Prime Minister Turnbull’s New York excursion is a mixed bag. On one hand he announces that Australia's humanitarian refugee intake will be set permanently at almost 19,000 per year and will now include a component of Central Americans under a series of pledges, but on the other hand he boasts that our border protection policies, zero tolerance for asylum seekers and indefinite off-shore detention is world’s best practice that everyone else should follow.
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Central America? What happened to our responsibility for Middle Eastern refugees, a part of the world in which Australia has regularly been unleashing its military ever since joining forces with British imperialism during the First World War? Could it be that there are fewer Muslims in Central America?
At Barack Obama's invitation-only special summit on the refugee crisis, the Prime Minister has also stumped up fresh cash. A new commitment of $130 million will go towards providing aid to displaced persons across the world, as well as more resources for migration agencies facing funding uncertainty.
Under his new formula, Australia's slated increase in the regular humanitarian intake from 13,750 to 18,750 has been effectively made permanent, over and above the skilled migration intake and irrespective of Australia's special intake of 12,000 refugees from the Syrian and Iraq humanitarian crisis. Tony Abbott originally announced the increase but never promised it would be permanent.
All well and good, but meanwhile, back home in Australia, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten chose to focus on the element of Australia's policy mix that Mr Turnbull has been more inclined to gloss over in New York: indefinite offshore detention.
"I notice that a lot of Mr Turnbull and Mr Dutton and the others are out there lecturing the rest of the world," he said.
Greens Immigration spokesperson Nick McKim was more forthright than Mr Shorten, not being afraid to call a spade a spade when he commented that “The government’s international bragging about its policies towards refugees and people seeking asylum cannot hide the shameful reality of offshore detention from the rest of the world. As Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton try to convince the international community that everything is going just fine, people on Manus Island and Nauru are at breaking point,” he said.
Indeed, not only are Australia’s policies not succeeding, they represent a failure of epic proportions with massive human and financial costs.
While the Prime Minister and Immigration Minister are falsely bragging in New York, here in Australia there are yet more revelations of abuse of women and children under Australia’s protection on Nauru.
Mr Turnbull and Mr Dutton need to explain to the rest of the world what they intend for the people trapped in limbo in offshore detention. As Senator McKim said, it was insulting to the intelligence for the government to claim a policy “success” by any measure.
We know, as does the rest of the world, that there has been extraordinary human suffering as a result of this government’s policies. We also know that there have been massive cost blow outs, to the point where it now costs much more than half a million dollars per year to keep a single person in offshore detention. And despite the government’s lies to the world, we know that people continue to risk their lives by trying to get to Australia in unseaworthy vessels.