Australia's generosity to Syrian refugees ignores those still languishing offshore
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Version 0 of 1. Related: Refugee crisis: some of the many ways Australians can help Australia, through its generous offer to resettle 12,000 Syrians displaced by the brutal conflict in that land, will unquestionably change lives for the better. Thousands of the most vulnerable and persecuted people on earth will have the opportunity to restart lives shattered by four years of grinding war, to depart from a future of intense, and potentially deadly, persecution. But the offer also serves as a reminder of the illegality, the inequity and wastefulness of its offshore detention regime for other refugees. The prime minister, Tony Abbott, said on Thursday he would not consider granting asylum to Syrians held in detention offshore or on mainland Australia, because they had come to this country by boat. Asked why Syrians currently in detention on Manus Island and Nauru did not deserve the opportunity of resettlement, the prime minister said: “We will never ever do anything that encourages the evil trade of people smuggling and all of those who have come to Australia by boat are here as a result of people smuggling.” This is illegal. The 1951 Refugee Convention, to which Australia is not only a party (and therefore legally bound) but which Australia helped to draft, explicitly states that refugees must not be penalised or punished for their method of arrival in a country. Related: Abbott praised for Syrian refugee intake amid calls to spell out military exit strategy “States shall not impose penalties [on refugees] on account of their illegal entry or presence,” the convention says. At a more human level, imposing a harsh, indefinite punishment on a person because of how they chose to flee persecution is viewed by the men on Manus as deeply unfair, and is certainly perceived as being unfair by those directly affected on Manus Island and Nauru. On Thursday morning, the day after the government’s announcement on the 12,000 extra refugees, one man in detention on Manus Island told Guardian Australia: “Really, it is too [much] injustice. The Australian government will accept Syrian people from so far place but tortured a Syrian in the Australian detention. I cannot understand Australian system. I cannot understand.” In a letter signed by more than 100 asylum seekers in detention, and seen by Guardian Australia this week, men on Manus Island write: “We have fled war and persecution just like the asylum seekers in Europe. We need safety and resettlement. “The Australian government has treated us like criminals and call us boat criminals because we came by boat.” Of Australia’s offshore detention regime, they write, it “punishes and tortures us who have fled persecution and torture”. Related: Syrian asylum seeker repatriated from Manus Island with Australian assistance “The Australian policy about refugees is inhuman and so very dangerous as a model for our world.” Australian immigration was involved in the repatriation of a Syrian asylum seeker from Manus Island back to Damascus only last month. Guardian Australia understands there is now one Syrian refugee on Manus Island, three on Nauru and several in detention on mainland Australia. On the point of wastefulness, Australia’s monetary contribution to assist Syrian refugees, also announced on Wednesday, exposes the absurd cost of offshore detention. Australia will contribute an additional $44m to those displaced by the Syrian conflict. This will assist 240,000 people with food, drinking water, blankets, and shelter for the impending, harsh winter. Yet the Australian government pays more than that – $60m – every single month to Transfield Services to detain 1,500 people on Nauru and Manus in conditions successive parliamentary inquiries have described as violent, abusive, and dangerous. The money is needlessly spent. The government’s own commission of audit figures revealed it costs more than $400,000 a year to keep one person in offshore detention. It costs one-tenth of that – $40,000 – to allow an asylum seeker to live on a bridging visa in the Australian community. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees says his agency’s operation in Syria is US$2.85bn short of money for this winter. Food to refugees in camps has already been cut by a third. According to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s budget documents, in 2013-14, Australia spent $3.07bn on asylum seeker detention alone. No one is suggesting the entire burden of Syria should fall to Australia. But the figures demonstrate that even a fraction of the money spent on offshore detention could make an extraordinary difference to lives in Syria, lives the government rightly identified this week as some of the most vulnerable and desperate in the world. The upshot is that Australia’s generous offer this week to help some of the world’s most persecuted refugees also exposes how it has failed, and continues to fail, others. |