Yesterday, after rampant speculation, Prime Minister Gillard announced the Australian Government’s new approach to asylum seekers.

This speech could have been used for yet another disappointing political point scoring exercise, but Amnesty International was hoping that the Prime Minister would use this opportunity to reframe the debate and remind Australians that seeking asylum is not a crime but a basic human right.

Ticking the right boxes

At 11:03 Julia Gillard started well by announcing an end to inflammatory politics about asylum seekers.

At 11:12 she said that helping people who fear for their lives is a core Australian value, and that the much celebrated "fair go for all" is just a quick and easy way of saying "human rights for all".

At 11:20 Amnesty International applauded her commitment to a fact-based approach to asylum seekers. Encouragingly, she reminded Australians that only 0.6 per cent of the world’s asylum seekers arrive in Australia and that asylum seekers make up less than two per cent of Australia’s annual migration intake.

At 11:29 the Prime Minister acknowledged the importance of regional cooperation and Amnesty International completely agrees that irregular migration, an international issue, cannot be tackled with a focus on domestic policy.

At this point Julia Gillard was ticking the Amnesty International boxes. She had articulated a framework of factual debate, affirmed Australia’s commitment to offering protection to refugees, and highlighted the need for a regional approach to irregular migration.

But she still hadn’t actually articulated a new policy.

At 11:38 Prime Minister Gillard stated that she would not re-introduce the failed and discredited Pacific Solution policy. Moments later, she announced a policy that sounded very similar to the failed and utterly discredited Pacific Solution policy.

The Pacific Solution policy repackaged?

Until we have more details, it is very hard to say outright that Julia Gillard’s proposed "regional processing centre" in East Timor is merely the Pacific Solution repackaged. However, as with the Pacific Solution, a small, impoverished island nation may be asked to process asylum seekers.

Also like the Pacific Solution, asylum seekers who arrive by boat in Australia may be transported from this large, wealthy island to that small, impoverished one.

The Pacific Solution was ended in 2008 for very good reasons. Namely, it breached international law, damaged Australia’s international reputation, was not effective in stopping the boats, and, most importantly, inflicted further suffering on people who were not actually breaking any laws but were genuinely fleeing for their lives.

Adequate care?

Whether it be Nauru or East Timor, is unclear how a country struggling to provide basic services to its own population is in a position to adequately care for the arrival of traumatised people who have suffered torture, severe persecution and extreme violence.

The mental health impacts of remote and indefinite detention have been well documented. It is simply not humane or practical to detain asylum seekers beyond the reach of lawyers, trauma counsellors, interpreters, community members, religious groups, NGOs and media.

Offloading obligations

Like with the Pacific Solution, sending Australia’s fair share of asylum seekers to East Timor would amount to offloading this country’s obligations under the UN Refugee Convention, something the UN criticised the Australian Government for repeatedly in the 2000s.

While it is true that boat arrivals decreased around the same time as the Pacific Solution, it doesn’t take more than a cursory glance at global and regional statistics to see that asylum seeker numbers in Australia follow global patterns. Simply put, the number of boats is determined by global push factors, not Australia’s domestic policies.

There may be, when more details of the proposal are revealed, some glimmers of hope in the regional processing centre proposal. Amnesty International hopes that the Prime Minister focuses on the parts of the new policy that will help to control irregular migration, such as working with regional governments to create new and better options for people fleeing for their lives.

The key facts

However, Amnesty International urges the Prime Minister to rethink any approach to asylum seekers that forgets key facts: people have the legal right to seek asylum in Australia, the vast majority of asylum seekers who arrive here by boat are found to be genuine refugees, and the numbers of asylum seekers coming here are very, very small.

Any policy that ignores these issues and tries to avoid meeting Australia’s fundamental responsibilities to asylum seekers in an attempt to score political points is not, in the end, the rational, fact-based approach that Julia Gillard is calling for.

This article was published in The Punch on Wednesday 7 July 2010.