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Greg Sheridan - Foreign editor -
The Australian THE government's handling of the asylum-seeker issue has been embarrassingly inept.
BEFORE the election Kevin Rudd as prime minister considered the option of trying to open an asylum-seeker processing centre in East Timor and rejected it. It had often enough bubbled up in a bureaucracy desperate to find some action, or something that would at least look like action, on the illegal immigrant issue and the evident fact the government had lost control of illegal immigrant arrivals.
On the day before he was dumped as prime minister, Rudd told Julia Gillard the idea was a dud. It wouldn't work. In fact it was basically a version of John Howard's Pacific solution, which involved a centre on Nauru, but unlike the Pacific solution the East Timor centre would not work if tried.
All this is revealed in Laurie Oakes's new book, On the Record.
Given that on foreign affairs Rudd has infinitely more knowledge, and better judgment, than Gillard, this is a damning assessment of the East Timor proposal.
This also leads to the inescapable conclusion that Rudd has declined to lead the negotiations over the East Timor centre, instead leaving that task to the wholly inexperienced Chris Bowen, whereas before the election then foreign minister Stephen Smith led the negotiations. And when Howard put the Nauru solution in place it was then foreign minister Alexander Downer who led the negotiations.
The Gillard government now has an obligation to explain how this centre will work and how on earth it thinks it will decrease the flow of illegal immigrants to Australia.
It has not done so. Instead it contemptuously refuses to answer questions on the subject in parliament.
The opposition has been dudded on the parliamentary procedure reforms. The government stonewalls and abuses with just as much freedom as before, but the opposition is not even able to raise more than one point of order per question. If anything, parliamentary question time is even more one-sided and less informative than it was before.
The only part of the system that provides anything like accountability, occasionally reveals information and offers some chance of policy scrutiny is when officials are questioned in the Senate estimates process.
And in so far as we have any information at all about the ludicrous East Timor proposal, which Rudd was absolutely right to bag without qualification inside the government before the election, it is from the Senate estimates process.
Gillard is emerging as a strangely weak and ineffective Prime Minister in foreign policy. As soon as she strays from the script she seems clueless, never across the detail, unable to explain anything beyond the most obvious cliche and often confused about her own government's policy. Oddly enough, she seemed better at foreign policy when she was deputy prime minister, making solid speeches and handling issues OK when she was acting prime minister. The former backers of Rudd say Gillard on those occasions was always sticking very much to a Rudd-approved script.
But Gillard's performance on the East Timor centre is embarrassing.
This is important because this is a national policy issue of serious consequence. With nearly 6000 illegal immigrants arriving by boat so far this year, and with the government having no strategy to stop the boats, Australia stands in a precarious position. We seem just about to embark on the disastrous European policy, which is now tearing Europe apart, of accepting a large, illegal Muslim immigration. This is not essentially a refugee question but rather, as in Europe's case, a question of a determined illegal immigration.
Gillard is achieving exactly the wrong result for Australia. In losing control of illegal immigration she is destroying support for Australia's uniquely successful legal immigration program, which is essential to our future economic health, demographic vitality and national security.
Gillard's performance on this issue in parliament has been pathetic. Last week, Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop asked her to define the region in terms of the countries to be involved in Australia's proposed regional processing centre in East Timor. Gillard seemed not to understand the import of the question and made two airy references, one to the Asia Pacific, the other to the Bali process, the anti people-smuggling collaboration that involves 44 countries.
When she was asked a refinement of the same question this week, she stonewalled and referred to her previous answer. But the government is insulting our intelligence here. It went to the election saying the East Timor centre would be a regional initiative that would help stop the boats. Yet no effective action has been taken on the Timor centre, while new centres are being commissioned on the Australian mainland, the boat arrivals have accelerated and the government can point to absolutely zero regional support for the East Timor centre and cannot or will not even outline which nations it will apply to.
In testimony to the Senate Estimates Committee, Andrew Metcalfe, the head of the Immigration Department, seemed to suggest only asylum-seekers from outside the region, by which presumably he meant outside South-East Asia, would be eligible to be processed in East Timor. We cannot know this, however, because when the opposition's Scott Morrison asked the Prime Minister whether Burmese asylum-seekers on the Thai border could be processed at the centre, Gillard simply refused to answer.
It seems clear (though we cannot know for sure) that in so far as the concept of this centre has any content at all, it will apply only to illegal immigrants seeking to come to Australia, which means it is not a regional centre but an Australian centre exactly like Nauru. However, the government is 100 per cent unconvincing in arguing such a centre would be a deterrent to people smugglers. East Timor is almost the closest point in the region to Australia, so illegal immigrants will be relocated closer to Australia. The centre will surely never open unless Australia gives East Timor a guarantee that no residual population of asylum-seekers will be left there, so that if it ever comes into existence the East Timor centre would be a tremendous magnet for illegal immigrants, swelling their numbers.
The government has never answered this conceptual contradiction. It gets asked it often enough. Bowen just gabbles away about negotiations being under way and Gillard refuses point blank to enter into detail. This is a bankrupt and dishonest approach to policy.
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