Australian Greens: Priorities, Persuasion and Possibilities

It would appear that The Greens humane policies towards asylum seekers are opposed by most Australians, but support for the hardline Lib-Lab consensus is more contingent than we often realise. Conversations that present neglected facts and celebrate refugee stories can change minds.

By Rob Delves, Green Issue Co-editor

I don’t think refugees rated even a single mention during the long election campaign ‒ until polling day itself when Morrison and Dutton went into nasty overdrive to milk an apprehended boat for all they could. And maybe kindness to refugees is back ‒ one of the very first initiatives of the new government was the warm-hearted but politically safe gesture of returning the Nadesalingam family “home to Bilo,” followed several weeks later by granting them permanent residence. However, as many refugee advocates have confirmed, despite nods towards permanent visas and family reunions, Labor is not budging from its rock-solid bipartisanship with the Coalition’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers. Here is Behrouz Boochani writing recently in The Guardian:

“A few weeks ago, those asylum seekers brought to Australia through the medevac legislation received a letter from immigration restating: “The Australian government’s policies have not changed and unauthorised maritime arrivals will not be settled permanently in Australia.”

I’d like to begin by explaining the key changes that The Greens and the Refugee Council want to make to Australia’s Refugee policies, then discuss the challenges we face in persuading people to accept these reforms, given that they run counter to the apparently solid Lib-Lab consensus.

Priorities

In the recent election campaign, The Greens three top priorities were to end offshore detention, close the camps and lift Australia’s humanitarian intake to 50,000 places per year. We also made other commitments: to end boat turnbacks, make the family reunion visa system fairer and establish a new civil maritime agency, the Australian Maritime Service (AMS) to protect our coastlines, oceans, environment, and economic activity, but also dedicated to search and rescue of people in trouble in Australia’s waters.

Last year the Refugee Council of Australia produced a plan of the five policy areas needing change. This plan is very wide-ranging, but it includes all The Greens priorities. Here is a summary:

1. The permanent end to offshore processing: All asylum seekers must be processed onshore. We must stop our detention and deterrence approach and instead respond in line with our responsibilities as a signatory to the Refugee Convention.

2. A fair process for claiming asylum: All asylum seekers should have adequate access to legal services, independent review and adequate financial support, no matter how or when they arrived in Australia. An important example is that Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) and Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEV) holders should have the same access to services, rights and residency or citizenship pathways as refugees who hold a Permanent Protection Visa.

3. Reform the Immigration Detention System: The three main points are to end mandatory detention, stipulate maximum time limits on detention for any asylum seeker and prohibit the detention of children.

4. A larger refugee and humanitarian program: Steadily increase the annual intake to reach 30,000 within three years. This will include increasing the family reunion numbers and providing opportunities for community involvement in the refugee resettlement process.

5. Improve our engagement in Asia: Shift our focus from promoting deterrence and detention for people on the move in Asia, to seeking cooperation to reduce the causes of displacement, rebuild after conflict and help host nations support refugees in their care.

I’d like to add two other ideas about how we should improve our response to those seeking refuge in our community. In my opinion, making sure we do all we can to assist refugees settle into our communities is as important as the prior responsibility of treating asylum seekers fairly. Point four in the Refugee Council’s plan includes an important element of this: “providing opportunities for community involvement in the refugee resettlement process.” For 11 years I taught English and Maths to recent migrant and refugee arrivals of high school age and saw first-hand how many of them struggled to gain the skills and confidence to participate. The second point is related: we should include refugees in all our decision-making about refugee policy. The logic and common-sense of this is so obvious that it shouldn’t need stating, but our failure here has a long history in the arrogant way we have refused to consult First Nations People when we make decisions about issues important to their lives.

Persuasion – problems

The Greens/Refugee Council policies aren’t supported by most Australians and persuading them to adopt a more humane attitude to asylum seekers is a big ask. For more than 20 years the interdiction of asylum-seeker boats and the detention of their passengers on Nauru and Manus Island has nearly always been bipartisan policy between Labor and the Coalition. This is both a cause of and a response to the fact that harsh policies towards boat arrivals appear to have clear support among Australian voters. For example, a 2018 Lowy Institute research into public attitudes found that boat turnbacks were supported by a whopping 70%, offshore processing had 55% support, and even 40% of those in the survey agreed with the extreme policy that boat arrivals should never be allowed to settle here.

In 2016 Dr Denis Muller led a team at the Melbourne University Social Equity Institute conducting discussions in a range of settings to find out why people hold these opinions and how they arrived at them. Their findings will be familiar to Greens campaigners who have engaged in conversations with people on refugee issues, but they do offer some possible ways forward.

Muller’s research suggests that people can be divided into three broad groups in their response to the uncompromising Lib-Lab policies.

A significant number of respondents, but very much a minority, want more compassionate solutions. These include shutting the offshore processing centres and bringing asylum-seekers to country towns where they can be screened and assessed while being able to work and contribute to the Australian economy. Those who hold these views tend to be among the more highly educated as well as younger people. I assume they also vote Green in large numbers!

A similar-sized minority enthusiastically support everything about the border protection narrative. They express anger towards people who arrive by boat, with the same statements repeated over and over again: ‘boat people are queue jumpers’, ‘asylum seekers are illegal’ and ‘people who arrive unauthorised are not genuine refugees’.

The “majority-in-the-middle” accept the need for a harsh response, but do so with important reservations and varying degrees of confusion. These people want Australia to do its fair share of accepting refugees. They acknowledge the desperation driving asylum seekers to flee danger and their genuine need to find a safe, secure future for themselves and their children. They express unease that Australia is punishing these people with indefinite offshore detention and disapprove of the secrecy that surrounds the implementation of the border-protection regime. However, they view boat arrivals as a threat and fear that unless Australia maintains strict and even punitive control of its borders, the country will be overwhelmed. They are pleased that border protection policies have stopped deaths at sea. If anything, their main reason for supporting boat turnbacks and detention is that they can’t see any other solution. These respondents would prefer a better system but are at a loss as to what it might be.

The study aimed to find why people hold these negative attitudes towards boat arrivals and how they arrived at them. The most important driver of such negative attitudes towards asylum-seekers was found to be religious prejudice, sometimes expressed as concern about the “Islamisation” of Australia – Islam seen as an intolerant religion alien to Australian values and linked to terrorism. A second factor was a generalised sort of racism fearful of taking in large numbers of people who are “not like us.” Finally there was considerable anger expressed by many who believe that asylum-seekers get preferential treatment for services such as public housing and welfare, receive government benefits and are likely to be a drain on the Australian taxpayer.

However, the study noted that negative attitudes towards asylum seekers have been driven by the two parties and most media relentlessly attempting to dehumanise them and paint them as a major threat that demands a response of ‘border protection’ and deterrence. This approach dates back to 1992, when the Hawke government detained 600 Cambodian asylum seekers for a prolonged period after the Prime Minister labelled them “queue jumpers.” Following the Tampa incident in 2001, the message that boat arrivals were also illegals and not genuine refugees was picked up with greater fervour. In addition, the use of fear was increasingly directed towards those arriving from Islamic majority nations.

Persuasion – opportunities

Finally, the study suggests some promising avenues for changing people’s attitudes. One such avenue is to improve people’s knowledge, starting with their understanding of Australia’s legal obligations. Very few people surveyed knew anything about Australia signing the 1951 Refugee Convention and therefore accepting legal responsibilities to asylum seekers. This ignorance is one reason people unquestioningly accept labels such as “illegals” and “queue-jumpers. It is widely agreed that Australians are a law-abiding people and so it unsettles the broad middle to learn that our country is acting illegally and that this behaviour damages our international reputation as a good global citizen.

An ANU research project early this year also showed that better knowledge is important in edging people towards questioning their support for harsh border protection and detention policies towards refugees. The ANU team interviewed 2,000 Australians and found that over 56% of them agreed or strongly agreed with these policies. Then they randomly divided the respondents into four groups: they told one group that Australia’s policy breached international law, one group that it was immoral, and one group that it harmed Australia’s international reputation. The fourth group received no additional information. The results?  Everyone who received negative information was more critical of current policy, but those who learned that current policy breached international law changed their attitudes far more.

Better knowledge might also address the exaggerated fears of boat arrivals from Muslim countries. The extent of disinformation is staggering. For example, an Ipsos-Mori poll published in The Guardian Australia in 2014 showed that Australians believe the proportion of Muslims in the country to be nine times higher than it really is – 18% instead of the actual 2%. We are rarely told the important facts about how refugees, including Muslims, have made overwhelmingly positive contributions to this country. A patient but bold presentation of these simple facts should create a better informed and perhaps less panicky debate.

Or would it? In The Greens we often say that stories and emotions are more persuasive in changing entrenched beliefs than facts and science. People who are particularly aggressive towards Muslim asylum seekers are rarely persuaded by facts about the relatively low numbers seeking asylum and the high percentage who go on to become good citizens. Instead they endlessly recount anecdotes proving that Muslims are undermining Christian traditions such as the sending of Christmas cards, the production of nativity plays in schools and the playing of Christmas Carols in shopping centres. Maybe such things happen somewhere, but the storytellers carry on as if they happen everywhere. Facts are weak in the face of these sentiments and their associated fears and resentments.

Or take the example of the Nadesalingam family. Their acceptance had little to do with the (absolutely correct) facts refugee advocates presented to counter the official line that Tamils weren’t genuine refugees because they had no reason to fear persecution in Sri Lanka. It was all about the local community coming to love this family who were simply good, positive citizens ‒ and then being devastated to find that their government could treat them so appallingly. This sort of narrative that appeals to the emotions of celebration and acceptance is probably more likely to succeed than one that appeals to reason. The majority of people celebrate the idea of Australia as a multicultural society. We must extend the celebration to include asylum-seekers. Maybe we should go harder on our policy of accepting much larger numbers each year – as well as being an appropriate response to the burgeoning numbers of people needing refuge, it would mean more Australians would come into contact with these wonderful people. We should also go harder on the Refugee Council’s recommendation of providing more opportunities for community involvement in helping refugees settle into their communities, as this would have the same benefit of more people getting to know refugees – an experience that is certain to transform negative attitudes (such as, “these people don’t fit in because they are so different”).

I’ve had conversations about refugee issues on doorsteps at just about every federal election since 2001 – in fact this 2022 campaign was probably the only time the topic didn’t come up. The possibilities offered in the above research studies study resonate with me. In particular, I’ve found that people’s negativity towards asylum seekers and Muslims doesn’t run very deep:  the sticking point is to articulate an approach that combines fairness with safety and orderly control of numbers, as was demonstrated in our success in dealing with large numbers of Vietnamese boat arrivals over 40 years ago. In my experience many people are willing to talk about more humane policies so long as basic requirements of security are met.

Header photo: Refugee rally in Perth in July 2019

_{[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]}