He would not drink from a glass at first. He has to be told to drink water, eat or to take a break. He had to be coached out of a habit of drinking water out of a plastic container in case he caused offence if he drank out of one of the restaurant’s glasses. Spencer, not his real name, is a kitchen hand in Melbourne, Australia, and he is a ‘boat person’ from Pakistan.
Spencer came to Australia in search of a better life than what he could expect to have at home. He made the journey with others before they were caught and processed. Spencer had nine months in an Australian detention centre. According to his boss, Spencer works hard, he is polite and punctual.
I never thought I would meet a ‘boat person’. ‘Boat people’ are just an issue you see on the news. Occasionally there is a fight in or outside one of Australia’s many detention centres but generally ‘boat people’ are just an outside group who play no role in my day-to -day life. I have now met Spencer and my understanding on one of Australia’s hottest election issues is a lot more informed.
Australia has a major task on its hands and its detention centres at best seem to be a short term solution to an ever-increasing problem of displaced peoples. Australia’s policy makers need to think faster than they are and any positive action they come up with will need cross-party support to succeed.
A Parliament of Australia paper titled ‘Boat Arrivals in Australia since 1976,’ states that the first set of ‘boat people’ to arrive in Australia were survivors from the Vietnam War. The first recorded boat came into Darwin in 1976. Immediately boat numbers skyrocketed as people fled their war torn or destroyed lands for the unknown. The reports explain Australia was hit with three separate ‘waves’ of boat people; between 1976 and 1981 Australia had 2059 Vietnamese boats, from 1989 to 1998 ‘300 people per annum’, and in 1999 the make-up of ‘boat people changed from Asian asylum seekers to Middle Eastern.
Australians as a whole feel they are under siege from ‘boat people’ and this impacts successive government policy and Australia’s international image for better or worse. Both the government and the opposition are in almost complete agreement on policy to deal with ‘boat people’ and that means including “mandatory detention for unauthorised boat arrivals”. A key difference being that opposition leader Tony Abbott would order the Navy to block boats and make them return the illegal boats to international seas.
In the 2012 Canberra Times opinion piece, ‘Boat people merely pawns,’ author Kim Huynh writes that Australia’s Mr Abbott does not want to stop ‘boat people’ because he knows neither he nor Julia Gillard’s Labor Government can, not immediately anyway.
“It serves Abbott’s political interests for as many boat people as possible to come to Australia now, as that makes the government look weak on border security. Then any reduction that follows a Coalition victory next year would allow him to present himself as a man of action who saved Australia from peaceful invasion (the noun surely negates the adjective).”
The idea that any Australian Government could stop ‘boat people’ would mean that institution would have to make conditions here for ‘boat people’ so horrific that they would opt to look elsewhere or stay in their damaged homelands, she says.
An Amnesty International report, ‘What we found behind the fences’, talks about what the organisation’s refugee right’s team come across during their detention centre facility inspections.
The inspections included Christmas Island and Wickham Point and discovered that the short term solution was destroying people. “Our findings confirm what we’ve known along: long-term, indefinite detention is crushing people.”
The lengths of stays for some detainees were too long. Amnesty found one man had spent 831 days at Curtin Immigration Detention Centre. People who had spent too long at a centre were now exhibiting serious mental conditions. “Self-harm, sleeping pills and talk of suicide had become a way of life.”
No matter which side people take in the debate, two things are certain. Nine months is too long to wait for anyone to know if they can build a safe and secure life for their families in the Pacific’s ‘lucky country’, and with on-going global conflicts, Australia can expect to be confronted by an increase in more ‘boat people’.
Politisphere 