Hardly a day goes by in this country without having a reference in the news in relation to asylum seekers or illegal migrants, as the boat people who land on our shores or disappear drowning in the middle of the oceans are referred to.
The most probable government of Australia after the elections, the Liberal National Party Coalition, and their allies have successfully managed so far to define the issue only in terms of national security, public order, public health and public expenses. After all, these arguments were effectively tested electorally, in favour of the Coalition parties, as recently as the 2001 federal election campaign.
You might recall the Tampa affair in August that year where a Norwegian ship carrying 438 rescued refugees was boarded by Australian special forces and the Children Overboard affair, the political controversy involving public allegations by government ministers a few weeks before the election, that seafaring asylum seekers had thrown children overboard in a presumed ploy to secure rescue and passage to Australia. These events did turn the tide around for the then Coalition government and led to its re-election with an increased majority.
The opposition leader Tony Abbott is already on public record saying (without using specifics) that during his first term in government he will stop people from entering Australia illegally. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will visit Indonesia next week where the major issue of discussion will be the asylum seekers. The anti-asylum seekers feel the need to run almost a daily campaign telling us that more than 40,000 boat people have come to this country under Labor.
Lonely voices from people such as the former Liberal Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser, who try to remind us that it’s about time to start telling some truths in relation to this issue, hardly get any mention in the public arena. The truths, according to Malcolm Fraser, are that Australia is not the only country in the world, as presented or as implied in the dominant public discourse, that is the focus of asylum seekers or smugglers. This is a worldwide phenomenon and other (relatively) wealthy and democratic countries of the world are much more sought after.
It is estimated that Britain has approximately 800,000 illegal migrants, the USA has anywhere between 7 to 20 million non-documented border crossers, South Africa has approximately 5 million, and the International Organisation for Migration based in Geneva estimates that approximately 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the total migrant population, that is approximately 25 to 30 million people worldwide, are undocumented migrants.
Greek Australians might also be aware that the influx of boat people in Australia is far less than the influx of boat people or border crossers in Greece, where more than 1 million entered the country during the last twenty years.
The issue of asylum seekers cannot become and must not become only an election issue. Or if it does become an election issue, then the full extent of the nature of the problem must be stated. As long as there is conflict, persecution and poverty in the world people will continue to try to run away to real or imagined paradises, jeopardising even their own lives or the lives of their children. As long as we don’t have regional agreements, for example with Indonesia and Malaysia, or international attempts to deal with the issue, the boat people or the border crossers will continue to land on our shores.
And as long as we don’t realise that as a rich country we do have an obligation to save as many defenceless people as we can and that this obligation does not stop in our detention centres on and off shore, we will continue to focus on the tree and miss the forest.
The obligation to understand or to attempt to widen the terms of the public debate in relation to asylum seekers is a challenge for the entire nation. This challenge is even bigger perhaps for those Australians who have a migrant background and have experienced firsthand poverty and deprivation.