Vanstone’s giant stretch to a bizarre conclusion

It’s a common tool in the Australian media; all the more-so as we move into a ‘less news, more analysis’ mix among newspapers, broadcast media and online. Opinion writers – so desperate in their need to justify their attention-grabbing headlines – are not just selecting only the facts that suit their arguments these days; they’re also taking otherwise innocuous points to paint grossly distorted pictures of people and events.  They’re adding 1 and 1; getting 67,400; and then presenting that answer as a mathematical certainty.

Amanda Vanstone’s tirade against asylum seekers in Fairfax Media this week is an extreme case in point. Her evidence that those on board a boat that capsized in Indonesian waters last Sunday were not genuine refugee claimants but rather media savvy opportunists was the presence of at least one mobile phone among the survivors.

“To travel with mobiles on international roam … is the work of people who are playing hardball with the Australian government and using the media to do so.”

Huh?

OK. So at first analysis, it doesn’t really sound like a smoking gun, but Vanstone does go on to explain why the phone is so sinister.

“Their modus operandi is to get as many sad stories associated with asylum seekers into the Australian media as possible.”

You see – by twisting the minds of Australians and energising the vast army of bleeding hearts here, blogs such as this one will soon force the Australian government to accept asylum seekers arriving by boat. It’s all part of a grand conspiracy to actually humanise asylum seekers in an Australian political landscape that has been doing the opposite since before 2001.

It was a very different Australian media back when I attended journalism school, but I have to hope Occam’s Razor still has some relevance. That is: wherever there is doubt, the simplest theory tying all the facts is most likely to be accurate.

In this light Amanda Vanstone, asylum seekers publicising their sad stories to anyone who will listen may be doing so simply because they have sad stories to tell. Passengers on a capsizing boat may have called out to anyone they could think of, simply because their boat was about to capsize. And with roughly 236 million mobile phones active in Indonesia, it could be that there was actually more than one device among its 120 passengers without any devious intention.

I have no idea if Australian authorities were aware of the impending tragedy last week, but neither does Vanstone. She’s right to point out that this controversy will be cleared up one way or another with access to the relevant phone records.  But she is choking on her own cynical irony when laying claims of media manipulation in her own regularly published newspaper column.

Where’s the simple story here? Australia, as a signatory to the International Convention on Refugees, has offered to accept asylum seekers and process their claims fairly. There are close to 900,000 people worldwide and around 8000 people in Indonesia (which isn’t a signatory to the Convention) who believe they have such a claim. Asylum seekers are not permitted to board flights to Australia without an existing visa, and there are no land borders to cross. So around 120 of them took a boat last week in the hope of exercising their rights on Christmas Island.

The simple story is not a sinister one. It’s a natural culmination of a range of world circumstances, Australia’s obsession with boat arrivals being just one of them.

Nobody’s suggesting it doesn’t make for a highly complex public policy issue. But this continued demonisation of boat arrivals has to change before any effective solution can be reached. There is no evidence to support the knee-jerk view that asylum seekers are gaming the system, probably because they aren’t.

Authorities and commentators need to start from the principle that asylum seekers are human beings who just might be seeking a fair and transparent assessment of their claim. By all means, make the argument that Australia needs to impose limits on humanitarian immigration, but stop labeling a whole category of very different people from very different countries and situations as wholly unfit for our community.   That’s the very real, and sadly effective, media manipulation taking place at the moment, and the very intelligent and capable people spinning those lines should be ashamed.

About the author:

Paul Howell is a freelance business journalist and communications consultant, based in Melbourne. 

Disclaimer:

All posts are the opinion of the individual author. The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre does not edit or review posts prior to publishing.