International Socialists

Australian socialist Tom Bramble asks why John Howard is creating a Fortress Australia.

 

 

With confirmation in February that Australian Prime Minister John Howard, Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock and Defence Minister Peter Reith, together with their senior bureaucrats, all lied through their teeth in the weeks running up to the November 10 federal election about refugees "throwing their children overboard," the Australian Government's racist witchhunt against asylum seekers arriving by boat has taken something of a dent.

 

However, there is no sign that this vicious campaign is coming to a halt. The storming of the Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, by the Australian SAS in October 2001, the introduction of the so-called "Pacific Solution" whereby the Australian Government bribes neighbouring poverty stricken island states to take refugees heading for Australian shores, and the imprisonment in desert concentration camps of those refugees who do wash up in Australia have all been far too successful in diverting popular attention away from budget cuts, corporate collapses and all the other crimes implemented or covered up by the Howard Government.

 

 

Hunger strikes

The hunger strikes by hundreds of asylum seekers in the desert camps of Woomera and Port Hedland in January focused international attention on the outrageous conditions that prevail in these camps. These centres were built in 1993 by the then Labor Government of Paul Keating who to this day still parades around as a friend of multiculturalism. They are located in the remotest spots of Australia to keep away relatives, social welfare agencies, refugee and legal advisory services and, of course, the media. In a recent twist, the news media have now been kept out of camera shot of the Woomera detention centre in a media exclusion zone, just in case the newspapers are tempted to take a shot of the prison conditions or, just as explosive, the resistance of the refugees themselves.

 

Australia's detention centres are run by Australasian Correctional Management, a branch of the Wackenhut Corporation, which has made its fortune running private prisons in the United States. Run on a for-profit basis, conditions in the camps are scandalous. Surrounded by razor wire, asylum seekers are subject to dehumanising conditions in which they are treated as hardened criminals, subject to twice daily musters, called by identification number (or worse), not by name. Their rooms and belongings are regularly searched by guards who are openly racist towards them. And they are kept behind the wire for, in some cases, years on end, men, women and children of all ages, denied access to family and most communication with the outside world. The results are tragic - suicides and attempted suicides, widespread depression and other psychological disorders, and sexual abuse.

 

 

Fortress Australia

Fortress Australia is now complete. The Australian Government has now passed legislation allowing it simply to repel by military means all asylum seekers who are sailing by boat to Australian waters, and to turn them back to their point of departure. If they can't be turned back, they are then transported to the camps in Nauru, PNG and elsewhere.

 

Once "processed," those deemed not eligible for asylum are then repatriated, sometimes in a drugged-up state to avoid embarrassing scenes at airports. If repatriation is not possible (for example because their homeland is at war), they will be imprisoned indefinitely until some bureaucrat decides that their homeland is now safe. Those locked up on the Pacific camps and deemed to be "genuine" refugees (which occurs in 84% of all cases) will then rot in the camps until some country decides to take them in.

 

Most likely this will not be Australia, which accepts only a minority of those which its own officials have decided are "genuinely" refugees. Those "genuine" refugees locked up in Australian camps are granted "Temporary Protection Visas" (TPVs) which may be temporary but are certainly not visas as usually understood and certainly don't protect their holders! Those on TPVs do not have access to English language tuition, meaning that they are most unlikely to find work. However, they also have no access to social security and therefore have to depend on charities and the goodwill of friends. They are not able to bring their families over, and their visas expire after three years at which point they are "encouraged" to return to their homelands.
 

Demonised

Meanwhile, the refugees are systematically demonised in the eyes of ordinary Australians. Not only are they accused of throwing their children overboard but they are routinely described as "illegals," "queue jumpers," or even "potential terrorists." "We don't want those sort of people in Australia," declaims John Howard when refugees sew up their lips in a desperate attempt to draw attention to their plight. In a further Orwellian manipulation of the language similar to George W. Bush's war of "Enduring Freedom" the whole racist farrago is presented as "Border Protection," as if the security of 20 million Australians is threatened by the three or four thousand asylum seekers who make it to Australia each year. The racism is sickening. No vicious smears or media barrage against the much larger number of overwhelmingly white European and North American backpackers and tourists who overstay their visas.

Howard's record

Given Howard's public record as a racist over the years, there is little surprise about his banging the racist drum about asylum seekers. What really sticks in the craw of millions of Labor supporters is the "me too" tailing of Howard by the Australian Labor Party. Kim Beazley, ALP leader at the November federal election, declared that Labor was "at one" with the Government on the issue of "border protection," with the result that more than 200,000 Labor voters switched their support to the Greens, and many more voted Labor while holding their stomachs.

 

The result was something of a post-election crisis within the ALP. Its new leader, Simon Crean, has uttered a few feeble words suggesting that perhaps women and children might be held in slightly less barbaric conditions, but the party still remains committed to mandatory detention, the desert camps, and Temporary Protection Visas. The leadership criticises the Government's Pacific Solution not for its inhumanity and neocolonialism towards Pacific neighbours but for its burden on the budget! It was Labor, after all, that built the camps and popularised the terminology of "queue jumpers" and "economic migrants" back in the early 1990s.
 

Deception

The Howard Government has won support for its racist policies by conjuring up a vision of a generous and welcoming Government taking "more than its fair share" of asylum seekers but which is threatened by "a flood of illegals" descending on Australia. The facts are rather different. Given the size, population and resources of the Australian continent, the Australian government is mean in the extreme. Seventy one countries accept refugees and asylum seekers and, of these, Australia is ranked 32nd. Relative to population, Australia slips further back to 38th, placing it somewhere behind Kazakhstan, Guinea, Djibouti and Syria, and well behind Tanzania which takes 20 times as many refugees as Australia.

 

The Australian Government accepts 12,000 refugees each year from around the world; by comparison Pakistan and Iran each hosts more than one million Afghan refugees. The statistics also explode one of the other common arguments, that the boat people are not "real" refugees but "cashed-up illegals" anxious to take advantage of Australia as a "soft touch." In fact, 97% of all Iraqis seeking asylum without valid visas in Australia in 1999 were subsequently found to be "genuine" refugees, as were 94% of Afghanis.

 

Resistance

The most heartening aspect of the whole situation is the resistance of the refugees themselves. In January, hunger strikes spread like wildfire from Woomera to Port Hedland to Curtin detention centre in Perth and Maribyrnong in Melbourne, to the point where hundreds were involved, some taking the drastic action of sewing their lips together. This defiant resistance led to a minor but significant concession by the Government which resumed processing applications from Afghani asylum seekers whose applications were originally frozen in the aftermath of the American victory in Afghanistan. More dramatic still have been the riots, the breakouts, and the burning of camp buildings, which has happened on several occasions in the past two years.
 

Galvanised support

It has been acts of resistance such as these that have galvanised support for the refugees in the wider community. In January and February there were many demonstrations in all the capital cities of Australia against the Government's treatment of the asylum seekers, with the largest rallies attracting up to 3,000. There have also been many large public meetings which have denounced the Government's actions, with several hundred crowding into halls in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane to hear speakers organised by refugee support groups such as the Refugee Action Collectives. The demands are simple: shut down the detention centres, permanent visas not TPVs, expand the annual refugee intake back to at least the level of 20,000 that prevailed in the early 1980s, and scrap the "Pacific Solution."

 

Just as significant as these rallies and meetings has been the widespread discontent evident within the Labor Party, with one opposition frontbencher and several backbenchers publicly coming out in opposition to Labor's public support for the Government, as have several Labor politicians at state level. Labor for Refugees groups have been established in New South Wales and Queensland, and have attracted senior trade union figures who have also expressed their disgust at the party's stand. The stance taken by Labor dissidents is an important component of the campaign to build mass support for the refugees.
 

"Good reputation"

Many quite conservative political figures in Australia have suggested that the treatment of refugees is costing Australia's "good reputation" in international circles. They argue that after the warm glow produced by the Sydney Olympics, the Howard Government is now throwing away international goodwill towards the country. Now while there's an element of truth in this, it's also important to understand that Howard is probably on safe ground so far as governments around the world are concerned.

 

In the past ten years, every Western government has launched a war on refugees, tightening up intakes, denying refugees social or political rights, and organising raids and systematic harassment by the police and bureaucrats to make their lives hell. Parties led by "respectable" neofascists and racists such as Jorg Haider in Austria, Jean Marie Le Pen in France, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy have become significant political forces, while "establishment" parties such as the German Christian Democrats are now led by outright racists and Tony Blair's "New Labour" turns out to be every bit as racist as Thatcher at her worst.

 

Like them, Howard understands that scapegoating refugees is a good way of dividing opposition to his agenda of cutting public spending, bashing trade unions, and forcing up the cost of public education while throwing billions at "defence" spending. And he's also stolen the thunder from Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation party has been completely outflanked by Howard and reduced to a miserable rump.
 

Socialists

Socialists in Australia, of course, take a very different view! We say loud and clear that refugees from every corner of the world are welcome. We are for open borders: if the rich can move their money around the world without restriction, we are for the right of workers and the poor to go wherever they can better their lives. Just as citizens of the European Union can seek work wherever they like within the EU, we are for extending that right to every citizen of the world in every country of the world.

 

The "refugee crisis" is the product of a world characterised by war and impoverishment in many countries. In most cases these evils are the result, directly or indirectly, of intervention by Western governments and corporations, most spectacularly with the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan. If there are costs associated with settling the refugees, therefore, let big business pay more taxes.
 

Solution

In the long term, however, the refugee crisis cannot be solved within a capitalist world economy. Impoverishment and war are the natural products of a world run for profit not human need. When the banks get together to draw up "structural adjustment programmes" for Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America, refugees are the natural result of what is nothing more than a war on the poor.

 

We need to abolish this system that creates massive "overproduction" of manufactured goods and foodstuffs and one refugee every 21 seconds and replace it with one in which the resources of the world are devoted to feeding, housing and clothing people. The resistance of the refugees shows that the struggle that may bring about such a world is possible even in the most dire of circumstances and their campaign for freedom deserves the support of everyone fighting for justice.