Countering the spin with facts

The airing of SBS’s ‘Go Back To Where You Came From’ this week has injected a much needed dose of reality and perspective into a debate dominated by sound-bites, spin and misinformation.

The program has taken 6 ‘celebrity’ guests and flung them into the very real situations faced by asylum seekers in some of the most dangerous places on earth.
At the beginning, the views of the guests ranged from the grounded, sympathetic and supportive of refugees and their plight to misinformed, ignorant and hostile.

Some interesting positions were presented at the beginning of the show:

• Anderson effectively claiming asylum seekers arriving by boat are ‘illegal’.
• Smith suggested that helping refugees was not the responsibility of Australia or        its residents.
• Reith hanging on to the argument that the Howard government he was involved with ‘stopped the boats’ and that was where the issue began and ended.

We are introduced to Anderson who believed ‘you can stick your illegals up your arse’. The counter to this is simple as always – seeking asylum in Australia is not illegal, regardless of how you arrive. This legal fact is overlooked on a daily basis by media commentators, politicians and ordinary citizens. Follow the commentary online and there are scores of people who have convinced themselves of this untruth. Politicians constantly espouse this misinformation through TV, print media and any other channel.  In a press release this week, Opposition Immigration Spokesman Scott Morrison referred to illegal boat arrivals.  On Tuesday night as the show was being aired, the Liberal Party tweeted about ‘illegal boat arrivals’.  Public figures like Anderson and Michael Smith persist in claiming that boat people are illegal. These statements are factually incorrect. It is no illegal to seek asylum, regardless of mode of arrival or undocumented.

Michael Smith is of the view that Australia is being taken advantage of by those seeking asylum here and that we can’t take them all.  We are not proposing we take them all – but that we take a reasonable number and have a policy of burden sharing rather than burden shifting.  Australia is ranked 71^st per capita for the number of refugees we hosted in 2011.
The argument that Afghan Hazaras and Tamil Sri Lankans or Somalis are just shopping around for a country with more favourable economic conditions becomes transparent once confronted with the realities refugees face in their home countries, as Smith began to discover once he landed in Somalia.  It is hard to overlook the fact that people living in these countries have genuine reasons to flee. In most cases it is literally a life or death situation.

The argument that asylum seekers traveling without passports or other identifying documents are doing so to cover up their identities also overlooks the practical reality of the situation.
In the UN camps the group visited in Ethiopia, the vast majority of the refugees there have no ID documents. It seems too much to expect that somebody (perhaps a child like Abi who we met in Episode 1), who has fled his or her homeland at a moment’s notice would be able to apply for and obtain a passport, from a country like Somalia, which has no functioning government, whilst in a refugee camp in a desert in another country. Can anybody truly say that they would not attempt to flee situations like those seen in Somalia only because they did not have proper legal identification?  And while some people may arrive without a passport, they do arrive with a local equivalent.  Anyone seeking asylum must prove their identity.  Politicians and the media often equate no passport to mean no documents whatsoever – this is not true.

Then there is Peter Reith, one of the architects of the Howard government’s ‘Pacific Solution’.
It appears that Reith considers his response to the Tampa events and the subsequent suite of policies to be the lasting legacy of his career in Australian politics. The policies included temporary protection visas to prevent family reunions and to send people home to countries deemed to be ‘safe’, including Afghanistan. He was responsible for the detention of asylum seekers for indefinite periods of time on remote islands like Nauru with poor facilities, little access to lawyers and rampant disease, both mental and infectious. Only somebody utterly disconnected with the human victims of these policies could be proud of such a legacy.

To watch Reith engage with a man denied protection in Australia and sent home to war-ravaged Afghanistan under the policies of which he was an architect is to see a man fail to full absorb the human cost of his actions.  As Rezai claims on Go Back, to his knowledge at least 11 of the 312 asylum seekers from the Tampa were killed upon their return, with more still unaccounted for. Other accounts show this figure as high as 25 who have been killed.  Those that survive do so under daily threats of violence.

Most frightening is the thought that we may be heading down that policy path again. Just as it was a decade ago, the denial of human rights in favour of political expediency appeals to the unfounded fears of some in our community and drives this ‘Pacific Solution MkII’. It is a familiar and sadly inhumane paradigm being implemented at the expense of those most vulnerable.

Let’s hope that programs like ‘Go Back’ can be effective in dispelling the spin and misinformation informing and connecting the public to the real refugee issues, those faced by asylum seekers seeking safety from persecution.