By Peter Job Feb 12, 2025
Australian citizens and residents who originally came to this country seeking asylum, as they are clearly entitled to do under international law, have been in the news recently, through no fault of their own and not in a good way. Sections of the media and some politicians have attacked them for doing what all citizens and residents have a right to do, that is to bring their partners and close relatives to Australia.
The ABC’s Media Watch program commendably took up this issue on 3 February under its new presenter Linton Besser. While there are certainly positive aspects to the Media Watch coverage, anyone with an understanding of fundamental refugee rights should be concerned by the way the program framed the issue, to the point of perpetuating misconceptions. To understand this, it is worthwhile having a look at Australian actions and policies towards refugees in the past few decades.
While refugees are treated badly by many countries, Australia has in many ways led the pack in the damage it has done to them, both to the welfare of individuals and to the collective rights of refugees to seek the protection to which they are entitled under the 1951 Refugee Convention. In simple terms, the convention stipulates that refugees should not be returned to a place of danger, that they should undergo fair and effective assessment and be provided protection if found to be in need of it, that they should be treated in a reasonable manner while undergoing assessment and that they should not be penalised if they arrive without papers or through irregular means such as boat arrivals. Australia has consistently violated all these provisions.
The assault began under the Keating Labor Government when in 1992 immigration minister Gerry Hand instituted mandatory detention for irregular arrivals, motivated by an influx of Cambodian refugees seeking protection. It accelerated massively under John Howard when a combination of often incompetent assessment, a punitive regime designed to punish refugees for attempting to assert their right to protection, and politicised vilification of refugees by self-serving politicians aimed at distracting Australians from other issues by occupying their minds instead with loathing of a minority.
Under Howard, not only were genuine refugees incorrectly assessed and kept in detention for years, but senior politicians from the prime minister down actively engaged in the propagation of disinformation and vilification, wrongly accusing them among other things of throwing children overboard and other untrue acts. Most importantly, the act of seeking asylum itself under the refugee convention became a matter of vilification and abuse by our most senior political leaders. This position was taken up willingly by sections of the media. These abusive policies met no effective opposition from the Labor opposition who then continued the practice when they took government.
Australia is not the only country to act in an appalling way to refugees. But Australia has pioneered many of the worst abuses, including long-term detention without end and offshore warehousing of refugees, in obvious violation of the 1951 refugee convention. Australian practices have influenced the development of refugee policy in other countries, with academics based in London and Melbourne reporting that “the Australian approach has featured prominently in political debates in several European states”.
While not as extreme in its detention policies, the UK, for example, has adopted the Australian rhetoric of refugee deterrence and stopping the boats, and the previous Tory government attempted to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, in emulation of Australian policies. Greece, admittedly in the context of far more arrivals than Australia ever experienced, has instigated policies of mandatory detention, while its practice of pushing back boats led to the catastrophic Pylos shipwreck. Such policies have no doubt influenced individuals in those countries looking to Australia’s bad example and the political advantages refugee vilification has provided certain politicians. Few countries are as bad as Australia as far as the amount of time refugees are imprisoned goes, whether in Australia or offshore. Nevertheless, what should fairly be termed the Australian disease, the vilification of refugees and the undermining of international refugee convention, has been enabled by the pioneer actions of the Australian government.
Sections of the Australian media have engaged in systematic and extreme vilification of refugees and of the act of seeking asylum. But in addition to the worst hate mongering, more moderate sections of the media have contributed to the normalisation of Australia’s refugee abusing policies. It has become standard throughout the Australian media to accept long-term detention, offshore warehousing and other abuses as a norm. Few point out that allowing asylum seekers undergoing processing to live within the community is an accepted norm in most countries, as it was in Australia in the past. Few in the media challenged the contrived sense of crisis conjured by Howard and others in response to refugee arrivals, despite the fact that arrivals to Australia are modest compared to many countries. Few have engaged in analysis that compares Australia’s situation and response to those of others, such as Türkiye, where millions of designated refugees live legally in the community and participate in the economy, or Germany, which from 2015 to 2019 accepted some 1.7 million mostly irregular arrivals, supported by the phrase Wir schaffen das (“We can do this”) of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Few have documented the biased processing of refugee claims and incompetent rejections undertaken by often ill-informed departmental bureaucrats or members of the Refugee Review Tribunal, a matter very familiar to those of us who supported and advocated for refugees during that period. Few have challenged the Federal Government’s claim that stopping the boats saves lives, despite strong evidence Australia’s interdiction policies in Indonesia have contributed to maritime deaths by forcing refugees to engage in longer voyages in more decrepit crafts, or by forcing refugees towards other destinations that are even more dangerous.
Media Watch should be commended for demonstrating how figures from the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs were misquoted, and the malicious and the self-serving manner in which this false information was used to vilify refugees. Indeed, Liberal Senator James Paterson provided a prime example of the manner in which Australian politicians have for decades used refugees as a punching bag by incorrectly implying that seeking protection in Australia under the refugee convention is dishonest or illegal.
Where the segment fell short was in its failure to situate the refugee issue in the context of the 1951 refugee convention and call out misconceptions in the material the program presented, thereby perpetuating them. Terms such as “illegal”, “illegal boat people” and “illegal asylum seeker” were constantly present, yet these inaccurate and derogatory terms were neither interrogated nor refuted in the context of the refugee convention or otherwise. Besser appears unaware or chose to ignore guidelines issued by the Australian Press Council which state that “great care” should be taken not to describe boat arrivals in an inaccurate or unfair manner, particularly when criminality or serious misbehaviour is implied, and that terms such as “illegal immigrants” or “illegals”, may constitute a breach of the Council’s Standard of Practice.
When a clip was played of radio host Peter Fegan of 4BC Breakfast claiming that relatives of former refugees were allowed into the country “with little or no vetting process”, no correction or examination of this baseless assertion was made. Fegan went on to claim that “some” would-be criminals were “here for ill will”, “here to break our laws” and “here to cause other people harm”. Yet this incendiary attempt to imply disproportionate criminality on the part of refugees and their families was allowed to stand uncontested, thereby further propagating it without interrogation or analysis.
Towards the end of the segment, Besser stated there was “nothing wrong with News Corp or the federal opposition gunning hard on border security”. Yet there is, if it involves distorting facts, vilifying refugees or any other minority group, implying without evidence they are disproportionally involved in crime, depicting them incorrectly as a threat to our security, or implying that Australian citizens or residents who originally arrived in Australia by boat, as refugees are entitled to do under international law, should have fewer rights than the rest of us. Besser’s uncritical use of the term “border security” in this context implies, as those who coined it intended, that refugees pose a threat to us. And no, that the families and partners of Australians who were once refugees are able to gain residence in Australia in the same ways others is not “a new crisis on Australia’s borders” as Besser describes it, ironically or not, in the opening of the segment.
The rest of Besser’s first Media Watch was largely impressive, and his multi-award-winning career certainly qualifies him for the job. His failure to adequately call out misconceptions and untruths about refugees hardly makes him Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, that such an otherwise accomplished journalist would fall into these traps is an indication of how insidious and normalised the Australian regime of refugee vilification has become.
It is possible to envisage a different universe in which decades ago the Australian Government had acted responsibly. In such a universe refugees would hardly have made page five in most newspapers, given the relatively small numbers by international standards and our capacity to absorb them. Refugees would have been quietly processed while living in the community, granted protection in the great majority of cases, and provided support while they found employment and integrated into society. In such a universe, refugees would never have been a burden for, as in ours, the great majority find employment and quickly contribute to our economy and community. In such a universe billions of dollars would not have been squandered on mandatory detention or offshore warehousing. In such a universe, the Australian Government would work with Indonesia to provide alternative pathways, rather than engaging in interdiction efforts that make maritime voyages more perilous. In such a universe, politicians and the media would devote their time to other issues of importance rather than vilifying a vulnerable minority group. In such a universe the Australian disease of refugee abuse would not provide such a starkly bad example for ill-intentioned actors in other countries.
While the prospects of a significant change to our appalling refugee policies seem remote, the worm has a habit of turning. There will undoubtedly be a day when Australians look back at our present refugee policies with horror, in much the same way we look back on the policies which produced the Stolen Generation. In the meantime, it is important that responsible sections of the media and elsewhere avoid the normalisation of the vilification and abuses we have subjected refugees to and call out the misconceptions and untruths that continue to plague Australian conversations about them.