Tony Abbott's address to the Institute of Public Affairs on Friday — 'The Coalition's Plan for more secure borders' — restates the well known mantra 'stop the boats'. Its simplistic announcements do not consider the serious human rights issues, nor add much to discussion in this complex area.
Abbott's solution has one potentially good idea, of increasing the program to 15,000 with some community sponsorship of refugees. The old Community Refugee Support Scheme (CRSS) of the 1980s and early 1990s was a good way of encouraging community involvement in refugee resettlement.
The speech's bad ideas include reinstating temporary protection visas (TPV), reopening Nauru, forcing back the boats where possible, and denying refugee status to those 'transiting through Indonesia who lack identity papers'. Each point needs to be considered in turn.
There is no evidence that the TPV deterred anyone. In fact, what it did was cause major stress for refugees because of enforced family separation, and made the only option for family reunion for women and children to board boats — which is what happened in 2000 and 2001.
The psychological harm was documented by mental health professionals at the time. Administratively, it caused a major backlog of cases in both Immigration and then the Refugee Review Tribunal. In the end most people on TPVs were granted permanent residence, anyway. The TPV was flawed and in my view cruel.
Nauru was also never a 'solution', but a warehousing of refugees, many of whom were later resettled in Australia because they could not be sent anywhere else. It was different to the camps established under the Comprehensive Plan of Action for the mainly Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s; under that system, there was international agreement about resettlement of cases.
Who is going to sign up to a Nauru deal for an issue which is considered 'Australia's problem'?
Turning back the boats is also highly risky because the boats could be scuttled thus endangering the lives of the refugees and naval personnel.
The final idea is even more worrying — a presumption against refugee status for boat arrivals transiting through Indonesia who lack identity papers. What will be needed to rebut such a presumption and what protections will there be to ensure there is no refoulement of a refugee?
The Refugee Convention provides in article 31 that a receiving country cannot impose penalties on people arriving without lawful authority. A presumption against refugee status because you do not