'The Good Refugee'

The Good Refugee

In August 2001, a boat carrying 433 asylum seekers, predominantly Hazaras from Afghanistan, entered into Australian borders. The Australian Prime Ministero rdered the navy to surround the boat and prevent it entering into Australian waters. As the mental and physical health of the asylum seekers deteriorated, and the demands for medical support escalated, Australian authorities eventually submitted to the provision of medical assistance. While the people remained in limbo for a week, the government passed the Border Protection Act to legalise their actions, with retrospective effect, and the Pacific Solution was born. The Pacific Solution started a dark chapter of expensive and inhumane policies of diverting all unauthorised maritime arrivals to mandatory detention camps in Manus and Nauru. Also known as the policy of ‘Stopping the Boats.’

The detention centres have been characterised by high rates of self-harm, suicide, sexual assault and other human rights abuses. And not to mention that the act of reporting by journalists remains criminalised. On Tuesday, Manus Island was scheduled to close down which has left close to 600 people prone to starvation and dehydration because of threats from settling within the local population in Papua New Guinea. This raises the question of why the Australia public has been complicit with these torture camps. 

Interestingly, Australia is not opposed to accommodating refugees, rather we accept an average of 6000 refugees through the UNHCR resettlement program. However, these are ‘good’ refugees who have followed legitimate routes, waited in refugee camps, come by plane and most importantly, allowed the government to select who to allow in our borders. Increasingly, the government has pledged to take in more refugees through the UNHCR program.

In contrast, the people in Manus and Nauru are ‘bad refugees’, ‘economic migrants’, ‘boat people,’ ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘illegal immigrants’. This rhetoric spewed by both the media and the government manipulates the image of asylum seekers who are merely exercising their right to seek asylum under Art 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to criminals who can spend an indefinite time in detention. This rhetoric has continued for sixteen years despite consistent reports that approximately 95-99% of the asylum seekers are granted refugee status.

Ultimately, this normative depiction of refugees coupled with the image of ‘boat people’ flooding Australian borders allows for the dehumanisation of refugees and permits human rights abuses in nearby islands.     

Australia’s double standards with refugees and asylum seekers is contingent on the factor that its engagement in resettlement processes enable the government to discriminate against certain peoples, while unregulated maritime arrivals remove this discretion. Australia has significantly reduced the granting of refugee status to Sudanese refugees after association with crime and increasingly has privileged Syrian Christian refugees over Muslims. The ‘bad refugee’ who comes by boat is seen to be flooding Australia’s sovereign borders and removing the choice of who we should allow into our nation-state.

Thus, the ‘good refugee’ enables politicians to discriminate towards certain ethnicities and religions while the ‘bad refugee’ normalises human rights abuses while simultaneously providing a source of popular political support for politicians.

References:

Doherty, Ben. “Australia's Offshore Detention Centres 'Terrible', Says Architect of System.”The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Aug. 2017, www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/aug/16/australias-offshore-detention-centres-terrible-says-architect-of-system.

Parliament of Australia, 'Asylum Seekers and Refugees: what are the facts?', June 10 2015, accessible on: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1415/AsylumFacts 

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