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The Pacific Solution |
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The Pacific Solution
BACKGROUND: On 13 April 2006, the Federal Government announced plans to expand the Pacific Solution (naval interception, detention and processing in the Pacific) to ALL unauthorised asylum seekers arriving in Australia (not just excised islands off Australia's northern coastline) by excising the entire Australian mainland from our Migration Act. Under the new plan, which was quickly dubbed 'the Pacific Solution Mark II', undocumented asylum seekers would have been intercepted by the Navy or picked up after arriving in Australia and forcibly transferred to Pacific Islands nations such as Nauru and detained until their processing is complete and they could be removed or resettled in another country. The legislation, however, was withdrawn from the Senate by Prime Minister John Howard when his own party members threatened not to support the passage of the Bill. Update: PM Withdraws Off-Shore Refugee Processing BillChurch and community leaders around Australia have welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision (on 14 August 2006) to withdraw the controversial Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006, which aimed to send all asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia, not just on remote Islands off Australia’s northern coast, to Pacific detention centres for refugee processing. The announcement came just moments after a statement was released from over 70 church leaders calling for the Senate to vote against the Bill (click here to read). The Prime Minister took the decision when it became clear that the Government did not have enough support in the Senate to pass the Bill. The Bill may have also been subjected to a lengthy, and potentially embarrassing, debate in the Senate. Commenting on the announcement, James Thomson, spokesperson for the National Council of Churches’ refugee program, which coordinated the statement, said that if it were not for the sustained pressure that churches and community brought to bear in the debate, and the pivitol role played by key parliamentarians who stood their ground against the Bill, it would have been passed. The statement was the latest in concerted advocacy efforts by the National Council of Churches and its member churches and was signed by leaders across denominations, including national and state levels heads of churches, bishops, heads and members of religious orders, church aid agencies, social justice groups, refugee support networks and educational institutions. Churches were outraged at the prospect of a full-scale return to the Pacific Solution, a chapter in Australian history that many Australians though had been put behind them. The overwhelming concerns of the community, churches and parliamentarians, however, shone through. If passed, the bill would have excised the Australian mainland from Australia’s legal migration zone, a legal fiction that would mean that under Australian law, asylum seekers arriving by boat would be assumed to have not arrived in Australia and not trigged Australia’s legal obligations to protect refugees. Instead, they would be sent to an offshore detention centre in Nauru were they would be detained, potentially indefinitely, until their refugee applications were processed and a third country was found that agreed to accept them for resettlement. After 43 West Papuan refugees arrived by boat in Australia, Indonesia put Australia under immense pressure to return them to Indonesia and then to prevent further embarrassing incidents. The Bill, widely held to be a way of deterring more embarrassing arrivals of West Papuan refugees and thus appeasing Indonesia, would have unfairly penalised West Papuans refugees fleeing to Australia in search of protection. Mr Howard’s amendments were intended to bring the Pacific Solution in line with international law and Parliament’s unanimously adopted principle of only detaining children as a matter of last resort. While this was to make the Bill more palatable for concerned Senators, it was also an admission that current offshore detention and processing arrangements do not meet these standards. Commenting on the Government’s decision to send the 8 asylum seekers who arrived on Ashmore Reef at the time of the Bill’s defeat, Mr Thomson said that if the Government was to start sending asylum seekers to the Pacific again it should, as a very minimum, introduce these reforms anyway. The Amendments proposed:
Please write to thank the Members of the House of Representatives who abstained or crossed the floor and voted against the legislation and Liberal Senators who threatened to abstain or cross the floor:
The NCCA wrote to the follwoing members of Parliament to thanks them: House of Representatives:
Senate:
The NCCA also wrote to the Prime Minister to thank him for withdrawing the Bill.
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