The current debate presumes there is no less brutal way to stop people smuggling, and thus prevent the loss of life at sea. But this is not true. We could, for instance, significantly increase our refugee intake from Indonesia. Many people who get on boats have already joined a queue, been processed by the UNHCR and been assessed as refugees. What they havent been is resettled. Indonesia harbours a large backlog of people going nowhere around 10,000 of them.
So far this year weve resettled around 60 refugees from Indonesia directly. If the annual figure were, say, 6000 (which would doubtless help Australia achieve more meaningful co-operation with Indonesia on surveillance, processing and policing), the number of boats would decrease rapidly and no one would need to be mentally destroyed in the process. More asylum seekers might pour into Indonesia, but their prospects within the queue would no longer be hopeless; they would surely be less likely to risk their lives on leaky boats.
After all, we could absorb several times that annual number with barely a blip. We could make the humanitarian intake 100,000 if necessary, and wed cope just fine. This would do more than break what the government likes to call the people smugglers business model. It would take away their clients altogether.
This will not happen. Not because it wouldnt work, but because it wouldnt work in the way we want. For all the gnashing of teeth and demonstrative compassion, our politicians have greater concerns than the lost lives of a few hundred asylum seekers. They have political equations to balance and shibboleths to repeat.
This is true even of the Greens, whose position is most explicitly about the rights of asylum seekers. One of the more intriguing manoeuvres of the last parliamentary sitting week before the winter recess was the Coalitions offer to increase the refugee intake by 6000 to 20,000 per year and limit processing times to 12 months. This responded to the problem directly and reflected much of the Greens own policy, but it came with a catch: offshore processing in Nauru an unthinkable backdown for the Greens constituency. Consequently, Australia continues to process and detain asylum seekers onshore which, let us remember, remains brutalising at the expense of thousands more people who continue to languish, and unknown others who will perish at sea. Apparently, asylum seekers human rights must be protected, even if it kills them.
