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The ‘Pacific Solution’ is no solution

ASAP Statement - May 15, 2003

[The following statement was issued by ASAP on May 15, in response to the Australian government's new federal budget and its provisions
for the so-called Pacific Solution.]

The recent federal government budget indicates that the Howard government is persisting with its misnamed Pacific Solution.

Pressuring Pacific Island nations to take asylum seekers has been described innocuously by Australian government ministers as"burden-sharing"– a convenient regional solution to a regional problem. However Australia is better equipped – economically and socially – to assist refugees compared to its relatively impoverished Pacific neighbours.

The government claims that the Pacific Solution is working. Yet, it has had to bribe and cajole Nauru and PNG to take the Tampa refugees and others since then. The Australian government asked the UN administration in East Timor, Fiji, Kiribati, Palau and Tuvalu to take asylumseekers, but was refused. (The Australian government offered PNG around $20 million to take 220 asylum seekers in September andfollowed it up with an October request to take another 1000.)

Max Lane, Action in Solidarity with the Asia Pacific (ASAP) chairperson, condemned the government's double standard: "Australia cannotaccept refugees arriving on its shores but it appears Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Nauru, Kirabati and even Tuvalu must. Of course, if the Australian government really valued these neighbours of ours, it would not be insisting on and bribing them to do things that it is not prepared to do."

"The reality is that none of the rich countries want to solve this problem", said Lane bitterly. "No rich country takes more than they can avoid. Putting more and more refugees into prison camps on the Pacific Islands is ... telling those countries to take them permanently. Even after the [UN High Commission for Refugees] declares them refugees, many will not find countries that will take them."

Last year some $500 million was estimated to have been allocated to the Pacific Solution. This year, some $3 billion has been devoted by the government to "border protection" – keeping out the miserable few thousand people who manage to make it to Australia’s shores.

Of this money, a third will be devoted to building and maintaining a new 1200-bed refugee prison on Christmas Island (a non-territory for the purposes of the Australian Immigration Act). Nauru is set to receive an 197% increase in its aid budget and some $116 million will be devoted to processing refugees in Pacific Island countries.

Despite being at the front line of the navy’s war on boat people, the 1500-strong population of Christmas Island has remained consistently critical of the Australian government’s actions.

At the height of the Tampa stand-off, several hundred people staged a demonstration demanding that the refugees be allowed to land on the island and have their claims for refugee status processed.

There is resentment at the militarisation of the island which harks back to the island’s colonial past. In 1987 the Hawke Labor government attempted to depopulate the island so that the Australian military could use it as a base in the south-east Asian region.

"The Australian government is not only contemptuous of its Pacific and south-east Asian neighbours’ sovereignty by trying to buy it on the cheap. Howard also shows no concern for the huge problems that intense social contradictions and economic crisis pose for societies that are poverty-stricken, often as a result of economic policies imposed from outside", said Lane.

He also believes an alternate, better solution would be relatively easy to achieve, though certainly unpalatable to an anti-refugee Howard government.

"It is summed up in two words, once fundamental to Australian immigration policy: assisted passage. Fly the refugees to Australia and help them settle. As for the refugees already in Australia, close the detention centres and help them settle. Help rather than hinder.

"The populations of the five smallest states of the Pacific combined would only half-fill Sydney's Olympic Stadium. The islands they live on would fit inside the Sydney metropolitan area. Their economies are highly dependent on the rich countries and are in permanent crisis. Yet the Australian government continues to mount the argument that these tiny Third World nations should ‘do their bit’ to help ease the global refugee problem, as if Australia is already doing its bit.

"Australia's responsibility is to offer an open door to the populations of all Pacific islands. As Nauru becomes uninhabitable, as Tuvalu sinks
beneath the waves, the Australian government is morally compelled to offer the islands' populations refuge in this country.

"The Pacific solution should be scrapped, Australia’s intake of refugees - especially from the Middle East - should be immediately increased, substantially undercutting the people smugglers' trade, and those asylum seekers still in Indonesia should be brought to Australia. The voices calling for such an approach are growing louder."

ASAP has also criticised the Australian government’s offer to return asylum seekers to Afghanistan with a cash incentive as inhumane. The plan has been overwhelmingly rejected by detainees, as well by many human rights organisations, which have pointed out that most are from the minority Hazara ethnic and religious group, which has faced persecution over many decades, and not just under the Taliban.

Fahim Fayazi, spokesperson for a newly formed association of temporary protection visa-holders, has commented that in the ethnic cleansing which took place in 1991 in Afghanistan, some 60% of the Hazara ethnic minority were killed or fled. He said that Hazaras returning to Afghanistan were likely to face similar persecution. At least 200 of the Woomera detainees are Hazara, and many are in Australia on Temporary Protection Visas.