Whether those turned away died in another country’s waters or back in the countries they initially fled did not figure in his equation. By removing images of boats capsizing off Australia’s shores from local television and ensuring that more migrants seeking asylum did not arrive in the country, his work was done. Nor was he bothered by the ongoing expenditure of billions of dollars for detaining asylum-seekers offshore on Nauru and Manus Island and occasionally flying them thousands of miles at taxpayer expense for medical treatment in Australia.
The core of Abbott’s argument was that “in Europe, as with Australia, people claiming asylum—invariably—have crossed not one border but many; and are no longer fleeing in fear but are contracting in hope with people smugglers. However desperate, almost by definition, they are economic migrants,” he insisted.16 By this tortuous logic, a Rohingya refugee who flees from Myanmar to Malaysia but is abused by police and arrested for trying to work—and cannot claim asylum because he is stateless and Malaysia isn’t a party to the UN refugee convention—becomes an “economic migrant” simply by refusing to stop his journey. “Our moral obligation is to receive people fleeing for their lives. It’s not to provide permanent residency to anyone and everyone who would rather live in a prosperous Western country,” said Abbott.
The Australian model is not about efficient resettlement of refugees; it’s about keeping them out. Abbott’s policy prescription was simple: turn boats back, deny entry at borders, and build camps. Some force would be necessary and a lot of money, he admitted. Sounding a bit like the fictional French president in Camp of the Saints, he declared, “It will gnaw at our consciences—yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever.” Abbott’s real fear is the same as Raspail’s—Western civilization being replaced. He even went so far as to criticize the EU and NATO naval presence between Greece and Turkey for being excessively compassionate toward refugees on capsized vessels. “As long as they’re taking passengers aboard rather than turning boats around and sending them back, it’s a facilitator rather than a deterrent.”17
An anonymous Tory minister labeled the speech “fascistic.”18 Farage called Abbott “heroic.”19 Elsewhere in Europe, the right was watching closely.
UKIP and the DPP are not the only parties on the European right looking Down Under for inspiration. Yohann Faviere, one of the Front National’s local leaders in Calais, France, thinks it is the only viable model. “When they find a boat in the sea, they send the migrants back,” he says admiringly of the Australians. He is bothered by the drownings but is adamant that Italy and Greece shouldn’t be in the business of rescuing refugees. “The boats found in the Med need to be sent back to where they came from,” he insists.20
Frits Bolkestein, the former leader of Holland’s centre-right VVD Party, who gave Geert Wilders his first political job, agrees that Australia is the answer the Europe’s current problems. “The better we treat them, the more they come,” he told me. “If you don’t want them to come, you should not treat them all that well, which is what the Australians do.” Bolkestein insists that Australian-style controls are the only solution as more and more of the world’s poor, whether they are refugees or not, seek to move to Europe. “Look at the United Nations’ statistics about African natality,” he says. “It’s most disturbing. Countries like Central African Republic, it’s a failed state, and they go on producing children. Do we want them to come here? No, we don’t, so what do we do? Australian solution.”
When pressed on whether this would actually solve the problem of asylum-seekers coming to Europe, he concedes that it won’t. “We are trained in the West to think that every problem has a solution,” he tells me. “There’s no solution to this, unless we adopt very nasty measures.”21 And nasty measures have become an Australian specialty.
The course of Australian immigration policy changed forever in August 2001. On August 26, a distress call went out from the KM Palapa, a vessel with over four hundred asylum-seekers aboard sailing from Indonesia toward Australia’s Christmas Island. Australian maritime authorities instructed any nearby vessels to attempt a rescue. The task fell to Captain Arne Rinnan at the helm of the MV Tampa, a Norwegian freighter that had just sailed from Perth heading for Singapore. Australian coast guard planes helped guide the Tampa to the site of the capsizing boat. Rinnan’s crew hoisted over four hundred people onto its deck as the Palapa broke apart in heavy swells. It was then that the crisis began.
Maritime law requires a ship to take those rescued at sea to the closest suitable port, which was in Indonesia, twelve hours away. A group of asylum-seekers refused to turn back to Indonesia and aggressively confronted the captain, asking him to take them to the closest harbor, which was Australia’s Christmas Island—just six hours away. Several of those rescued were unconscious and sick with dysentery, and the ship, designed for cargo and a few dozen crew, only had sleeping quarters for fifty people. Rinnan agreed to head for Christmas Island, which was not equipped to dock a large freighter like the Tampa. On the evening of August 29, the Tampa declared a state of emergency aboard and approached Australian waters, despite lacking clearance. The government turned up the heat.
Although Australia had issued the initial call for rescue assistance, the conservative government led by Prime Minister John Howard had now changed its tune; that same evening, he introduced the Border Protection Bill of 2001 and threatened to prosecute Captain Rinnan for people smuggling if he entered Australian waters. Norway’s government and the ship’s owners warned Australia not to seize the Tampa, but when Rinnan eventually sailed toward Christmas Island, Australian troops forcibly boarded the freighter.22
Julian Burnside, one of the country’s best-known lawyers, was called in to handle the case as the crisis deepened. Soon he was the senior counsel on the case, arguing, ironically, that naval officers had a legal obligation to detain the rescued migrants on Australian territory rather than hold them hostage aboard the Tampa.23
“The case that we ran started on a Friday night,” he recounts. By the following Wednesday, the arguments were done and the judge went to prepare his ruling. It came down at 2:15 p.m. on September 11, 2001, Melbourne time—about eight hours before the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan—a federal court judge instructed the Howard government to bring the passengers to Australia, citing the judiciary’s power “to protect people against detention without lawful authority.”24
It was bad timing. Burnside lost on appeal a few days later. “All of a sudden, the discourse changed, and you didn’t have terrorists anymore; you had Muslim terrorists, and you didn’t have boat people anymore, you had Muslim boat people,” he recalls.25
In late 2001, Prime Minister John Howard was in trouble politically. His response to the Tampa boosted him in the polls. Before the incident at sea, the nativist politician Pauline Hanson had posed a genuine challenge on the far right. Howard distanced himself enough to seem palatable to centrist voters but not so far that he would anger Hanson’s followers. His own base, the so-called Howard battlers, were suburban working-class voters. Howard spoke to their fears, and when the aspirational white working class bought into the anti-immigration message and the strategy proved politically profitable, the party pursued it.26
What came to be known as the Pacific Solution was cobbled together during the legal proceedings. The intercepted asylum-seekers were sent to Nauru aboard a troopship.27 Burnside later discovered they were housed below deck next to the engine room. One of Howard’s party colleagues, Jackie Kelly, reportedly ran up to the prime minister as he was on his way to address parliament. She was afraid voters were abandoning them for Hanson’s One Nation Party. As legend has it, Howard waved his Tampa speech at her and said, “Don’t worry, this will fix it.”28
The numbers of boat people coming in 2001 were higher than in the 1970s and 1980s when Vietnamese refugees had fled to Australia. Back then, the right, which had supported the Ameri
can war effort, campaigned in favour of admitting the South Vietnamese, and Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser remained committed to welcoming them.29
John Menadue, an octogenarian who has served at the highest levels of Australian government and business, points out that, after 9/11, it was “much easier to appeal to an anti-Muslim sentiment than an anti-Vietnamese.” The antimigrant backlash did not appear out of thin air, opportunistic though it was. Menadue has a longer political memory than most, and he remembers how Malcolm Fraser, Australia’s conservative statesman in the 1970s and early 1980s, adopted a welcoming stance toward the Vietnamese that paved the way for general acceptance. There was, however, “one politician at that stage who had reservations. That was John Howard,” recalls Menadue. He spoke out against asylum-seekers twenty years before he came to power, particularly in the mid-1980s.
Howard accused the asylum-seekers of queue-jumping at every opportunity, framing them as cheats while “real” refugees languished in camps. In Australia, land of the “fair go,” it was a powerful smear. By the late 1990s, Howard was going after the far-right supporters of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. Menadue gives him credit even if he sees the move as cynical and unnecessary. “In the end, he neutered that party by in effect adopting its policy, a very successful and skillful enterprise.”30
The vocabulary of illegality that took hold in the wake of the Tampa crisis changed public attitudes. Even though there is nothing criminal about seeking asylum without a valid visa, many Australians now believe it is illegal. It’s a twisting of basic definitions and legal concepts, but it has permeated everything. If all asylum-seekers are illegal and hence criminals, then draconian policies are easier to justify. If it’s a “war” against people smugglers, then military deployments are acceptable, and so is the rhetoric of national security threats that former immigration minister Scott Morrison repeatedly conjured with his talk of going to war on smugglers. The language is not an afterthought; it is part of the policy and serves as a justification for it.31
Within two days of 9/11, the then defence minister Peter Reith linked asylum and terrorism by warning that boats could “be a pipeline for terrorists to come in and use your country as a staging post for terrorist activities.” Never mind that the country’s top intelligence official called the risk “extremely remote” and denied there was any evidence that terrorists were seeking to get to Australia by boat.32
As the scope of acceptable interpretations narrowed, civil servants start to mimic their superiors. A former Labor Party minister, Chris Evans, noted that “public servants pick up the language of the politicians and they then start to demonstrate the attitudes that that language reflects.”33 It becomes self-fulfilling.
One of the public servants most responsible for shaping attitudes was Philip Ruddock, a short, gray-haired politician who represented Sydney’s suburbs in parliament for over forty years and served as immigration minister under John Howard. Ruddock is proud of his role in transforming the national discussion about refugees. “I am probably more responsible for conditioning the Australian debate than any other public official,” he told me. “We take the view that they should wait where they are first safe and wait a place in the queue.”34
But not everyone can safely wait in refugee camps indefinitely.
Mohamed Baqiri fled the Urozgan province of Afghanistan in the late 1990s as ethnic Hazaras came under attack from the Taliban. He was seven. Baqiri’s older brother had come in 1999, and the family decided to follow. They lived illegally in Pakistan for two years, and then, after paying £12,000, he and a group of relatives traveled through Pakistan, then to Malaysia, then Indonesia. It took a week for their boat to reach Australian waters; during the journey, two women died, and a baby lost consciousness for six hours. Finally, they arrived in Australia—or thought they had.
As Baqiri recalls it, the navy circled their boat, telling them there was no way they would manage to enter Australia. A refugee on the boat who had previously been turned back lit a fire to force a rescue. After three hours of chaos, during which Baqiri’s young nephew lost consciousness and several people jumped in the water, the navy rescued the passengers. They were taken to a detention centre on Christmas Island. “The clothes that we were rescued in, that’s what we had with us. For over a month, that’s what we were wearing,” he recalls. Then they were told that to have their claims processed, they would be taken to Nauru. “We had no idea where Nauru was.”35
When the plane landed, Baqiri couldn’t believe how small the island was. He remembers the mosquitoes the most—and seeing detainees suffering from malaria.36 They were living in army tents. “There was no plumbing,” he recalls. The passengers from the Tampa were there, too, he adds, and all of them were told they’d never get to Australia. Once on Nauru, he says, there was massive pressure to “stay here forever or go back to your country.”
The list of abuses at Nauru is long and almost always contested by Australian officials. Health workers and inmates there have documented and reported dozens of cases of rape of female inmates, guards demanding sexual favors, denial of medical care, and countless incidents of self-harm, including inmates attempting to hang themselves and slit their wrists. One asylum-seeker poured gasoline on himself and burned himself to death, and others have sewn their lips together in protest.37 Baqiri was lucky. After spending three years as a child detainee on Nauru, during which time his brother joined a hunger strike and Baqiri watched him collapse three times and be carted to the hospital on a stretcher, in 2004, the family suddenly received news that their applications had been approved and they would be sent to Australia with temporary visas valid for three years.
When Australians talk about boat people, they do not usually imagine someone like Baqiri. He is young, hip, and dresses and speaks like most other men his age in Melbourne. But he has experienced a side of Australia that few natives or tourists ever see.
Things did not go well once the family arrived in Melbourne. Baqiri was bullied in school and had no friends. His older brother was working in the countryside two hours north of the city picking fruit. The family moved there, where there was work. Even Baqiri, just thirteen, would occasionally go into the fields. The local school was friendlier, and there were refugees from Iraq and other countries. He quickly became a star athlete, was chosen as a team captain in football, and won medals in track and field.
A decade later, in 2016, Baqiri was finishing up his undergraduate law degree and crisscrossing the country giving speeches. He is especially focused on talking to groups that have never encountered refugees, to union members, and to investors connected to companies that profit from detention facilities. At a shareholder meeting filled with investors in the company that manages part of the Nauru facility, there were discussions of how to increase profitability. “They were talking about numbers, about how much it’s making. There were people like, ‘What are you going to do to make it better so we can get more profit?’” Baqiri took the floor and told the audience and the media, “Look, I’ve been in that detention centre.… Do you think it’s ethically right to do this?” There was silence.38
Ruddock oversaw Australia’s immigration policy during the years Baqiri was locked up on Nauru. He takes comfort in Australia’s great diversity and top-four ranking worldwide in the number of foreign-born residents, along with Israel, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. “Initially, we didn’t seek people with particular skills; we just wanted people who were like us,”39 he told me, a vague reference to the notorious White Australia policy that explicitly barred Asian immigration and lasted until the 1960s.
Ruddock is quick to point out that it was his party, the right-leaning Liberals, who welcomed South Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s while the Labor Party opposed them. Back then, the most vicious antirefugee voices came from trade unions in Darwin. “They claimed that some of the boat arrivals were crime syndicate figures and brothel owners,” recounts Klaus Neumann, a German historian who works at Deakin University in Mel
bourne.40 Opponents tried to paint them as too wealthy to be genuine refugees because they arrived with all their earthly possessions, much like some Jewish Holocaust survivors who came in the 1940s or Syrians with nice smartphones today.
Ruddock likes to invoke the plight of the poor who wait in line in camps while wealthy asylum-seekers pay smugglers, but it’s not a meaningful distinction in international law; wealth is irrelevant in determining asylum eligibility.41 One can be a wealthy Muslim landowner and yet be violently expelled by bigots who hate all Muslims. A rich woman who is raped by soldiers and chooses to pay a smuggler to escape her homeland has no less claim to asylum than a poor person waiting in a camp. Ruddock would never dare to question the legitimacy of refugee claims made by members of Berlin’s Jewish aristocracy in the late 1930s, especially in his heavily Jewish constituency, but the logic behind denunciations of those who can afford to pay is the same.
As Madeline Gleeson of the University of New South Wales explains, Australian policy makers like Ruddock cleverly linked the two traditional sources of refugees in the public mind and “created the illusion of a queue” by setting those who are assigned for resettlement by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) against those who flee on their own and make a claim upon arrival in some sort of imaginary zero-sum equation. But in fact, Australia or any other country has no legal obligation to resettle a single UNHCR refugee. If they accept them, “it’s goodwill,” says Gleeson. “Asylum is something else.”42
Ruddock remembers visiting refugee camps in Malaysia and Hong Kong as a young MP in the 1970s. “The first immigration of Vietnamese was extraordinarily well received, highly regarded. They worked hard. They were well educated. They were people who’d fought with the South Vietnamese.”
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