Asia Times: Howard rides Australia's anti-immigration wave


	October 3, 2001	atimes.com

Oceania

Howard rides Australia's anti-immigration wave
By Bob Burton

CANBERRA - The government of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, its standing boosted by its tough handling of asylum seekers ahead of elections due next month, has been tapping into the unease many Australians feel on the issue of immigration.

While Howard's get-tough policy over the past month annoys the United Nations and local activists, it plays well domestically. It attracts strong support from anti-immigration supporters of the right-wing One Nation Party and the conservative working class supporters of the opposition Labor Party.

Still, Howard, who is likely to call an election within the next few days for November 10, desperately wants to end the stand-off over the shipload of more than 400 asylum seekers who reached Australian territory last month - and avoid further embarrassment during the election campaign.

In frustration at a 10-day stand-off over the offloading of the asylum seekers at the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru, Canberra has been defying a condition set by Nauru's government that it would only accept those who voluntarily left the Australian Navy ship that had taken them there. Australian troops have been forcibly removing the asylum seekers from the ship, prompting the Nauru government to temporarily suspend accepting any more of them.

On Monday, a dozen asylum seekers were marched off a landing craft onto a mini-bus to take them to a detention center. "We are refugees, not criminals," one Iraqi man shouted from on board the bus. "They forced us, they hit us."

Australia's actions led to the United Nations announcing that it would not agree to process another 262 asylum seekers currently aboard another Australian Navy ship heading for Nauru.

Howard's strategy has been to campaign strongly on the immigration issue, and plug into the growing discomfort some Australians feel about increasing numbers of immigrants.

While one-third of Australians were born overseas or born of parents who were born on foreign soil, taking a tough line on asylum seekers - tagged by the government as "queue jumpers" - resonates with some recent immigrants who patiently waited for their formal applications for immigration to be processed.

Since the Australian government dramatically prevented the captain of the Norwegian ship Tampa from landing 433 asylum seekers on Australia's Christmas Island last month, Howard's electoral standing has soared. The latest opinion polls reveal the likelihood that Howard, who only months ago looked set for defeat, is now likely to win comfortably.

The opposition Labor Party at first opposed some of the government's moves, but after experiencing a backlash has lamely fallen in behind Howard. Commenting on the unloading of asylum seekers from the Australian ship, opposition leader Kim Beazley said: "Nobody is entitled to be on an Australian naval ship if the Australian navy does not want you on it."

Bolstered by its meteoric rise in the polls, the Howard government last week passed six separate amendments to Australia's migration legislation to dramatically restrict the rights of asylum seekers. One of the approved amendments allows for ships with asylum seekers aboard to be towed back into international waters, and asylum seekers to be transferred to quasi-prison centers on Nauru and other islands.

Another amendment excluded the most common landing sites of Ashmore Reef, Christmas Island and Cocos Island from Australian migration legislation. This means that asylum seekers who land there would be ineligible to apply for permanent residency.

Even pleas from the government's own Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) for a delay in passing the legislation were dismissed. "I am concerned that a restrictive refugee definition proposed in this bill will endanger people genuinely at risk of persecution," said commission president Professor Alice Tay.

The spokesman for the Refugee Council of Australia, Professor William Maley, views the amendments as "repressive and abominable legislation". "It is disturbing that the baying of uninformed opinion has so intimidated the major parties that they are prepared to pursue this particular course," Maley said.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees spokeswoman, Ellen Hansen, has also offered muted criticism of the legislation. "This sort of legislation sets a precedent for other countries who perhaps do not have the traditionally high standards that Australia has," she said. "It is very difficult to have countries like Pakistan and Iran keep their borders open to refugees when this is becoming increasingly difficult to do in a country like Australia, which faces far fewer numbers and fewer problems."

(Inter Press Service)