answer the call to increase their refugee quotas. Australia, in a move that might sound familiar, said it would fulfil its obligation and allow for 15,000 refugees over three years, which sounded compassionate but was cyn​ical. It constituted a lower intake than the some 5,100 refugees Australia had been taking annually leading up to the conference.

This is the kind of asylum seeker history we should keep in mind. Regardless of whether you believe it's similar to the present situation, it illustrates that when it comes to people fleeing their homes there's no such thing as a shopper, and a 'transit country' is sometimes just that.

And it's not like we need to look at history to feel shame about Australia's attitude toward asylum seekers. We need only look at the filthy c​onditions imposed on men, women, and children in our UN co​ndemned detention centres, and the current policy of paying other nations to take refugees, even if the citizens of those countries threaten them as they just did in N​auru, or they hurt and kill them as they did on Manus Islan​d. Or remember how recently we imprison​ed Tamils at sea, and sent them back into the arms of tortur​ers, or how we equated the quest of asylum seekers to escape persecution and seek a better life with sugar on a table.

If our record makes you wonder when someone is going bring us to justice over how we treat refugees, know this. There will be no punishment for our behaviour. That's not how international politics works.

Before John Howard's famous quote from 2001 there's a less remembered prelude that I've always appreciated. "It's about this nation saying to the world we are a generous open hearted people taking more refugees on a per capita basis than any nation except Canada, we have a proud record of welcoming people from 140 different nations."

It was solid speech writing, a pre-emptive answer to his critics. Granted, he may have been skewing the facts, but I believe he described Australians as we see ourselves. If we want to actually be that country we're going to have to stop the bullshit, not allow cruelty, get over our silly fears, and remember the difference between an immigrant and an asylum seeker.

Follow Girard on Twitter: @Gira​rdDorney

Image by ​Ben Thomson.