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Bring 100,000 tsunami
refugees to Australia – fast
By Bob Gould
The awesome scale
of the natural
disaster around the Indian Ocean rim has moved the world, including
Australia,
deeply.
Australian doctors and nurses, military personnel and Federal Police
have
volunteered in large numbers, and are doing courageous and dangerous
work in
immediate disaster relief with the full support of other Australians,
who are
responding generously to the relief funds. The enormous proportion of
the
disaster is brought home to Australians by our increasing connections
with the
region. Many relatively recent migrants have relatives in the affected
areas.
Southern Thailand in particular is a favorite Australian tourist spot,
which is
why the Australian victims are largely concentrated there. The
Australian
Government has pledged an initial $60 million in immediate disaster
relief, a
good start.
The question in
the minds of many
Australians is what more can we do?
What
will be most effective?
There are some
historical
precedents. Immediately after World War II, the then Labor Immigration
Minister, Arthur Calwell, was
personally shattered when evidence of the brutal Nazi holocaust against
the
Jewish people in Europe was confirmed. Calwell’s
response was to bend the existing
immigration rules, and to even dedicate a special ship to bringing
holocaust
survivors to Australia. For this he was reviled by some newspapers and
anti-Semites, particularly the recently deceased conservative MP Joe
Gullett,
who made an extraordinary anti-Semitic speech in the Parliament.
Nevertheless
Calwell stuck to his guns and those holocaust survivors have
contributed
enormously to Australian life.
The
Vietnamese
boat people
After the end of
the Vietnam War,
hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who supported the losing side in
that civil
war took to the south China Sea in small boats. To his great credit,
Malcolm
Fraser, the then Liberal Prime Minister, adopted a proactive attitude
to this
problem, and recognising Australia’s moral responsibility as a
protagonist of the South
Vietnamese side in the civil war, launched a refugee program,
additional to the
existing migration program.
Under
these
arrangements many tens
of thousands of people from Indochina settled in Australia. As
relatives and
members of communities in Vietnam have joined these initial migrants,
the
Vietnamese community in Australia has swelled to more than 300,000
people. They
are a hard-working, productive section of Australian society.
One of
the deep
ironies in this
situation is that this connection has led to substantial Australian
trade with
Vietnam and remittances from Vietnamese Australians to families back
home have
played, and still play, an important role in Vietnam’s economic
reconstruction.
Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, with
a booming economy and a relatively small
population
Despite the current drought, and
serious environmental problems, Australia has a modern, relatively
stable economy – so much so that in some sectors there’s
a certain labour shortage, which
has led reactionary conservative politicians to float the idea of
bringing in 10,000 so-called guest workers from China, who would not
have the
rights of permanent residents.
Quite properly the
Australian
Workers Union has opposed this scheme, pointing out that the precarious
situation of guest workers without permanent residency would make them
vulnerable to exploitation, and would introduce the possibility of
breaking
down Australian wages and conditions.
A
modest proposal
for an emergency
migration program for victims of the Indian Ocean rim tsunami disaster
Australia
currently has a migration
program that brings in around 100,000 new migrants annually, of which a
relatively small number are refugees.
I propose
that
there be a one-off
tsunami refugee program, in addition to the existing migration program
to bring
in 100,000 extra people.
There are
five
million or more
people who have lost their homes and livelihoods in this enormous human
catastrophe. They face the prospect of living in terrible conditions in
primitive refugee camps for many years.
The
United Nations
is already
talking about a 10-year reconstruction program. The most effective
thing
Australia can do in the short and longer term would be to turn all of
our
modern techniques and resources to bringing 100,000 of these people to
Australia,
with initial full permanent residency, leading quickly to Australian
citizenship.
This
program
should be bipartisan,
supported by all Australian political parties. Unless such a program is
adopted
quickly we face the possibility of thousands of refugees again trying
to come
to Australia in leaky boats.
The
breakdown of
sources for these
migrants would look something like this: 1500 from Somalia, 1500 from
the
Maldives, 2000 from Burma, 5000 from Thailand, 20,000 from Sri Lanka
and Tamil
Eelam, 20,000 from India (half from the Andaman and Nicobar islands),
50,000
from Aceh.
The
breakdown for
the settlement in
Australia might look something like this: 30,000 to NSW, 25,000 to
Victoria,
15,000 to Queensland, 12,000 to WA, 10,000 to SA, 3000 to Tasmania,
2500 to the
ACT, 2500 to NT.
The
existing
detention centres for
refugees and asylum seekers could easily be converted to their original
use as
migrant holding centres, and the few hundred refugees left there could
be
released into the community under suitable arrangements.
Economic
and
social benefits for the
tsunami survivors and the regions they come from
It’s a
well-known fact about migration,
particularly refugee and disaster migration, that immediately they get
work
such migrants remit a large part of their earnings to families back
home. If
such migrants in Australia are properly paid, and not subject to
intimidation
like “guest
workers” it’s
easy to
envisage an enormous income stream flowing back to the home regions
from
employed family members in Australia.
This was
true of
my Irish ancestors,
who immigrated to Australia in the aftermath of the Irish famine in the
19th
century, and it has also been true of more recent migrants form
Vietnam, East
Timor and elsewhere.
An
immediate
transfer of a substantial
number of refugees from the refugee camps to Australia would obviously
ease the
pressure in the camps. This emergency migration program would be the
most
powerful and effective help that we could give.
Economic
and
social benefits for
Australia
Such an
emergency
immigration
program would solve the short-term labour shortage in some sectors of
the
economy for a few years, until this cohort of migrants eventually moved
up to
better jobs, which is an inevitable part of the migration process. It
would
alleviate the labour shortage while avoiding the anti-social aspects
associated
with any scheme for “guest workers” without permanent residency.
The rapid
immigration into Australia
of economic and social refugees from the rich kaleidoscope of races and
religions
in the Indian Ocian rim: Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims,
would
further break down xenophobic racism in Australia as human familiarity
evoked
the usual warm response in Australians to people of other cultures whom
they
have actually come to know.
The
response of
ordinary Australians
in country towns to Afghan refugees demonstrates this. In addition,
such a
program would go a long way towards integrating Australia in the Asian
region
and relegating the White Australia Policy to the distant past in the
minds of
both Asians and Australians. In addition, the economic benefits of
increased
trade between Australia and the Indian Ocean rim are obvious.
The scale of the
catastrophe
in the Indian Ocean is enormous and the circumstances demand a quick
and
effective response. |