http://www.guardian.co.uk/Refugees_in_Britain/Story/0,2763,724487,00.html
Howard's way is the wrong way
Australia's asylum seeker strategy should not be a model for Blair
Patrick Barkham
Thursday May 30, 2002
The Guardian
Kylie Minogue in the charts, Michael Lynch on the South Bank, Robert
Thomson at the Times, dozens of footballers in the football league and oceans
of wine on supermarket shelves: we are being swamped by a flood of
successful Australian exports. And now Tony Blair is poised to adopt another
Australian export - a political strategy perfected by the Australian prime
minister, John Howard, in which the far right is defeated and disillusioned
voters are won back by demonising refugees.
Judging by the Home Office memo leaked to the Guardian, Blair's wonks want
to follow Howard's way. The Australian prime minister won an unwinnable
third-term election by declaring war on asylum seekers. He sent those who
reached Australia to detention centres more suited to prisoners of war, and
dispatched the navy to patrol its northern shores.
The Home Office recipe for calming public anxieties about asylum seekers is
remarkably similar. Today's white paper, which widens the Working
Holidaymakers Scheme (currently used by thousands of Australians) to
encourage people from poor Commonwealth countries to come to Britain on
temporary working visas, sounds a different note. But it still seems part of
a process to split migrants into "good" working immigrants and "bad"
refugees - a division perfected by Australia.
What will be the result? Pit armies, civil servants, fortunes in taxpayers'
money against some of the poorest people in the world and there is only one
winner. But, judging by the Australian experience, the developed world will
pay a big and ugly price.
Last year, Howard's political obituaries were written. Pauline Hanson's One
Nation party was certain to split the rightwing vote. Then, three months
before the election, Howard transformed his fortunes by refusing to allow
433 Afghans rescued by a Norwegian container ship north of Australia to
claim asylum. He followed this by instructing the navy to permanently seal
off Australia's borders, stopping boats of asylum seekers and exporting
migrants to primitive camps on impoverished Pacific islands.
Those who penetrated Fortress Australia on planes were thrown into
barbed-wire-and-desert detention centres, rife with violence and abuse.
New laws ensured that those detainees deemed genuine refugees would only
get three-year visas. Legal appeals were curtailed for those refused
protection. Finally, September 11 enabled Howard to link refugees to the
"war on terror".
Howard's way was the most divisive controversy in Australia since the
Vietnam war. Some feel the country's reputation for generosity has been
spoiled and community sentiment permanently soured. But the vast majority
support Howard. On its own crude terms, the strategy has also worked: no
boats of asylum seekers have reached Australian beaches for six months.
But Blair and his Home Office wonks would be wrong if they hoped a similar
package of measures could seal off Britain or Europe to such excellent
electoral effect. Just 4,000 asylum seekers were entering Australia by boat
each year - a trickle compared to the numbers crossing the Mediterranean.
And it is much easier to turn a geographically isolated nation into a fortress
than it is to build walls around Europe.
Regardless of the multiple immoralities of such a strategy, Australia also
offers a warning to Blair on the economics of stopping asylum seekers.
Preventing 4,000 asylum arrivals is costing Australia A$287m (�1bn)
over five years. Most of this is paying for extra navy patrols, new offshore
detention centres and bribes for Pacific nations to take camp-loads of
refugees and for individual refugees to return to their homeland. The
treasurer totted up that in return for this "protection", fewer Australians
would get disability benefit and all would have to pay more for prescription
drugs.
The building of Fortress Australia has blown a huge hole in Howard's budget.
Suddenly the Australian PM doesn't look such a convincing manager of the
global economy. Governments may find it easier to adopt the
anti-immigration prong of the far right's agenda than its anti-free market
stance - it is simpler to stigmatise immigrants than address the inequalities
created by economic globalisation that foster anti-immigrant prejudices in
the first place. But they will struggle to make consistent policies by
adopting this ugly opposition to the free movement of people while retaining
a contradictory commitment to the unfettered global capitalism to keep the
bankers and George Bush happy. Blair be warned: Howard's way is an
expensive and probably shortlived palliative to voter discontent.
Patrick Barkham was the Guardian's Australia correspondent
2000-2002
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