The lower house of Australia’s Parliament on Wednesday passed sweeping immigration changes aimed at deterring the thousands of asylum seekers who try to reach the country each year on rickety, overcrowded vessels, by reopening a series of remote offshore detention centers that have been criticized by rights groups as inhumane and possibly illegal.
The amendments to the country’s Migration Act, which were put forward by Prime Minister Julia Gillard of the governing Labor Party on Tuesday and passed with the backing of the opposition coalition after a marathon debate, allow for the deportation of asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Only two lawmakers — an independent and a member of the Greens — voted against the measures.
The move, which is expected to pass the upper house as early as Thursday, is a stunning reversal of course for Ms. Gillard’s government, which had largely abandoned a similar strategy when it came to power in 2007.
The legislation passed two days after an expert panel convened by the government recommended the tactics in response to a growing number of accidents at sea that have killed more than 600 people since late 2009. Around 90 asylum seekers are believed to have died in June when their boat capsized south of Java, Indonesia, and the debate itself unfolded as officials said in recent weeks that they had “very grave fears” that a missing boat carrying 67 people had sunk en route to Australia.
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen capped the emotional debate, which at times had descended into little more than a shouting match, with a pledge to pursue additional measures to combat the rising volume of human smuggling.
“This is not the end of the efforts to deal with what is the very, very, very, very pernicious trade of people smuggling, which trades on people’s lives and gives people the expectation that in return for very significant sums of money they can be brought to Australia for passage,” he said.
“The Australian people expect no less, and the people smugglers fear nothing more,” he added.
Despite backing the issue, the opposition coalition seemed determined to score as many political points as possible from Labor’s policy reversal. The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, took to the floor of Parliament and demanded a formal apology from Ms. Gillard for hewing to what he said were failed policies that had led directly to the deaths of asylum seekers.
“After tragically almost 1,000 deaths at sea and after 4.7 billion dollars has been blown because of the government’s border protection failures, the prime minister has finally seen the sense of what the opposition has been proposing all along,” Mr. Abbott said.
“One thing is clear,” he said. “This government’s failures gave the people smugglers a business model.”
Australia has tried for years to find a policy that will deter would-be immigrants from trying to reach Christmas Island, a remote territory in the Indian Ocean that is Australia’s closest point to Indonesia. Under former Prime Minister John Howard of the Liberal Party, such asylum seekers were sent to nearby island nations for lengthy processing, but his so-called Pacific solution was abandoned in 2007 when Kevin Rudd of Labor became prime minister and Ms. Gillard became his deputy.
Ms. Gillard, who became prime minister in 2010, had proposed sending asylum seekers to Malaysia for processing as the number of boats has soared in recent years, but the plan was rejected by Australia’s highest court and negotiations over a replacement plan broke down. More than 7,500 asylum seekers have arrived by boat since the start of the year, making 2012 the busiest year on record.
Debate over the measure was extraordinarily long and bore more than a measure of political theater. More than 40 opposition members of Parliament — over half of its representation — took to the floor to point out the government’s about-face. The process at times took on a surreal air, as opposition lawmakers spent hours on Tuesday evening debating to an empty room after most Labor members walked out in protest.
The public debate is unlikely to end with the enactment of this new legislation. A wide range of domestic and international human rights groups have dismissed offshore processing as a violation of Australia’s obligations under the United Nations Refugee Convention, to which it is a signatory.
David Manne, a prominent human rights lawyer who successfully argued the Malaysia case in front of the country’s High Court last year, called the legislation a sad result of years of “interminable political jousting to see who has the harshest policies for dealing with these people.”
“Really, all that deterrence policies like this do is sweep vulnerable people from our doorstep to dangers elsewhere,” he said in an interview ahead of the vote.
“The proposals would place Australia in clear violation of the commitments we’ve made under the refugee conventions and are likely to condemn many innocent people to the same type of severe harm that we saw in the past under a similar experiment called the Pacific Solution.”
nytimes.com
