Australia’s position in asylum seeker policy is nothing new to you: the arrival of refugees by boat to Australia has been continually cocked-up, for lack of a more eloquent term, since the children overboard scandal in the Howard years: no government since gets off guilt-free at their handling of asylum seekers in detention in Australia. After all, while the number of people in detention centres is currently on the decline, we’re still the only country in the world that subjects children to mandatory detention as a first-choice measure.
The reality of our asylum seeker policy is grim at the best of times; today, a damning University of Queensland research paper—the first academic analysis of its kind in Australia—investigating and researching all the boat “turn-backs” the government has instigated since 2001, has been released.
The study, led by researchers Andreas Schloenhardt and Colin Craig has made its most significant find by concluding that there is no evidence any of the 29 boat turn-backs since 2001 have saved any lives whatsoever; by contrast, those boat turn-backs can be accounted for eight deaths.
Now, while it’d be easy to go ahead and say that boat turn-backs are straight up losing lives rather than saving them, the study admits that the “secrecy” surrounding these boat turn-backs may well obscure the reality: in other words, turning back boats could be saving more lives than we know of (that, in itself, though, is difficult to discern), and it could be taking more lives than we know of. “Given the official secrecy surrounding this topic, it is not possible
to say with certainty that there have not been further cases of death or
injury,” the study states, according to The Guardian.
One of the study’s researchers, Andreas Schloenhardt, criticised Australia’s global position on asylum seeker policy, considering the comparatively low number of arrivals to some European countries: “In Italy, where in the first month this year they had 6,000 arrivals by boat, they debate to what lengths they go to to rescue these people not about what they can do to stop them coming in the first place.”
Schloenhardt also said to the Guardian, “We have a situation where international refugee laws are completely and
utterly meaningless for Australia and the government is simply so
dishonest about that. That is what is so frustrating for me.”
The report comes after Tony Abbott this week claimed that “Australians are sick of being lectured to by the United Nations” over asylum seeker policy. The UN’s following return rally was just as much of a smackdown.
Via The Guardian.
Lead image by Scott Fisher via Getty.
