"It's time for Beazley to act on detention", Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, Opinion, Canberra Times, 12 May 2005

 

TK Comment: I am pleased to put this important opinion piece by my friend Jerzy (George) Zubrzycki, concerning border protection and mandatory detention policy, on my website – it deserves a wider Australian readership than just in Canberra. TK 16.5.2005

 

GIVEN the continuing controversies surrounding detention of asylum-seekers and the Government's half-hearted attempt to deal with long-term detainees, it concerns me as a Labor supporter that the very principle of mandatory detention was first introduced by a Labor Government.

This issue was completely ignored, indeed zealously avoided, by the ALP during the general election of 2004. The party's 2004 platform merely echoed the "safe" stand that Kim Beazley took as leader in 2001 when he kept silent at the Government's refusal of humanitarian aid on Australian soil to a boatload of asylum seekers rescued by the Tampa and the subsequent launch of the Pacific Solution.

We all know that the infamous Operation Relex was the sequel of this inglorious "maritime incident". Still, despite Labor's obvious endorsement of the Howard Government's stand on this issue, I, and I am sure most traditional Labor voters, supported Labor in 2001 as the lesser evil of the two. We voted Labor again in 2004 hoping that one day a new leader would be found capable of addressing the issue of compulsory detention outside the arbitrarily defined and ever-extending Australian immigration zone.

The challenge to Kim Beazley today is to deal now decisively with what a recent editorial in The Canberra Times described as "the shame and the stain of Labor's pragmatic approach to the detention of asylum-seekers". Kim Beazley holds the leadership once again and it should be within his reach to move boldly and decisively regardless of any perceived short-term electoral disadvantage.

The leadership and the courage which he is now being called to demonstrate, both realistic and visionary, might stem from the events surrounding the tsunami tragedies. Australians from all walks of life have demonstrated and still demonstrate an unprecedented generosity and a sense of common humanity. It seems that despite all past appearances to the contrary, we are not an exclusionist Australia, fearful of our Muslim neighbours now suffering in our own near-north. Now must be the moment to apply the lessons of this natural disaster practically to the refugees who currently and in the future may suffer further horror from our Government's unjustly punitive treatment.

The issue before us - all Australians - is how to design a policy which is in the national interest, economically sound, more humane and consistent with international best practice (United States, Britain, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand) - all the things that our present policy is not.

In the next few decades, Australia will encounter an inevitable crisis with more genuine refugees fleeing from economic and humanitarian disasters on our doorstep in South Asia. Basically the challenge to Australia will be how to respond to massive gaps in world income resulting in economic pressure that force migrant flows out of poor areas within nation states and into international migration channels. In the past these pressures could be and were largely frustrated by artificial immigration control, but in this century substantial increases in the working population could well produce unforeseen scenarios. Gross regional over-population, leading to intolerable living conditions - usually combined with grave environmental deterioration, life threatening famine and drought - will all produce global emergencies similar to the tsunami and the recent disastrous earthquake.

There will be no scope for a self-centred Pacific Solution Mk 2 and no adequate resources for the infamous use of naval force as in Operation Relex. The seeking of refuge will not only be a matter of international peace and security but a massive challenge and call for leadership at all levels of society. Kim Beazley could be such a leader of the Labor Party and eventually the nation. Now "It's time".

It might be worth recalling that Arthur Calwell, a senior Labor politician of an earlier generation, faced a similar challenge in 1945 when Australia was at war. Yet he unveiled a major plan for a taxpayer-assisted immigration scheme on a scale which in relative terms was unprecedented in world history.

He did this knowing full well that large-scale immigration to Australia from non-English speaking countries would, at that time, be anathema to the rank and file of his own Party still smarting from the Great Depression and double-digit unemployment. And yet he proceeded with his plan undeterred by gloomy predictions of an electoral backlash or the small-town mentality of "border protection". History recalls that the Australian people rose to the occasion to embrace his brave vision.

Jerzy Zubrzycki, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University, served as adviser to several Liberal and Labor immigration ministers from 1968 to 1999 and is regarded as the architect of Australian multiculturalism