The Tampa Crisis

In the last month Australia has drawn international attention and criticism in a diplomatic incident which entangles countries as far flung as Norway, Indonesia and Nauru. Susanna Nelson reports.

The Norwegian ship MV Tampa, equipped to support a crew of only 27 and carrying 460 rescued Afghani refugees, was forced to anchor just outside Australian waters, the government using an obscure international legal loophole to prevent it docking and later sending the SAS aboard to take control of the vessel. The captain of the Tampa, Arne Rinnan, soon realised that valour at sea counts for little when you’re up against the stubborn intransigence of an Australian government with one eye firmly on the upcoming election, and a clear idea of how to appeal to the darker elements of the Australian national psyche.

It says something about the political climate here in Australia (now that the multicultural bonhomie of the Sydney Olympics has well and truly worn off) that Prime Minister John Howard had the overwhelming backing of the Australian people. According to one poll, public support for the actions of the government stood at 82%. Howard has managed to capitalise on fear and swing flagging popular opinion with his latest tough stance on refugees and is laughing all the way to the next election, under the spectre of Pauline Hanson. How all this could happen in a seemingly multicultural, enlightened society can be explained by a mixture of public fear, media myopia and a national refusal to cast a critical eye over this country’s short history.

Australia is a vast, virtually empty continent with one of the lowest population replacement rates in the world. It is an incredibly young country, geographically but not culturally removed from its colonial parent, Britain. Many here – notably Prime Minister John Howard – find it difficult to relinquish a recent past built by Anglo-Celts and reinforced by the White Australia policy and popular folklore until the late 20th century. The folklore continues to this day. Countless documentaries and dramas attempt to re-live the historical triumphs of the mythical ‘Aussie battler’ without irony or critique – he is usually a craggy faced, muscular bloke working up a sweat on the land or climbing out of the trenches of Gallipoli. He is always white. Take a look at the soap operas we export – they do little to represent our diverse ethnic mix.

As a country with a short past, we have not yet built up the back catalogue of inquisitions, imperialist injustices and war crimes that shame some of the old powers of Europe. As a result, no-one has had to question or criticise the image of the great (white) Australian. Indeed, many Australians feel that they have been countlessly wronged by other nations – sidelined by Britain, tormented by the Japanese in World War II, sent off to fight in other people’s wars. There has been no need for national self-assessment until now.

A bi-product of all this nostalgia is the notion that a true Australian is born not made (‘it’s in the blood’) and that the face of that Australian is unmistakably white. Yet the truth remains that Australia relies and has always relied on immigration to supply it with jobs, ideas, and arguably, culture. With the exception of the Aborigines who arrived 40,000 years ago, everyone here is an immigrant if you dig back far enough. As one Aboriginal leader recently commented, European Australians were the first ‘boat people’, regardless of the more romantic labels (try ‘pioneer’ or ’settler’) their descendants might apply. Not one of the angry people who has complained about immigration during the recent debate is entitled to call themselves indigenous to this country. This is why the popular and political response to the problem of whether to let 460 desperate Afghani refugees into the country has been so astounding and shameful.

The terms ‘boat person’ and ‘queue jumper’, inevitably applied to those who do not have the wherewithal to stride in through our airports and, more pointedly, invariably referring to non-whites, have been thrown wildly around in all the major news bulletins. These terms have allowed many bitter people in Australian society to feel a sense of righteousness and entitlement in their bigotry. One media report screamed that the Prime Minister thought the refugees, adrift outside Australian waters, were ‘faking’ their increasing ill health. Such reports made anti-immigrant sentiment seem acceptable and legitimate. The government had led by example, coaxing previously unthinkable racism into the public arena. Pauline Hanson, eager to make as much mileage as possible out of the popular mood, piped up saying that the Tampa ‘boat people’ brought disease which ‘our people’ could catch, and that these people were Muslims and therefore ‘wouldn’t fit in’. Her predictable ramblings, intemperate and badly thought out as we’d come to expect from her, were largely inconsequential in terms of the national debate. What was really disturbing was that traditional supporters of the oppressed were eerily silent. There was not a peep from Labour opposition leader Kim Beazley to denounce Howard’s stance – he muttered something about bipartisanship and stood back nervously, unwilling to take what was clearly the ‘unpopular’ stance on the issue and support the refugees. This was perhaps unsurprising – he and two other sympathetic political leaders had been sent bullets and detonators in the post by right wing extremists. It would seem that the encouragement of anti-immigrant sentiment in the general community had lured the loonies out of the woodwork too.

The more ‘reasoned’ letters to the newspapers have cited a lack of infrastructure and resources to sustain these people. There is a widespread belief that people who have sold up and set sail in perilous circumstances are coming here to ‘feed from the national trough’; to sign on, kick back and relax with a pina colada and take in the view from Bondi Beach. It seems unlikely that migrants fleeing persecution and oppression have even considered whether their destination has a cradle to grave social security system, let alone, as many xenophobic Australians seem to imagine, had time to leaf through glossy travel magazines and select a country of taxpaying mugs to support their idle ways. On the contrary – every country in the west with a migrant population can provide evidence of the migrant work ethic. The Chinese who came to Australia during the gold rush incurred the wrath of the Anglo-Celtic contingent because of this very trait. In contemporary society our post war immigrants from Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, and more recently, the refugees of the conflict in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam have contributed greatly to the nation’s wealth and cultural development. Far from burdening the ‘taxpayer’, migrants become taxpayers themselves. Moreover they connect this remote island to the rest of the world, and allow it to cast off its traditionally macho, redneck image.

Sadly, the recent crisis indicates that many Australians are far from ready to accept international opprobrium, let alone embrace cultural change. This reluctance to move forward is reflected in another popular sentiment amongst angry letter writers – fear. Australia’s vast coastline and the classic 19th century fear of attack by ‘the marauding hordes’ to our north, have fuelled the notion that, once here, migrants will take over, indoctrinating ‘decent Christian Australians’, stealing ‘our women and our jobs’. One letter writer feared that, if they made it to New Zealand, they’d ‘find their way over here sooner or later’. He was certain that, even if the asylum seekers got to the safe haven of New Zealand, they’d still be interested in creeping across the Tasman and invading Australia. This widespread paranoia is borne of a particularly Australian brand of isolated patriotism which reached its height during war with the Japanese, and lingered after subsequent conflicts which brought Asian refugees to these shores. There is a belief that foreigners come here to conquer, to destroy the Australian way of life, rather than simply for a second chance or as a matter of survival. The idea of ‘taking refuge’ has become somehow corrupted. Many seem to confuse it with ‘taking over’.

While the Tampa crisis captured international headlines, a domestic race argument brewed which revisited the old racist cliché of dark immigrant men defiling white women. There was hysteria in the media about the rape of two white girls by a gang of Lebanese youth, and the growth of Asian organised crime in inner Sydney suburbs. Community leaders received death threats and (Labour) politicians exploited the situation by tapping into the notion brewing amongst whites that they were under siege by ethnic minorities. Of course, the vast majority of hard working, tax paying ethnic minorities were forced into a position of having to prove their mettle. Disappointingly, some resorted to condemnation of those on board the Tampa, making the cycle of fear complete. It was depressing to hear the vitriole that issued from the mouths of those who’d been in the shoes of the Afghanis not so many years earlier. Radio stations were inundated with callers spilling vicious bile against the refugees. Many of the callers had strong European or Asian accents – recent arrivals themselves who could not see the irony in the stance they were taking. Many of these cited the mysterious ‘queue’ the Tampa refugees had ‘jumped’. The notion of a polite, orderly queue in countries where you can’t even queue for necessities like health and education, because they don’t exist, and where you don’t need to queue to be shot, must seem quaint to those who have thought it necessary to risk everything to get out before it was too late. To a country which has existed in peace time comfort for so long, the ‘queue’ has become a social standard – there is no crisis which queuing cannot solve. This is how removed ‘ordinary Australians’ have become from the realities other less privileged people face.

Around 5000 ‘boat people’ risk peril on the high seas to reach our shores each year, and many of these are placed in overflowing detention centres, where they stay for months and often years. By contrast, every year 55,000 queue-jumping Britons (usually backpackers) fly into the country and overstay their tourist visas. They are most certainly not sent to detention centres and there is little if any public outcry about that abuse of Australian immigration policy. When set against the conspicuous, but comparatively tiny number of ‘boat people’ who find their way here, this makes a lie of the arguments about ’sustainability’ and ‘infrastructure’ put forward by the opponents of immigration. The current objection to ‘boat people’ has its roots in a festering racism in Australian society, which the Howard government has gone out of its way to exploit, using a few hapless Afghani asylum-seekers as political pawns.

Appeared in Dim Sum online magazine December 2001.