What has the Federal government got to hide? Reporters, camera crews and photographers have not been allowed to get within a reasonable distance to cover what is happening to refugees being dealt with by Australian troops off the coast of Nauru. There cannot possibly be any security reasons for the lack of access. No-one is doing any shooting. The events are of immense public importance. It seems that six asylum seekers were forcibly removed by 12 soldiers in full battledress from the HMAS Manoora on to Nauru for immigration processing in Nauru. In the absence of access to events by journalists to report to the public, Australians have every right to assume the worst: that the Government has ordered troops to use force to remove the asylum seekers. They certainly should treat any statement from Defence Minister Reith’s office and the defence forces with a great deal of scepticism. Keeping the media away is the first sign that they have something to hide.
It seems that the Government refugee policy — which took a further turn for the worse with the arrival of the Tampa with more than 400 rescued asylum seekers in August — is slowly unravelling. The Government’s new policy is to attempt to prevent these people from landing on Australian soil through the intervention of Navy vessels which then take them to islands in the Pacific for processing under UN rules without access to the Australian courts. With Opposition support, it also removed Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef from the Australian migration zone to prevent refugees landing there from obtaining access to the Australian courts. However, the boats are still slowly tricking through, and instead of having an orderly processing in Australia of the few thousand people a year who escape the hellish Taliban regime, we have a vastly more expensive process of using Australian naval ships to take people to camps on Pacific islands. The camps have cost Australia more than accommodating the refugees in Australia. The cost of the naval ships is unfortunately anyone’s guess. The Government will not provide costings. It only says that Labor’s costing of $20 million a week for the naval picket in the northwest is wrong. The Government should issuing costings on the whole exercise – including the money it has offered the Nauru Government to take the refugees. That money is little short of crude bribe.
Nauru has agreed to the processing of 262 more refugees who were picked by HMAS Tobruk last weekend. But the UN has not agreed to process them there, so the job might have to be done by Australian immigration officials who would have to be taken to Nauru at great cost.
This whole process of taking the refugees to a foreign country by Australian vessels where they are housed in camps built at Australian cost and then processed by Australian officials is deeply flawed. We have taken the mountain to Mohammed.
The use – or misuse — of the Navy this way must be undermining other defence capability, not least responding to the threats posed by the terrorist attack on the US last month.
No doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time. It seemed like good politics, too. Getting rid of the refugees seemed to have popular support. But as events unfold, this attempt to export the problem will prove more costly economically as time goes on and as Australians see their soldiers under the orders of the Government using force on unarmed people in a foreign land, they will realise that the traditional sense of Australian fair play has been offended.
Prime Minister John Howard will no doubt be rushing to an election before the whole thing blows up in his face.