Radio Australia Today Editorial

Tamil Asylum Seekers. Damned Each Way.

27 October 2009

It seems that the mode of transport asylum seekers use to come to Australia is the defining factor on how they are treated.

Many people fleeing persecution come to Australia by airplane, and formally seek asylum once they are in the country. For others, the only option on escaping their country is to hire the services of so-called ‘people smugglers’ and get transported on risky and dangerous old boats across a very difficult stretch of water, only to land on a barren coastline, where the chances of survival are terribly low. For people who say that these people are ‘queue-jumpers’ is to ignore the fact that a persecuted people, such as Tamils in Sri Lanka are unlikely to have access to passports and the freedom of movement to get on an international plane undetected from the people allegedly persecuting them.

So then why are these distresseed people being treated so differently to people who come on a QANTAS flight. Is it easier for the government? Is it for the political scoring that can be made by a government that is being seen to be tough on boat people?

The government denies this of course. It says that in the case of the 78 Sri Lankans now awaiting processing in Indoensia, these people were on a boat that came from Indonesia, and therefore it’s reasonable that Indonesia take its share of responsibility for handling them. The Rudd government says it is helping Indonesia by paying for the detention and some of the processing of the asylum seekers.

The Rudd government also vehemently denies comparisons between its actions and the policy of the previous Howard government to send asylum seekers to Nauru (as part of that government’s “Pacific Solution”). As the ABC’s Tony Jones noted last night on Lateline, the big difference between the two programs is that the asylum seekers in Nauru at least had a chance of eventually being able to settle in Australia. The likelihood of the asylum seekers currently in Indonesia ever coming to Australia is much less.

That’s a distinction that may well prove to be a political bonus for the Rudd government in the short term, but as more and more Australians come to realise the Tamils are being shunted away, never to reach our shores, there could well be a bounce against the government from its own heartland, the very people who voted for Kevin Rudd because they were fed up with the perceived heartlessness of the Howard administration.

It’s a danger that Kevin Rudd should ignore at his own long-term political risk.

Meanwhile these Tamils who couldn’t stay in their own country are finding that their attempts to find a safe home almost as heart-wrenching.