Early this week a boat carrying suspected asylum seekers from Vietnam was spotted off the coast of Western Australia. We no longer know where it is or what is the fate of the people on board.
West Australian Premier Colin Barnett was happy to tell reporters that “the West Australian police is looking after that situation until the Commonwealth naval vessel arrives, so the situation is in order.” He added further that “this boat, while it’s approaching our coast, it’s well offshore and it’s under surveillance.”
But since then, nothing. Once the navy became involved and the responsibility turned over to the Commonwealth government there has only been obfuscation.
The Prime Minister told reporters that “we do not comment on operational matters on the water.” He didn’t even acknowledge that there was a boat. Similarly, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Peter Dutton, refused to respond to the assertion from Sky News host, Peter van Onselen that “there’s been a boat, it’s been spotted” other than to say, “we said we don’t comment in relation to operational matters.”
Thus it is interesting that this week Bill Shorten placed great store in going on numerous television shows and explaining that he now supports turning back the boats.
While it is yet to be debated at the ALP’s national conference, Bill Shorten effectively would like the ALP’s policy to be one that the government refuses to say it even does.
Asylum seeker policy in this country – as in many others – is always the home of despair. It involves politicians laying on thick their care for the welfare of people.
Joe Hockey for example, when the issue of the “Malaysia solution” was being debated, stood in parliament and said of sending asylum seekers to Nauru or Manus Island that he “opposed it until the moment [John Howard] assured me that at all times Australians would be able to supervise the people who were sent there, that they would be protected, that they would have health care and education support—until he could assure me that those most vulnerable would be protected.”
Hockey concluded that, “I rest easy on this because I can be entirely consistent with what beats within my soul.”
So, it is with some degree of surprise that not more is being made by people like Joe Hockey, or other members of the government who voted against sending asylum seekers to Malaysia because they were worried about their welfare, of the evidence being presented this week to the Senate committee on the management and operation of the Nauru Regional Processing Centre.
The committee heard that Transfield Services, which operates the Nauru facility, had received 67 allegation of abuse, 30 involving children. Among the other revelations are that the detainees live in tents that are fit for that purpose, an unexploded WWII bomb was found underneath the school tent, children were running out of clothes, that it “took months” to requisition 120 pairs of shoes, and that women detainees had to go to ask a male guard for sanitary pads and would be given “only two at a time, from the guard station.”
There were also allegations made by a social worker that Wilson Security officers would “trade sexual favours for access to longer showers or marijuana or cigarettes or indeed some of the other incidents of organised viewing of sexual activities” and that those working at the centre would talk about these things “in a social setting.”
None of this should be surprising. Whenever you try to put a problem out of sight so it will be out of voters’ minds such things occur.
They occurred when asylum seekers were held in the Baxter Detention Centre, and that was on the mainland. Sending asylum seekers out of the Australian jurisdiction was never going to improve affairs – especially when there was a profit to be made at the same time.
The days of the ALP trying to take a higher road on asylum seekers is long gone. They were the ones who brought back the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres and were the ones who decreed that no asylum seekers coming by boat would ever be settled in Australia.
Moving to turning back the boats is thus such a little jump it hardly seems worth the trouble fighting to resist it. The battle was lost long ago.
But congratulations to the victors.
The Labor right can now convince themselves that they've got a red hot chance to win back the seat of Lindsay, and in a some years time - maybe decades - when the parliament offers a national apology to asylum seekers, they’ll have a front row seat to that as well.
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