Australia's 20 years of asylum seeker dog whistling
Throughout the electoral fracas over boat arrivals and the PNG solution, Tony Abbott has been keen to isolate Australia's border control challenges from any international context: in his terms they are 'Australia's problem'. Of course this is language designed to reinforce a sense of crisis and threat, popular intuitions that he plays upon without remorse.
But Abbott knows that Australian border control policy has always been influenced by international policy trends and forced migration realities. He may deny it, but the Opposition Leader understands that the Australian discussion is part of an international debate about national regional responses to people movement.
A historical perspective helps to illuminate this. Take mandatory detention. As a policy it was developed and debated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the moment when the curtain rose on a two decades long Australian political and cultural drama over the issue of asylum seekers in boats.
As is well known, in 1993–1994 the Keating Government introduced mandatory detention of irregular migrants, with the strong support of the then Liberal opposition. Indeed, then, as now, the Liberal Party made it their business to place political pressure on the Government on the issue of migration and borders. During an interview in 2011, Philip Ruddock acknowledged that in the early 1990s the Liberals were deliberately making the matter of boat arrivals a political malignancy for Labor to 'cure'.
But where did the Liberal Party look for inspiration? Their advocacy of mandatory detention emerged at the same time as other Western nations were introducing stringent border measures.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, as European countries aspired towards greater economic and political unity, policymakers negotiated a framework of laws and organising principles (the Schengen agreement) which would structure Europe's immigration and border control system. This framework construed migration as a security issue linked to challenges such as terrorism, illegal trafficking and transnational crime.
European discourse on migration during this period became 'securitised': it conceptualised transnational people movement as a threat that required enforceable policies of exclusion. UK Prime Minister John Major even referred to European borders as a 'perimeter fence', language that evokes plagues of pests rather than human beings.
Anti-immigration parties gained electoral successes across Europe — the term asylum seeker became associated with African, Eastern European and Middle Eastern identities that formed a distinct 'other' and were in turn associated with anti-social characteristics such as criminality and welfare dependence. It's hard to imagine how Australian