By Bert Hetebry  

A group of South Asian men arrived on our doorstep seeking shelter, seeking a place to be made welcome, seeking safety and security. We don’t know why they left their homelands, but they undertook a dangerous journey, finding their way from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India to Indonesia to board small, overcrowded boats and sail across to the northwest of Western Australia.

We don’t know what drove those men to leave their homelands, but to leave is never easy, the decisions usually are to escape one sort of tyranny or another, whether it be religious persecution or some other form of intolerance which is life threatening, racial difference, sexual orientation, or the consequences of natural disasters, but whatever the reason, they now find themselves on Nauru effectively imprisoned for an indeterminate period of time while various checks are made to determine who they are and whether their claim to seek asylum is legitimate, but are promised that they will never be settled in Australia.

They join a multitude of other stateless people, adrift in the uncertainty of having no home to go back to and no place for them to go to. According to the documentary film Human Flow made in 2017 by the Chinese artist and activist Ai WeiWei, about 68million people in search of a home, somewhere, anywhere as they have fled wars, famine, persecution and a life that the only certainty appeared to be death either through starvation or violence or imprisonment for daring to speak out on political differences. According to UNHCR that number has grown to over 110 million in 2023. That is about 1.375% of the world’s population are displaced for any number of reasons. (To make that number seem more real, that is more than 13 people out of every thousand, worldwide.)

Included in that number are internally displaced people who are not defined as refugees but have fled their homelands because of desertification due to climate change, flooding of regions to build dams to gain water security, rising sea levels or other environmental issues which have made the homelands uninhabitable.

These people, seeking somewhere to live are not criminal, they are not illegal, terms which seem to be flung around when defining refugees or asylum seekers, whether they arrive here by plane or boat. Many, according to the Australian Red Cross arrive here with a valid visa, as visitors, and then make claims for asylum. Neither is it illegal to enter a foreign country without visa, passport or other papers when seeking asylum. So the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia, effectively as criminals is not in accordance with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, to which we as a nation are signatories to. Article 14 affords the right to asylum in other countries from persecution.

We have politicised and effectively criminalised those who are some of the most desperate and disadvantaged people in the world and deny them the basic human rights as defined by that declaration which we are obliged to uphold.

And yes, we do have the right, in fact the obligation to confirm that the asylum seeker has a legitimate claim to asylum, and we can restrict their movements during the period of validating that claim. The wording of Article 14 stipulates that the right to seek and enjoy other countries asylum from persecution “may be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” That does acknowledge that not all claims are legitimate and that at times criminals do try to get in ‘through the back door’, but the safeguards are there to ensure that those who are not legitimate refugees can be sanctioned, deported, returned to face justice from the place they have fled.

Listening to the political debate on refugees and asylum seekers, one could be forgiven for thinking that we have a severe problem.

We don’t.

The nations hosting the most refugees are Iran, Turkey, Germany, Pakistan, Uganda, Russian Federation, Poland, Bangladesh, Sudan, Ethiopia, Lebanon… and Australia does not even appear on that listing from stastista.com. Iran according to UNHCR for over 40 years has been host “to the largest and most protracted urban refugees in the world and has provided asylum to refugees for over four decades.” Iran currently hosts over 3.4million refugees and asylum seekers. The small nation of Lebanon, almost half a million refugees, many dating back to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine/Israel.

Why are we afraid of showing some humanity? Fear of these strange, desperate people drives the political argument, but when I look at our history as a nation, we are an immigrant nation. Starting 236 years ago were undesirables from Britain, prisoners and their guards, followed by wave after wave of settlers and more convicts, after both world wars more immigrants seeking a new life away from wore torn Europe settled here, developing this nation to be at that time an essentially European nation but that changed in the 1970s when we welcomed people from all over the globe. After the Vietnam war we welcomed more boat people, Vietnamese escaping from the re-education camps of the winners of that conflict or the repression of those who had sided with the losing side, and with each successive wave of immigrants we saw new economies flourish, rather than being a burden on this country, these immigrants all have made great contributions to Australia, cultural diversity, new businesses, each wave adding to the economic and cultural development of Australia.

The reality is that each of us who does not claim First Nations status is an immigrant or can trace their ancestry to another country at the most ten generations ago, each of us have either arrived  as immigrants, leaving our birth countries, or our parents, grandparents or great grand parents did, for reasons not dissimilar to those who arrive here, whether through the airport carrying a visitor’s visa or through unofficial channels, arriving by boat at great risk to escape whatever the threats and dangers of their homelands.

Diane Armstrong in her book The Voyage of Their Life, records the lives of over five hundred people who arrived in Australia in 1948 on a poorly prepared, dangerously inadequate ship, the SS Derna, and interviewed many of them fifty years later, recording the lives they have created in their new country, many are success stories, business people who have made significant economic contributions, others in the social and political spheres, from people who settled in all parts of Australia, from Western Australia to Far North Queensland, in other words like any other immigrant, arriving, seeking a better life for themselves and the families they formed.

Why do we continue to look to newcomers with such fear, instead of going through the validation of their claims for asylum as refugees and welcoming them so they too can start a new life and contribute as so many have before them.