Australia's ad hoc refugee rescue costs many lives

09 July 2012

When distress calls come in from asylum-seeker boats, Australia's current policy is to rescue by choice – in other words, on a case by case basis.

Some of these calls are from areas quite close to the Indonesian shoreline. Some are closer to Christmas Island.

To its credit, Australia’s border protection system usually rescues asylum seekers who have made distress calls from the Indonesian search and rescue zone. This zone includes all the international waters surrounding and north of Christmas Island.

The responsible Australian authorities include the Border Protection Command (BPC), under Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), under Transport Minister Anthony Albanese.

Occasionally, they fail to respond correctly to such distress calls. On these occasions they pass them to the Indonesian search and rescue authority BASARNAS and wait to see what happens. They do this knowing that BASARNAS has neither the maritime rescue capacity, nor the policy inclination, to rescue refugee boats reporting distress in international waters while trying to reach Australia.

When BPC/AMSA and BASARNAS play chicken with people’s lives in this way, boats sink and people die. We now know that this happened both with the Barokah, which foundered near Java in December 2011 with the drowning of up to 200 asylum seekers. It also occurred with the boat that capsized last month, on 21 June. In this case, Australia had known of distress calls for two days but had simply informed BASARNAS and then watched and waited.

Australia took charge of that rescue only after the boat was seen to have capsized on 21 June. An estimated 90 people drowned. These people could have been saved if Australia had mounted its own rescue in response to the distress messages phoned in on 19 and 20 June. We also know there had been a comparable incident in October 2009 (detailed in my new book Reluctant Rescuers).

When such tragedies occur, embarrassed Australian ministers and officials are economical with the facts. They try to blur public understanding of the legal status of the waters in question, obscuring questions of which government was most responsible for the loss of lives.

The public is often told – inaccurately – that such tragedies are happening ‘in Indonesian waters’. Indonesian waters actually extend only 19 kilometres from the Indonesian coast. And, anywhere at sea, response to distress calls is properly the responsibility of the nearest country or ships with capacity to rescue.

The fact that Australian

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Australia's ad hoc refugee rescue costs many lives

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