- Aug 17, 2009
- 6,800
- 8,356
- AFL Club
- North Melbourne
That's a mischaracterisation of refugee history in Australia. The Hanson trend was in place long before Hanson. Fraser's position was largely accepted by the Australian public at that time, the idea of it being courageous is probably an anachronism based on subsequent attitudes in the 1980s.
In April 1976 five Vietnamese men arrived in Darwin, having set out from Vietnam in February. They had been resupplied at various ports throughout SE Asia on the condition that they keep moving. By the end of 1979 more than 2000 people had arrived by boat in Australia. A trickle (less than 50) of arrivals would come over the next two years before ceasing all together in 1982, when conditions had largely settled in Vietnam.
Unauthorised boat arrivals clearly followed the fall of Saigon and there was a feeling among politicians and Australians generally that we had been fighting against their persecutors ourselves only months earlier and were therefore dutybound to take in these refugees. The Australian legislative framework was also not equipped to deal with the situation; at that time the Migration Act really only considered unauthorised arrivals from the perspective of stowaways. The arrivals were held in loose detention and had their refugee claims processed quickly
The "regional solution", if that's what it was, was heavily pushed by the other ASEAN nations, who had 200,000 boat arrivals in 1979 alone. None of those nations were signatories to the Refugee Convention (and still aren't). The Orderly Departure Program that came out of negotiations handled by the UNHCR saw Australia, the US and Canada agree to take 260,000 refugees. Refugee status was determined by group identity, leading to perceptions that many were economic or non-genuine refugees.
This was the beginning of the concept of the "queue-jumper": the ODP established a supposed method of "orderly departure" and even those who arrived via this method had their refugee credentials questioned. How much worse then must be the people who evaded the queue?
The second wave of unauthorised boat arrivals lasted from 1989-1998 and saw about 3,000 arrivals from Vietnam, Cambodia and southern China. Once again ASEAN nations pushed for a solution and the successor to the ODP was the Comprehensive Plan of Action. This time refugee status would be assessed on an individual basis by the ASEAN states. This was obviously problematic, given that none of these states are signatories to the Refugee Convention, and the assessments were beset by accusations that they began with the assumption the refugees were non-genuine and due process was not followed. If the ODP was the creation of the concept of the "queue-jumper", the CPA set the foundations for offshore processing and the outsourcing of Australia's obligations under the Refugee Convention.
The Migration Act still had not been updated, but these second-wave arrivals were detained much longer than those in the 1970s. Indeed, the act only allowed them to be detained for 14 days after the departure of their arriving vessel. In 1992, arrivals from 1989 were still in detention and the Australian government was about to face court action. Their boats had been burned, and it appeared likely the court would find that the detention was therefore illegal. The Keating government hastily amended the Migration Act and it was at this point that mandatory detention of unauthorised boat arrivals in Australia came into law. At the time it was to be limited to 9 months, but later amendments, still under Labor, changed this to indefinite mandatory detention.
Of course policies would become even more draconian by the time of the third wave of unauthorised arrivals from 1999-2001 (12,000 arrivals mostly from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan). But immigration policy in Australia has been very much characterised by bipartisanship, despite coalition attempts to wedge Labor on the issue. The coalition supported Labor policies in opposition, and with very rare exceptions the ALP has supported coalition policies. The hardening of community attitudes to refugees, especially boat arrivals, can be seen since the beginning of the 1980s.
