BY SARAH STEPHEN
On June 18, the federal government was forced to introduce into the Senate regulations it had drafted 12 days earlier to excise some 3500 islands from Australia's migration zone, islands which run from 200 kilometres south of Exmouth in Western Australia to Rockhampton in Queensland. The Senate disallowed the regulations on June 19, and the following day the government passed mirror legislation through the House of Representatives.
If the Senate rejects the legislation, and all indications are that it will, the government has the option of reintroducing the legislation in three months' time. If the Senate rejects it again, it can be used to trigger an early double dissolution election.
Not only is the legislation itself ridiculous, its timing seems bizarre. No refugee boat has arrived in Australian waters since December. There is a boat rumoured to be on its way, but the government admits it has "disappeared". More likely, it never existed.
Nevertheless, immigration minister Philip Ruddock has continued to warn that a new wave of asylum seekers are eyeing the Torres Strait as a gateway to Australia.
According to the June 21 Sydney Morning Herald editorial: "If the government had really regarded excision of islands as an urgent necessity, it would have adopted the same approach it had in regard to other legislation relating to security and terrorism. It would have tried to negotiate a compromise with Labor and the Senate minor parties.
"Instead it has presented the parliament with a quickly drafted bill that amounts to an ambit claim. The aim was twofold: to enable it to portray Labor and its Senate allies as weak on border protection and to give it a potential, populist trigger for a double dissolution election."
The government's motives are much more tactical. The legislation has been timed to exert maximum pressure on the Labor Party, which is facing substantial internal dissent. Prime Minister John Howard and Ruddock are confident that they can inflict damage by demonstrating that Labor has "gone soft" on "people smuggling" and "illegal immigration".
Ruddock told parliament that the new legislation was intended to "give the opposition an opportunity to make it clear they are sabotaging the border protection measures".
The double dissolution threat merely turns up the heat on the Labor leadership. On June 18, Howard continued to flog the Labor Party, telling parliament: "Never trust the Australian Labor Party because when there is a bit of pressure applied to an [ALP] leader, that leader will buckle at the knees, he will go to ground, he will go to water, he will cave in and he will flash a green light, not to the interests of the Australian public, but to the interests of the international people smugglers."
Opposition leader Simon Crean took the best part of a week to announce that the Labor Party would oppose the excision regulations. Crean knows that if Labor doesn't take a stand at this point, it will compromise every effort the new Labor leadership has made to convince its supporters that the party has changed and is willing to reconsider its anti-refugee policies. It would indicate that, no matter what they say, the parliamentarians' actions speak loudest — that Labor doesn't have the principles to stand against the government's racist scapegoating and offer a bold alternative.
In his public statements, Crean has gone to some lengths to argue that by opposing the islands' excision, Labor is in fact stronger on border protection than the Coalition.
Interviewed on ABC radio on June 20, Crean said: "You don't protect your borders by surrendering them... That is surrendering our sovereignty. That's appeasing people smugglers and it's inviting them to head to the mainland."
Crean finished with a plea to the government: "Withdraw this legislation. Join with Labor in developing a constructive solution and let's together protect our borders. Lets do it for Australia and lets be proud of Australia. Stand up for Australia. Don't surrender Australia."
It is significant that the Labor Party has opposed a piece of government legislation. It breaks a nine-month pattern of shameful bipartisanship on the mistreatment of refugees. But unless Labor moves from its feeble approach of pretending that it is still "tougher" than the government and begins to put forward a compassionate and humane alternative, it will run the dangerous risk of losing support from every quarter.
From Green Left Weekly, June 26, 2002.
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