Migrants, Refugees and Multiculturalism

At the time of the Cambodian refugee crisis under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal government, Ms Lê already worked on asylum seeker cases. At the time she lobbied for better conditions and, with others, for higher refugee intake quota. Below is the transcript of the lecture.

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16 December 2011: Evil Smugglers or Extreme Rhetoric? - The Political Origins and Development of Australia's People Smuggling Legislation. Jack Smit's Masters Thesis - The research findings indicate that the increasingly harsh measures imposed by successive Australian governments targeting smugglers and passengers represents an increasingly punitive and continuous series of policy proposals and parliamentary discourse...

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The Curious Ambivalence of Australia's Immigration Policy

Capitol Theatre
Saturday, May 12, 2001, 6pm
Canberra ACT

Firstly, I wish to pay tribute to the young Australian woman who stood in the Royal Exhibition Hall in Melbourne last Wednesday, four days ago, stealing the opening from the celebration of the past, setting the agenda clearly for the future.

I want to say a very sincere, heartfelt 'Thank you' to Hayley Eves, who at 15 said it all:

"I am young, I'm a woman and I'm an Asian Australian. That I am standing here in front of you demonstrates clearly that we have changed."

Thank you, Hayley. Thank you for my children and the children of the thousands of multicultural families who today make up the rich tapestry of Australia and Australian life. There is no going back - you, Hayley, are the voice of the present and of the future and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your courage and your inspiration.

* * * * * *

Migrants, refugees and multiculturalism: the curious ambivalence of Australia's immigration policy - this is the title allocated to me for today's lecture.

I am conscious of speaking in the context of the month in which we have heard not only Hayley Eves but also the voice of Shane Stone accusing the current Howard Government of being "mean, tricky, out of touch and not listening".

We heard the voice of Malcolm Fraser, former Liberal Prime Minister, speaking out clearly asking the Government to re-assess its detention regime and its commitment to human rights and international obligations.

And we heard, on May 2, the dismissive response of Immigration Minister Ruddock that

"Malcolm has joined the ranks of the well-intentioned."

That sentence did not serve the Minister well - in the context of Shane Stone's criticisms it proves the point. It was under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal Government, as Ruddock obviously knows full well, that the most substantial intake of Asians into Australia occurred with the Indo-Chinese refugees changing forever the face of Australia.

Nancy Viviani gives credit to the Fraser Government for its role at the time, noting that: "For Australians, Vietnamese refugee entry was the first real test of the disestablishment of the White Australia policy and a test successfully passed."

Fraser also put in place an enduring settlement philosophy of multiculturalism stating at the opening of the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in October, 1980:

"We used to have a view that to really be a good Australian, to love Australia, you almost had to cut your links with the country of origin. But I don't think that was right and it never was right."

Malcolm Fraser deserved better from Philip Ruddock. He deserved, and deserves, respect and attention from the current Minister and the Howard Government. Because they have got it wrong. Not to listen to the people who are the visionaries, to the human rights advocates, to the calls to social justice and international responsibility, is to sound the death knell for any government. Shane Stone was right. Historically, there has always been an ambivalence, an uncertainty, an ambiguity in government approach to migrants, refugees and multiculturalism. A "them and us" approach which has never quite accepted the refugee as the migrant as the citizen. Has never quite known when to recognise that the sojourner is now the son, or daughter.

In 1988, the year of the Bicentenary of Australia, the Federation of Ethnic Communities Council held its annual conference in Canberra.

The then Minister for Immigration, the Hon. Clyde Holding, hosted a reception in the Great Hall, the first such gathering since the opening of the new Parliament House by the Queen earlier that year.

Minister Holding opened the gathering with words to the effect of:

"I am very pleased to be welcoming you all as representatives of the ethnic communities to the Great Hall of the Australian people."

As quick as a flash, the voice of a young Vietnamese Councillor from Fairfield in NSW rang out, "I thought we ARE the Australian people". I have never forgotten the words of Councillor Phuong Ngo on that occasion.

Multiculturalism as a policy is now past its time. The interchange in Parliament House in 1988 illustrated something of the confusion, the ambivalence, of that policy as it evolved over the years.

A year later, in 1989, a new report from a council headed by Sir James Gobbo, drew a precise and highly balanced definition of multiculturalism,: a right to ethnic and cultural heritage but only within a framework of loyalty and obligation to Australia.

Phuong Ngo in 1988, Hayley Eves in 2001 - these are the voices of the reality of multicultural Australia. Ngo demanded recognition; Hayley embraced it.

True multiculturalism stood on stage this week in the person of a 15 year old Australian.

We have come a long way.

A long way, but not all the way.

Look at the current Immigration Minister's web site though and see the ambivalences, the ambiguities, reflected in the photo gallery displayed there.

First photo - a tidy Curtin Detention Centre, then the Centre destroyed by rioters; then numerous photographs of the Minister with various "ethnic leaders" attending various ethnic rituals.

Good but not good enough.

* * * * * *

Lest there are any tempted to label me "well intentioned", which really means "without substance", I want to establish something of my credentials.

I am a migrant. I am Australian.

I am a historian as well as an activist and advocate for social reform.

I have been actively involved in immigration and refugee work in the non-Government voluntary sector since 1975, that is for the past twenty-five years.

So the years I will principally cover here tonight, are years I have lived and experienced of our migration history.

* * * * * *

I want to focus primarily on the ambivalence, the ambiguity in our migration and refugee policy since 1975 - to show that Governments have generally been dragged reluctantly to consider human rights issues in the context of political pragmatism.

The Australian Government's policy towards refugees has arguably been one which is rooted in self-interest internationally rather than in a fundamental commitment to refugees and human rights.

Non-government organisations (NGO's) have been the catalysts for government change and the conscience of the nation in international affairs.

But to set a brief historical context, we go back to the year of Federation.

* * * * * *

When the new Australian Parliament met in 1901, fear of and hostility to Asia was one of the great defining characteristics of Australian identity. Parliament's first priority was to enshrine the White Australia Policy in the Immigration Restriction Act, unashamedly designed to keep Asians out of Australia.

Whilst fear of the "yellow peril" dated back to the days of the Australian gold rushes, economic concerns had underpinned much of the political emotionalism during the final two decades of the nineteenth century.

The Chinese were said to work long hours, seven days a week, for poor wages.

Most had come here to escape the poverty in China and were sending money back to support their families whilst living on a pittance themselves.

This was seen as undermining everything the Unions were fighting to achieve and was placing Australian families at an economic disadvantage.

George Dibbs labelled the Chinese Restriction and Regulation Act 1888 (NSW), "a sudden spasm of fear and panic".

Alfred Deakin, who served three times as Prime Minister of Australia, was clear in his stance:

"Unity of race is an absolute to the unity of Australia."

"It is not the bad qualities but the good qualities of these alien races that make them dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance."

The fundamental racism of the White Australia policy is undeniable. Deakin voiced it thus:

"They (Asians) are separated from us by a gulf which we cannot bridge to the advantage of either."

Under Calwell and Chifley, in the post war era, a determined nation building exercise began.

They were not humanitarian in focus - they were pragmatists.

Calwell wanted workers, not intellectuals. He saw a stronger nation as the essential precondition to upholding white Australia. He was ruthless: he was taking the cream and what suited Australia best.

As Paul Kelly has noted, however, the irony is that post-war immigration sowed the seeds for a multicultural society and the abolition of White Australia. [1]

In 1972, the Whitlam Labor Government was elected.

Whitlam ended the White Australia policy; recognised China; denied any support to the apartheid regime in South Africa and set the framework for Mabo with recognition of the Gurinje as landowners in truth.

Gough Whitlam said recently,

"I was profoundly embarrassed by (the White Australia Policy) and did all I could to change it." [2]

Yet Whitlam's policies towards migrants and refugees were ambivalent and selective, rooted firmly in his own political agendas.

From the time of Whitlam, however, until today, focus moved from the domestic to the international arena.

* * * * * *

In 1975, Saigon fell to the "liberating" forces of the North Vietnamese and the exodus of refugees from Vietnam began in earnest.

Australia was reluctant to grant kudos to the final betrayal by the Western governments of those who had served them loyally and well.

In Cambodia (Kampuchea) the betrayal of the people was even more stark as Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh, and other cities, of residents and forced them into the countryside, slaughtering them in their thousands.

The West was to plead ignorance for the next few years of the realities of life in "Pol Pot Time", as the Cambodians now call those years, 1975-79.

Likewise, news from Laos was controlled and only the continual arrival of refugees across the borders into Thailand gave testimony to the events unfurling in that country as the Communists assumed power.

In Australia, Gough Whitlam was strongly against Australia accepting refugees from Vietnam.

He was supported in his stance by Clyde Cameron, then Minister for Labour and Immigration in Whitlam's Cabinet.

It was apparent to Whitlam and other astute members of the government and public by 2 April, 1975, that the war in Vietnam was virtually over.

Whitlam made it clear that Australia would support a united Vietnam and that the government would offer post-war economic aid.

Cameron records his position regarding the possible evacuation of Vietnamese who wanted to come to Australia, writing:

"I rejected the 'bloodbath' propaganda from Saigon and the USA which was being peddled by the Liberal and Country Parties and I decided that all Vietnamese would be treated in the same way as European applicants for emigration to Australia, except that I added 'unprocessed' orphans to the categories of eligible applicants ...Whitlam then put an injunction on the processing of all nominations of Vietnamese." [3]

A few days later, Whitlam took over total responsibility for Vietnam migration. [4]

Whitlam's attitude was made abundantly clear to both Cameron and to the compassionate Don Willesee who went to see him on 21 April, 1975 (co-incidently, the day President Thieu resigned).

Cameron recalled:

"...Whitlam stuck out his jaw and, grinding his teeth, turned to Willesee and thundered, 'I'm not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us!"

and Cameron agreed. [5]

The last days in Saigon were a nightmare for ethical Australian Government officials torn between duty and morality [6].

Early in May, 1975, Whitlam, pressured by the USA, had a turn around and agreed to admit some three thousand refugees, from Guam and Thailand. In the shambles, Cameron was told to resume control of the programme.

Whitlam's private secretary, Mike Delaney, and Cameron's private secretary, Wayne Gibbons, were sent to select appropriate refugees for resettlement in Australia. [7]

It is important to note that both these men were still key players in the bureaucracy in 1989 when the "second wave" of boat people arrived on Australia's Northern shores. [8]

The culture of the Immigration Department in 1989 had been set long before, in 1975.

In Australia two powerful lobby groups had arisen - those concerned about the plight of Vietnamese "orphans" (the baby lobby) and those concerned about the plight of the Vietnamese students in Australia - whether they should return home immediately or whether their families should be admitted to join them in Australia. [9]

Out of these two initial groups was to emerge the powerful lobby group of the Indo-China Refugee Association (ICRA) Australia with branches in every State. [10]

Whitlam was reported as saying: "These Vietnamese sob stories don't ring my withers" and those most vocal in urging the government to accept refugees were Whitlam's political opponents. [11][12]

The media and the Opposition were scathing about the Whitlam Government's lack of commitment to former allies.

Polls in May, 1975, revealed, however, that there was not overwhelming support in the general community for the acceptance of Indo-Chinese refugees - one third of those polled were against letting Vietnamese enter. Lobby groups continued their support undaunted. [13]

By May, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had determined that all those who left Vietnam of their own volition in the wake of the Communist victory were genuine refugees and entitled to resettlement.

A clearer picture had emerged of the numbers involved, roughly 200,000 in makeshift camps throughout the region. [14]

Australia was forced by the USA and the ASEAN countries of first asylum to agree to play its part.

It was these international pressures which led to Whitlam's change of policy and to a co-operation with the UNHCR for Australia to take its "fair share" of refugees.

Domestically, Church groups (the Catholic Bishops, the Anglican Primate), the RSL, some unions, the Vietnamese students and various non-Government lobby groups kept up their pressure for Australia to resettle refugees in larger numbers.

Whitlam made refugee policy throughout 1975, clearly aiming to balance International pressure with his concern to keep faith with Hanoi.

The families of Vietnamese students residing in Australia were deliberately ignored apparently out of concern to avoid an anti-Communist backlash in Australian politics.

Also ignored were the refugees from Laos and Cambodia who were languishing in the camps of Thailand.

In June, 1975, the Senate referred the refugee issue to its Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. Its report, and two volumes of evidence, makes fascinating reading.

Many of the people who gave evidence to that committee were still involved in refugee work in 1989 when the second wave of boats arrived in Australia - people like Roger Fordham; Wayne Gibbons; Dr Charles Price; and Michael Sullivan were all to play important roles throughout the years.

The evidence of Mr T W W Pye (Bill), Canberra, was instrumental in bringing the plight of the Vietnamese students and their families to the attention of the Committee and through them to the, by then, Fraser Government. These were the seed days of the extended family reunion policy. [15]

Another interesting submission to the Committee was that by a Canadian Pastor, Rev RT (Bob) Henry, who was fluent in Vietnamese and had spent several years as a linguist in Vietnam until the Tet Offensive of 1968.

Henry spoke of the difficulties experienced by new arrivals in culture, employment and language and misunderstandings by the host society.

In general, those giving evidence to the Committee were sympathetic and knowledgeable with practical suggestions to enable successful resettlement of the newcomers to proceed. [16]

The Liberal-Country Party came to power in late 1975 and established a separate Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (DIEA) reversing the Labor Government's merger of the old Immigration Department with the Department of Labor.

Then, on 21 January, 1976, Michael McKellar, the new Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, announced two initiatives - the first, to accept 800 refugees, mainly from Thailand (for the first time) on the basis of their having family links or other ties with Australia; the second, to cancel undertakings the Whitlam Government had sought from a number of "special case" Vietnamese refugees (such as Mr Tran Van Lam, former President of the Senate of South Vietnam and a former Ambassador to Australia) that they would not engage in political activity in Australia.

Whilst both these measures appeared fair and in distinct contrast with the restrictive policies of the Labor government, more astute observers noted that the family links criteria actually narrowed the eligibility factor further and lobby groups then applied pressure to have the category broadened.

After a period of calm and few developments, the first Indo-Chinese boat slipped quietly into Darwin on 28 April, 1976, with four refugees from Vietnam aboard.

They attracted very little public interest and were granted two year temporary entry permits (TEPs), thereby making Australia for the first time a country of first asylum rather than merely of resettlement.

Two further boats arrived in November and December of 1976, were granted TEPs, flown to Brisbane for medicals and allowed to stay.

Now, however, the Press (particularly the Melbourne Sun News Pictorial) began to express some concerns about the "trickle" becoming a "tide of human flotsam".

During 1977, boat arrivals in the ASEAN countries, especially Thailand and Malaysia, increased steadily but were not resettled in equal numbers.

Singapore and Thailand began to pressure Australia to take more refugees; the reported shooting of some boat people attempting to land in Malaysia and increasing reports of "push offs" leading to death, awoke compassion in the hearts of many in Australia to offer their help in direct settlement of refugees into the community.

Australia's responsibility was argued by the ASEAN countries in terms of her past involvement, under a Liberal Government, in the war. Vietnam Veterans also felt some obligation and guilt for the people now pouring out of their former homelands because of a war, or wars, lost by the USA and her allies.

McKellar did not cave in easily. He resisted the pressures to raise numbers and in the government's "Green Paper on Immigration Policies and Australia's Population" he attempted to balance Australia's obligations as a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees whilst establishing the principle that the decision to accept refugees must always remain with the government and be determined by Australia's capacity to absorb them.

He talked about skills being used to assess some refugees for entry but the majority would always come under a family tie or other link with Australia.

Australia linked its refugee intake policy to that of other countries such as the USA and Canada which were to be used as the barometers whereby Australia would calculate her "fair share".

The other concept of linking intake numbers to "Australia's capacity to absorb them" was never defined or explained and thus remains a running sore to this day.

Obviously political factors were most important in the calculation of refugee entry numbers. Since there was no way of knowing what numbers of refugees could be accepted without a domestic backlash, caution was seen to be the best policy to be adopted by the Government. [17]

In June and July 1977, four more boats arrived in Northern Australia, one of them undetected, which aroused considerable alarm in Government circles.

The Government tried desperately to send "signals to Asia" about the dangers of the voyage in order to deter others from making the trip.

Thailand, however, announced that, with approximately 95,000 refugees on her territory, she would take no more and began pushing off with or without refuelling.

Thai pirates also began preying on the small boats and it was estimated that between 10 - 40% of all boat refugees in 1978-80 lost their lives either to the sea or to the pirates who raped, pillaged and killed them.

In Australia, refugee boats arrived almost daily in the last two months of 1977 bringing the numbers of unauthorised arrivals (as they were to be called in the 1990s) to 857 compared with assisted arrivals of 2107.

Politically, the Government was vulnerable because there were the elections to think about and a certain Senator Mulvihill, acting as the ALP spokesman on Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, declared that Australia should begin turning refugee boats back to sea.

Mulvihill questioned whether the boat arrivals were really genuine political refugees; advanced the cause of refugees in Latin America who, he argued, were more politically deserving; and raised the spectre of disease and quarantine risk being brought by the unauthorised arrivals.

Fifteen years later his counterpart was also a Senator: WA's Labor Jim McKiernan, who, as Chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Immigration under Ministers Hand and Bolkus, raised the same questions.

WA Liberal Ross Lightfoot and other WA talk-back callers went further and suggested, variously, shooting arrivals as they landed, bombing them at sea or putting them on a small island and either leaving them to die or blasting them out of existence.

Labor Member for Kalgoorlie, Graeme Campbell, joined the radical chorus in the mid-1990s playing to the anti-Immigration lobby. He was to be expelled from the Labor Party prior to the 1995 Federal Election. He ran as an Independent, won his seat and for a time at least championed the rise of Independent Pauline Hanson, Member for Oxley, in the espousal of her anti-Asian, anti -ATSIC views in Parliament and the community. [18]

The official response from the Governments of both eras, up to 1996, was to ignore the redneck solutions and come up with something practical.

In 1977, the solution was to send selection teams of Australian Immigration Officials to the South East Asian camps to process boat arrivals for Australia.

News that a large freighter, hijacked from the Vietnamese Government in Ho Chi Minh City, had called briefly at the refugee island of Bidong in Malaysia and was currently refuelling in Indonesia to continue its voyage to Australia with "a large number of refugees on board", made the dispatch of selection teams more urgent.

The announcement was made by McKellar and Health Minister, Ralph Hunt, on 23 November, 1977 and the teams left for Singapore and Malaysia the next week with more officials sent to strengthen the task force in Thailand.

On 29 November, 1977 the freighter, Song Be 12, finally docked amidst huge international media publicity in Darwin with 183 people on board, including three Vietnamese Communist soldiers under guard in the hold. (Incidently, my future husband was one of the crew on that boat.)

Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock was urged to return the boat and its occupants back to Vietnam as allegations of piracy and hijacking were added to the protests by Bob Hawke, then speaking as a Unionist, and other pro-Hanoi voices that these were "not genuine refugees". [19]

In 1989, Bob Hawke, then Prime Minister, was to voice the same sentiments of the boat arrivals of that period.

Declaring "Bob's not your uncle", he vowed to return the 1989 boat arrivals to their country of origin, Cambodia, whilst at the same time offering refuge, and eventually permanent residence to the more than 40,000 Chinese illegal visa overstayers and students stranded in Australia at the time of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4 1989.

In 1977 pressures of the December election forced the Liberal Government to act with speed to stem the direct "flow" of boat arrivals and the deterrent factor in selection of more refugees off-shore led to the announcement in mid-December of an increase in the number of arrivals - an emergency quota of 1,000 was set, soon raised to 1,500, to be airlifted from Malaysia to Australia in a five week period from 23 December, 1977.

Non-government community groups, [20] responded and over the next few years applied pressure to the respective Governments to lift quotas based on the community's ability and willingness to respond.

Out of this community interest was born the CRSS, the Community Refugee Settlement Scheme [21] and the numbers acceptance policy of Indo-Chinese refugees was thereafter largely driven by the ability of community lobby groups and their leaders to convince the Government of community acceptance of the newcomers.

Some were quick to see the opportunity for Government funding to increase lobbying power and the refugee and ethnic lobby groups grew into what was by the mid-1990's a perceptively, and deceptively, powerful ethnic "industry".

Only the Indo-China Refugee Association of the ACT, under my Presidency, and its Western Australian Office with spokesperson Richard Egan, remained truly independent of government funding and were therefore able to maintain effective lobbying during the 1990s on behalf of the new wave of boat arrivals. [22]

Other groups, such as the Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA), found their position compromised by their increasing dependence on government funding under the Labor Governments of Hawke and Keating.

In the mid 1990's, the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils (FECCA) became largely a mouthpiece for Labor policies and was felt by many to be out of touch with the communities it purported to represent.

When Howard's Liberal Government came to power, funding to both groups was cut drastically and there was, for a time, a significant silence from both RCOA and FECCA on refugee and migrant issues, including the Hanson debate.

In the wake of the violent demonstrations at Woomera last year, Minister Ruddock made a clear public threat to cut funding to the Refugee Council after comments from Margaret Piper, which he found untenable.

The solution found by the Labor Government in 1990 to the arrival of boats on the Northern coastline was to implement a harsh detention regime whereby all processing was to be carried out from remote Port Hedland in the far north of Western Australia.

This policy was developed after the first few boats awakened considerable sympathy at their point of entry (Darwin and Swift Bay) with community groups responding to assist them.

The Aboriginals' reaction to the arrival of the Cambodian boats in 1989 was to share the land with them because:

"...we, like they, know what it is to be dispossessed in our own land."

Immigration bureaucrats reacted badly to any suggestions that the community should be allowed to assist the new arrivals - they had the lessons of the past to learn from. Put the new arrivals into the community and it would be too difficult to prise them free from the "do-gooders".

Wayne Gibbons, Ian Simmington, John Forster were all old hands from the refugee Immigration bureaucracy of the 70's and their advice was taken seriously by both the Labor Government and the Opposition in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

Simmington was first off the rank with a paper delivered in Refugee Week, July 1989 at the ANU where he outlined the links between China, Hong Kong and Australia's future Immigration policy.

From that time, the Immigration bureaucrats drove Australia's policy regarding boat arrivals out of a fear for the future should the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China not go smoothly.

The notion of "signals to Asia" was established. Senator Jim Short, Liberal Opposition spokesman on Immigration, earned the irreverent nicknames of "Signaller Jim" or "Semaphore Jim" for his persistent use of the term as a justification for the detention deterrent policy.

In the six year period, 1975 - 1980, fewer than 2,000 people arrived directly by boat, unprocessed, on Australia's shores seeking asylum. They were mostly absorbed into the community without fuss or great expense to the taxpayer.

In the seven years, 1989 - 1996, roughly the same numbers arrived and, thanks to the detention regime and the "Rolls Royce Refugee Processing Scheme" established under Labor Ministers Hand and Bolkus, the cost to the Australian taxpayer was in the vicinity of sixty million dollars ($60 million).

In the year 1997 - 98, the cost of detention services alone was $21.5 million rising to an astronomical $97.5 million in 1999-2000, last year with total expenditure on detention infrastructure of $24.4 million. About the same is estimated for this year. [23]

Minister Ruddock has frequently lamented this expenditure, as well he should.

There has to be a better way but the bureaucratic culture has been set. It is a culture of reaction rather than of interaction, communication and pro-activity.

The confusion of the 1990's following Tiananmen Square outstrips anything experienced in the 1970's after the fall of Saigon yet, essentially, the ingredients, including many of the main players in the bureaucracy and amongst the NGO's, were the same.

The Chinese students were treated to the sight of the Prime Minister of Australia weeping on the platform of the Great Hall of Parliament House and were able to use this to great advantage later against the bureaucracy who, horrified by the implications of having the Prime Minister make emotional responses to allow any group to stay in Australia without formal processing, tried to delay the inevitable as long as possible.

In May 1991, a group of five Chinese students challenged the bureaucratic delays in the Federal Court, won, and opened the door to the processing of some 20,000 others. [24] I personally assisted in their preparation of the case after the suffering of families caught in limbo became apparent.

On December 31, 1991 a group of Chinese landed undetected at Swift Bay on the far North Coast of Western Australia and brought all the xenophobic fears of the bureaucrats and others to the fore once again.

The old themes of 1977 were revived even amidst the general admiration expressed in the media by those involved in rescuing the group of 56 Isabella's from the desert and mountains of the remote Kimberleys.

As police sergeant, Michael Harper, voiced it, "If they've come all the way from China, then they've made Superman look like a sheila." [25]

They had indeed come from China and the worst fears of those behind the 1989 drive to control Immigration intake through legislative reform had been realised.

By legalising the criteria in the 19 December, 1989 Migration Reforms, the bureaucrats made a rod for their own backs and for the Government and taxpayers too.

With each successive international crisis - Cambodia, China, Timor, Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo, they found little room to move and were forced time and again to amend the legislation.

The first boats in 1989, 1990 and 1991 originated from Cambodia - their arrival and exact composition largely kept from exposure to the media.

Contrary to popular belief, these arrivals were not solely Cambodians fleeing Pol Pot but Vietnamese fleeing either the peace process in Cambodia or persecution in South Vietnam.

Some who guided the boats were ex-military officers who had only recently been released from the Communist prison camps in Vietnam and who had made their way across land to set sail from Cambodia.

Once again, politics took precedence over Human Rights.

Gareth Evans, as Foreign Minister, was committed to the Australian backed election process in Cambodia - the peace plan - and this had to be upheld at all costs. Decisions on the future of the boat arrivals were delayed time and time again.

After representations by myself, ICRA and RCOA lawyers, some of the Vietnamese were released quietly into the community as residents on humanitarian grounds.

Allegedly to dissuade other unauthorised boat arrivals, the detention regime became tougher; many people cracked and were confined to psychiatric wards in Sydney and Perth as days in detention turned into years. [26]

The first Chinese boat arrivals, known as the "Isabella's", were transferred to Port Hedland and there treated so badly that the Catholc Archbishop of Perth, Barry Hickey and his appointed Priest, Father Larry Reitmeyer, enlisted my assistance and of ICRA (ACT) to intervene and lobby Government on their behalf.

The RCOA lawyers, also incensed by the illegalities and breaches of Human Rights in the system, persuaded several law firms to work pro bono for the Cambodians and some later Chinese arrivals. Litigation in the Federal Court, through to the High Court became increasing problematic to the Government as costs soared out of control. [27]

In 1994, the Beihai boats bringing dispossessed Sino-Vietnamese from the PRC peaked in the Christmas week, 22-28 December when 315 people arrived, most of them children.

Considerable community concern was expressed on both sides of the debate which began to focus around the issue of asylum for people on the basis of China's one child policy.

On 6 December 1994, Justice Sackville of the Federal Court handed down a decision to grant refugee status to a couple from China on that basis. This was a blow to the Government who had challenged the original decision and lost.

A champion of the Beihai arrivals at this time, and subsequently, was Independent Senator Brian Harradine who was a problem to the Government because he held the balance of power in the Senate. [28]

The Comprehensive Plan of Action established in Geneva by the UNHCR in 1989 had decreed that all Vietnamese should be resettled or repatriated by the end of 1995. [29]

Significantly, the UNHCR was also, in the main, loudly silent on the plight of the boat arrivals incarcerated for many years, the longest more than six, in detention camps in Australia.

The regime of secrecy on boat arrivals reached its peak in late 1996 with very few people aware of the numbers of non-Chinese arriving by boat - Sri Lankans, Iraqis, Vietnamese, Timorese, and eventually Afghanis and Iranians, who arrived and were contained in Port Hedland.

In June, 1998, Justice Robert French, sitting in Australia's Federal Court, ruled in favour of refugee status for a Chinese couple and their son, CHEN SHI HAI, born in the Port Hedland Detention Centre.

The Judge ruled that they would face persecution under the one child policy if returned to China. The family spent over five years in detention whilst the Minister challenged the decision all the way to the High Court.

The High Court upheld French J in his decision and the family were released last year and are now living in Perth. [30]

In 1997, a Chinese woman, within ten days of giving birth to her second child, was removed from Australia and returned to China where her baby was forcibly aborted.

Three years later a video smuggled back into Australia was the catalyst for a Senate inquiry which resulted in a much needed reform of the Ministerial discretion option for intervention in cases on humanitarian grounds. It also ensured that in future the Convention on Torture will be considered by decision makers.

Minister Ruddock has been the most active of past Ministers in exercising his Ministerial discretion and should be commended for this. But why not amend the system to allow humanitarian entry for those who are deserving of it - the old "Grant of Residency" category?

In truth, the Australian Government has never happily accepted people who arrived here by boat as refugees.

There was always an ambivalence in approach.

The success of the boat people gaining entry in both periods came only because of the lobbying of Non-Government community groups and because international considerations forced Australia to accept them.

Every country, Australia included, has the right to regulate its borders and deny entry to those who seek to circumvent the normal established immigration channels, those who are involved in criminal activities or pose a health threat to the general population.

I most strongly oppose any suggestion that I endorse an open door policy. I do not.

But under international and domestic law, those who come here seeking asylum are entitled to stay in Australia while their claims are being assessed.

They are also entitled to have those claims heard fairly, impartially and swiftly in accordance with the principles of human rights and dignity as set out in the various international conventions to which Australia is a signatory.

Concerns for individual Human Rights have never ranked high on the Australian Government's agenda for entry to this country.

But now, there is a dark side to our migrant, refugee and muticulturalism which does us no credit. I refer to the increasingly secretive and punitive detention regime where people are dehumanised and degraded every day.

I know that Heinz will address the issues fully so I will raise them only briefly.

Increasingly, Minister Ruddock has become known as the Minister for Detention and Deportation.

The Government's increasing paranoia about the relatively small numbers of people arriving on our shores by boat is reflected in the increasingly punitive legislation which the Minister has sought to pass in the Australian Parliament.

The most recent, which incorporated the rights for employees of the Australian Correctional Services Management (ACM) to strip-search detainees, including women and children, on suspicion that they might be concealing home-made weapons, brought public protests from human rights and church based groups as well as the ethnic communities.

Of particular concern was the apparent insensitivity in suggesting that Moslem women might be violated in this manner. This was identified as potentially inflaming and exacerbating emotions and tensions already in evidence in the Detention regime.

If you treat people as animals they will behave as animals.

Ruddock is obviously sensitive to the fact that during his terms as Minister for Immigration, unauthorised boat arrivals have increased. [31]

According to Departmental statistics, the people have come from a variety of backgrounds including doctors, clerical workers, mechanics, self employed and unemployed.

This gives the lie to the rhetoric often employed by the Minister which implies that people arriving by boat have nothing to offer Australia.

In any event, there is some force to the claim that people who select themselves for migration are as good or better than those selected in overseas posts by public service clerks operating on set criteria and allocating points according to a rigid selection process.

The rhetoric employed by the Minister, and his Department, includes the vocabulary of queues, quotas and illegals.

In reality, there are no queues where these people come from - only the endless nightmare of years spent in limbo, in camps, in despair; there are no quotas - they are always full; there are no illegals because the term has no meaning in international law.

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In Conclusion

Our migrant, refugee and multicultural policy is, and always has been, ambivalent and ambiguous. This has not prevented us standing proudly in the world community.

But now, we have got it wrong.

There is something mean, tricky and squalid about a policy which locks up little children behind barbed wire, razor wire, for five years.

There is something mean, tricky and sordid about an immigration policy which denies a family reunion because a child has a disability and yet upholds the family as the core of our Australian society.

There is something mean, tricky and out of touch about a government which denies entry to Australia to the grandparents of Australian citizen children on the basis of cost to the community and yet upholds the family as the core of our Australian society.

There is something mean, tricky and sordid about a government which locates the euphemistically named Immigration Reception and Processing Centres in the deserts and remote outback towns, and pretends that all is well.

There is something mean, tricky and squalid about locking up asylum seekers for indeterminate periods of time without setting the limits so that they go crazy in limbo and inflict harm on themselves and others out of sheer frustration.

There is something mean, tricky and out of touch about a government who accepted children as residents from the trauma and loss of war and once they are in trouble, locks the doors to our gaols and throws away the keys. I speak here of the plight of the young Vietnamese who have served their time in our gaols yet are now held, seemingly forever, in our gaols awaiting deportation which is not an option.

For the future, it is apparent that much needs to be done internationally and at home.

In the overall global context of mass movement of people across borders and international politics we have allowed the arrival of a few desperate survivors of war and torture to bring about a return to what George Dibbs identified in 1888, as "a sudden spasm of fear and panic".

Our reception of the refugee on our borders is the measure of our maturity as a nation.

How sad that we now appear to have entered upon an era of the mean- spirited and punitive response to those who arrive here largely the victims of international politics and the realignment of power within their homelands.

Sadly, as a country, we have become reactive, rather than proactive, in a world which desperately needs sound, compassionate, moral leadership on the issues of human rights and free speech in order to cope with the overwhelming abuses perpetuated on so many people in the world today.

We need to creatively embrace the international dilemma of dispossession and respond practically and humanely.

A Government which does not listen to the voices of the human rights advocates has got it wrong.

But thank God for Hayley Eves and the thousands of young Australians who will carry us proudly into the next one hundred years.

This is the inherent ambivalence, the ambiguity, of our migrant, refugee and multicultural, immigration policy.

Thank you.

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References