Christmas Island Refugee Deaths

The WA coroner’s findings of failure of the Federal Government to generally foresee and act upon the probability of the disaster and loss of life which occurred on 15 December 2010 - the tragedy of the sinking of SIEV 221 at Christmas Island with the loss of 50 lives - comes as no surprise. Our government and the community at large has pretty much turned a blind eye to the refugee situation, perhaps hoping it will go away. In doing so we have abrogated our responsibility to humanity.

The anti-refugee push will say ‘the boats are unsafe therefore they should be prevented from coming in the fist place’. BRRRR wrong answer, because in this glib response is the expectation that if they don’t come here they will be someone else’s problem, we won’t have to worry. That means they will remain somewhere in the Sub-Continent or South East Asia. A version of the Malaysia solution without controls. Have a look at my photographs from the Pulau Bidong Vietnamese refugee camp off the east coast of peninsula Malaysia in the mid 80s at: https://picasaweb.google.com/RichardJGWilson/PulauBidong

You can see from these that Malaysia, left to its own devices, will not run a humanitarian refugee holding facility worth the name. This camp was run by the prison department. The rumours of ill-treatment of the refugees by the guards were common and sometimes visible. Beating a uncooperative prisoner (refugee) with a hammer, for instance.

This community needs to take into our hearts the idea that people in less fortunate circumstances than ours - meaning most of the rest of the world’s population - are not a threat to our economy or sovereignty or security, rather, in not looking after them we threaten our own claim to be decent people.

While our hearts seem to be intractable, the problem is not. I know from my own work in refugee camps that our government and the bureaucracy knows what is going on in the source countries and in the pathways refugees take to get to here. Or if they don’t know, they should. We are failing to deal with the problem at its source, even before a military situation arises. We have the capacity to intervene positively and diplomatically in emerging trouble areas. We must acknowledge that Iraq and Afghanistan are now beyond diplomacy but, had we acted earlier, they may not have got to their present parlour state. And now that refugees are on the move we could intervene earlier in the pathways, selecting a generous refugee intake with open and willing hearts to prevent them needing boats at all. This we attempted to do in the camps in Malaysia. This we should do for refugees from the Middle East. This we may need to do in Irian Jaya, for instance.

At home we need to reject the rhetoric, especially from the right, of the threat that refugees present. It is simply not true.