Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Many members of this chamber grapple with the best way to respond to the international refugee crisis. In 2015, for the first time since the Second World War, the number of refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people worldwide has exceeded 50 million people—including around 20 million refugees and two million people seeking asylum. No one country can provide protection to all of those people who need it. In the absence of a comprehensive international solution, decisions made by individual countries have life and death consequences for different groups of people. Weighing these consequences is a challenging policy and moral question. People of good will can look at the same set of facts, the same complexities in this area, and come to differing conclusions. One thing is clear, however, there is no silver bullet—no simple solutions without other consequences.

In this context, those who pretend that there are simple solutions to this issue can make it difficult to have a serious conversation about how we can weigh the consequences of our choices in order to pursue the most compassionate, generous policy possible for those in need. Last week, Senator Hanson-Young of the other place wrote a piece in The Monthly that was particularly unhelpful in this respect. The article argues that former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's response to the Indochinese crisis in the 1970s should be seen as the model for responding humanely to this issue today.

As a member representing an electorate with a very large Vietnamese-Australian community, I have had much cause to reflect on this. On the wall of my Canberra office is a picture of the Pulau Bidong refugee camp in Malaysia, where many Vietnamese asylum seekers passed through on their way to Australia—including many of my constituents. It is a constant reminder to me that that the process of resettling refugees from Indochina under the Fraser government was far from simple. It took more than a decade of work by Australian, ASEAN and UN diplomats.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, millions of Vietnamese began to flee their homes to neighbouring South-East Asian countries—particularly Thailand, Malaysia and later Indonesia. In 1978, a UN conference of 36 nations was convened in response to the crisis and made provision for the resettlement of 120,000 people but ultimately failed to stem the flow of people fleeing Vietnam. Overwhelmed by the number of people on the move, these nations began turning back asylum seekers to the persecution that they had fled. In the next year, 1979, a further UN conference agreed that states in the region would provide temporary accommodation to refugees in exchange for the resettlement of 260,000 refugees, and, crucially—thanks to the initiative of Australian diplomacy—Vietnam agreed to enforce an orderly departure program that dealt with the source of this exodus. Later that year, after years of diplomacy from a worldwide coalition, an agreement was reached under which Indonesia offered Galang Island to the UNHCR as a refugee processing centre.

Ultimately, more than 2.5 million people were resettled in the Indochinese crisis. The program was such a significant achievement that the UNHCR was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1981. However, it was not until 1989, when 77 nations endorsed the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese refugees that the crisis was ultimately resolved. More than a decade of diplomacy was needed to implement this process, but this impediment did not get a mention in the senator's op-ed. She did, however, claim that the Labor Party:

… want us to think that there are only two options; either be cruel to refugees or open the borders and see people die needlessly at sea. They want you to forget that there is another way.

That is nonsense, and the senator knows it.

Labor has aggressively pursued a regional solution to the movement of asylum seekers, like that adopted in response to the Indochinese crisis, for years. Indeed, in 2011, the Gillard government reached an agreement with Malaysia where 800 asylum seekers who arrived by boat would be transferred to Malaysia in exchange for 4,000 processed refugees waiting to be resettled from camps in Malaysia. This regional agreement was, of course, voted down by the senator's own party with the support of the coalition. Despite this, the senator's article goes on to argue that Australia should set up asylum seeker processing centres in Indonesia and Malaysia. The tricky bits—how to achieve this challenging diplomatic outcome and how we respond to people who would seek to arrive by boat in the interim—are again left unsaid. The misleading, politically opportunistic and completely unhelpful impression left by this article is that all that is lacking to realise a regional solution is political will; the difficulties of international diplomacy are ignored.

In contrast, Labor are not in the business of offering simplistic political snake oil on asylum policy. We are in the business of developing a practical, compassionate, generous asylum seeker policy. This year's Labor national conference adopted a platform that commits Labor to:

… take a leadership role within South East Asia and the Pacific to build a regional humanitarian framework to improve the situation of asylum seekers … supporting the UNHCR in providing health and education services to asylum seekers … advocating for work rights for asylum seekers, similar to what would have been achieved under the proposed Malaysia Agreement in 2011.

We also committed to practical, compassionate measures that will work in the short term—continuing the combination of offshore processing and regional resettlement together with the policy of turning back boats that has stopped the flow of vessels arriving on our shores. We also committed to abolishing TPVs, introducing a 90-day rule, returning references to the UN Refugee Convention in the Migration Act, independent oversight of Australian funded processing facilities and increasing UNHCR support to $450 million. (Time expired)