The media and asylum seekers in Australia

In early February 2000 hundreds of Iraqi asylum seekers detained at a converted air-force base in the far north-west of Australia went on a hunger strike. They gathered in the compound to chant ‘Where are human rights? Where is freedom? We want freedom!’ and produced a large, professionally drawn banner depicting the dictator Saddam Hussein, expressing gratitude to Australia’s Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) for its co-operation in locking up his critics. Some hunger strikers refused water and had to be treated at the detention centre clinic for dehydration. Most dramatically of all, a core group of between a dozen and twenty men sewed up their lips using ordinary needle and thread available in the camp for mending clothes.

Their protest was deeply unsettling and profoundly eloquent. It communicated the frustration and anger of those made mute and impotent. It demonstrated what people might do when the only power they have is over their own bodies. The Australian media however treated the protest action as something of a curiosity.

In The Age newspaper in Melbourne, the Curtin hunger strike rated three side-bar news briefs, each about fifty words long . Two of The Age stories were almost identical. Both used the word ‘bizarre’ to describe the mouth-stitching protest and each one quoted Immigration Department officials as saying that the hunger strike was now all but over. Coverage of the Curtin protest was dwarfed in The Age by another interstate story, the fate of a ‘feisty ferret’ that bit a Queensland policeman on the penis.

The compere of ABC Radio’s national current affairs AM programme also used the term ‘bizarre’ to describe the lip stitching , while The Australian newspaper demonstrated some originality. Instead of ‘bizarre’, the headline described the protest as ‘grisly’. The Sydney Morning Herald initially carried a 40-word side bar news brief about the hunger strike and then a slightly longer story on the lip-stitching two days later .

Perth’s Sunday Times devoted more copy to the story . ‘Bizarre’ cropped up again with ‘gruesome’ thrown in for good measure. The West Australian followed up with reports on a subsequent joint visit to Curtin by Immigration Minister Ruddock and then West Australian Premier Richard Court, who apparently spent an hour listening to the detainees concerns .

Afterwards Mr Court declared that the detainees ‘had a nerve to be complaining’ and that they ought to show ‘a little bit of gratitude.’ The Premier then chastised the asylum seekers for their ‘irresponsibility’ in bringing children to Australia. He admitted that seeing the children, ‘sort of tugs on the heart strings’, but he said that the detainees ‘should have had the decency not to subject their children to that illegal activity.’

The ‘illegal activity’ the Premier referred to is entering Australia without a valid visa. People who arrive in Australia without authorisation are locked up without charge and without recourse to a magistrate, regardless of whether or not they seek to invoke Australia’s protection obligations under the 1951 Convention on Refugees. Such people must, by law, be held in detention along with their children. They cannot apply for bail and no court has the power to order their release. If they are recognised as refugees under the accepted international definition, then they will be accorded the protection that Australia promised to provide when it signed the relevant international agreements. If they are not recognised as refugees, then, barring personal intervention by the Minister on humanitarian grounds, DIMA will remove them from Australia.

Official bias

All the news reports of the Curtin protest relied heavily on the official version of events as supplied by DIMA in Canberra. No journalists are allowed into Australia’s immigration detention facilities or ‘Immigration Reception and Processing Centres’ as the remote camps are officially called. Those people who are allowed in - like doctors, nurses and lawyers - are often reluctant to speak to the media for fear that it may jeopardise their future access to the detainees, or their future contracts with DIMA or Australasian Correctional Management Pty Ltd (ACM), the private company that runs the camps.

The Curtin protest was prompted in part by the poor conditions in the detention centre. People complained about finding snakes in the camp, about the shower facilities being inadequate and about queuing for hours in the hot sun to wait for meals. The mess could only seat 250 people at a time, which meant detainees were forced to eat in shifts. A detainee who requested a pair of nail clippers to trim his toenails was told to use his teeth. Above all, the detainees complained about being cut off from the rest of Australia and the rest of the world, with no telephone, no access to the media and no ability to send or receive mail.

None of this background emerged in contemporary reporting on the Curtin protest. The media’s shallow treatment of the event shows just how effectively the federal government had enforced a black-out on news from Australia’s six immigration detention centres. But coverage of the Curtin story also exemplified the media’s initially shallow and panicked approach to the asylum seeker story after the sharp increase in unauthorised boat arrivals to Australia in late 1999. In the six months from 30 June to 31 December 1999, 52 boats landed in Australia carrying 3,334 people. This was almost equal to the total number of arrivals for the previous decade. (Between 30 June 1989 and 30 June 1999, there were 124 boats carrying 3,956 people.) The surge in arrivals in late 1999 marked a qualitative shift in the unlawful movement of people into Australia. Smugglers had become more sophisticated and were using bigger boats to ferry larger numbers of passengers. There were 1,245 arrivals in November 1999 alone, including one boat carrying 355 people.

By April 2000 there were 3,791 people in immigration detention in Australia. Their arrival in the country had provoked a storm of media interest but their continued presence in desert camps initially went almost unremarked. There were notable exceptions, of course, but overall, media coverage of the issue was thin on detail, context and analysis. Reporting on the boat people issue tended to be knee-jerk and sensationalist. Statements by the Minister or by DIMA officials were rarely questioned, or challenged with an alternative viewpoint. In fact the media uncritically adopted the Minister’s language; the reports did not refer to ‘asylum seekers’ but to ‘illegal immigrants’ or simply ‘illegals’.

There is a deeply held yet irrational anxiety that Australia is perpetually in danger of being overrun; that our sovereignty is brittle and our borders weak. It is as if this continent were a rickety lifeboat, towards which all the world’s oppressed and poor are desperately swimming, threatening to drag us under. This is clear in the metaphors used to describe unauthorised boat arrivals, which are invariably compared to natural disasters.

We are warned that we are in danger of being ‘swamped’ by ‘a flood tide’ of refugees. They threaten to ‘inundate’ us in ‘waves’ and even ‘tsunamis’. A ‘rising tide’ of would-be immigrants is reported to be ‘massing in their thousands’ in nearby Indonesia. This imagery is disturbingly reminiscent of the language used to describe Chinese immigration a century ago. As historian David Walker writes in ‘Anxious Nation’ :

‘The Chinese were presented as a vast mass of humanity .... Their movements were described as tidal. They ‘flooded ‘ into the colonies. .... Floods and tides obliterate boundaries and destroy recognised landmarks. They carry all before them.’

Birth of ‘White Australia’ policy

As Australia celebrates the centenary of federation in 1901, we should remember that fear of Asian immigration was one of the issues that helped pull the individual colonies together to form the Commonwealth of Australia. One of the first items of legislation in the new federal parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. The birth of the Commonwealth also marked the beginnings of Australia’s racist White Australia Policy, which was to last until the early 1970s .

Chinese immigrants were accused of bringing with them all variety of vice and disease. Today, Senator Ross Lightfoot sounds a similar warning on the boat people. As he wrote in a letter to the editor published in The Australian ‘these people are criminals - worse, if they bring with them communicable, pandemic, epidemic or parasitic diseases (and they are from areas where contagious diseases are rampant), then innocent Australians could suffer.’

As arrival numbers peaked late in 1999, Minister Ruddock fanned the panic with talk of ‘a national emergency’ and in one press release he invoked the language of war, referring to an ‘assault to our borders’ . The media extended the imagery with words like ‘invasion’ and ‘armada’ .

Again this plays on deep-seated fears of invasion and the historical anxiety about the empty and defenceless north of Australia. In the late 19th century the radical utopian and labour activist William Lane developed a theory of ‘swarming populations’. He believed that nations, like beehives, reached a critical stage of over-population at which point mass emigration became inevitable. Lane calculated that China had an annual ‘swarming population’ of 65 million and believed that there was no land ‘so convenient and so promising [as Australia], so unoccupied yet so hospitable.’ There was a rash of invasion narratives around this time in which a defenceless and morally weak Australia was overrun by more calculating and ruthless Asians.

The genre is still with us, as in the popular teenage fiction of John Marsden. In his invasion series that begins with the novel Tomorrow, When the War Began , a group of resourceful rural school kids find themselves cast in the role of bush guerrillas, carrying out hit and run attacks against a foreign invader. In the tradition of the 19th century invasion narrative, Australia is portrayed as naive and complacent, a target ripe for the picking. The invader is never identified but his fantasy conforms to the key element of William Lane’s bee-hive analogy; the belief that plentiful Australia is at risk from overpopulated countries elsewhere:

‘They came swarming across the land, like locusts, like mice, like Patterson’s Curse. We should have been used to plagues in our country but this was the most swift, sudden and successful plague ever. They were too cunning, too fierce and too well organised. The more I’ve learnt about them, the more I can see that they must have been planning it for years.’

Tomorrow, When The War Began went through three editions and 19 reprints in the six years after it was first published in 1993. In the island continent, the fear of invasion is alive and well.

Provoking ‘public concern’

If this helps to explain the panicked reaction to unauthorised boat arrivals, then it also underlines the need for a sober and dispassionate assessment of the ‘threat’ that asylum seekers pose to national security. In the last financial year, 99/00, 12,713 people sought refugee status in Australia. Less than one third of those people arrived by boat. The vast majority of asylum seekers arrived in Australia with valid travel documents and were allowed to live freely in the community. These 7,904 people made up two thirds of all asylum seekers in 99/00, yet they were the ones we heard least about. Their presence was never an issue of public concern because it is only the boat people who spark panic.

Unauthorised arrivals at airports never emerge as a matter of public concern. Equally, there are thought to be more than 50,000 people in Australia who failed to leave before their visas expired (the largest groups are from the United Kingdom and the United States). Their presence is just as illegal as that of the boat people, but it does not cause a public panic. Nor do they usually get locked up.

At the peak of increased boat arrivals in late 1999 and early 2000, it became routine in the media to refer to the boat arrivals as a ‘crisis’, but rarely was this ‘crisis’ put in its international context. At the same time Tanzania received 50,000 refugees from Burundi, and 25,000 people crossed from East to West Timor in a single day. In the first eight months of 1979, 531 boats arrived in Hong Kong carrying 46,000 refugees from Vietnam . Iran lives with the daily crisis of 2 million Afghan refugees and 500,000 Iraqis.

We seem to be fixated by the pull factors; the attraction that brings people to Australia, rather than the push factors that force them to leave their homes in the first place.

To ignore the varied and complex motivations of asylum seekers is flawed journalism; to attack their credibility is a calculated political act. Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and his Foreign Minister Gareth Evans publicly questioned the validity of applicants for refugee status from Cambodia, because their arrival in Australia raised doubts about the success of the Canberra-initiated Cambodian peace plan; the Suharto-friendly Paul Keating questioned the legitimacy of East Timorese asylum seekers on the basis that they should go to Portugal. The current Immigration Minister also applies the acid of disbelief to asylum seekers in liberal doses; the media generally allows him to get away with it and the effects are corrosive.

In an interview with Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Mr Ruddock claimed that the ‘so called boat people are flying first class into Indonesia and Malaysia before boarding rickety vessels for Australia’. The interview was carried on the front page under the screaming banner headline ‘Alien Scam’. The article claimed to be an ‘insight’ report into the problem of illegal immigration. In fact it was little more than a series of unsubstantiated and tendentious assertions by unnamed departmental officials. The paper concluded that boat people were ‘exploiting a loophole in migration laws that grants people from Iraq and Afghanistan almost certain permanent residency’. What the Herald Sun calls a ‘loophole’ is in fact Australia’s international obligation to offer protection to people at risk of persecution.

As Sharon Pickering noted in a recent study, media reporting on asylum seekers and refugees is dominated by binary logic - she gives the examples of bogus/genuine or legal. I would add the pairing citizen/non-citizen to underline the way in which the moral panic directed at the boat people and refugees is driven by notions of entitlement. Citizens pay taxes; they are entitled to have their rights protected and to access public services. Refugee non-citizens have no such entitlements and no such rights. Hence they can be detained indefinitely without trial - a practice that the High Court has found to be constitutional and lawful.

As people without entitlement, refugee non-citizens are only acceptable in a certain guise - as the passive and grateful recipients of the generosity that we choose to bestow. The media is comfortable with images of refugees and asylum seekers as helpless and bedraggled. The Minister paints an image of deserving refugees ‘waiting patiently’ in squalid refugee camps. Such people not only fit the stereotype of a ‘refugee’ (in the popular non-technical meaning of the word), but more importantly they are passive and therefore, by definition, controllable. We (the entitled) can choose to bestow our generosity on them (the unentitled), or choose to withhold it. By contrast the ‘boat people’ display a disagreeable degree of self will; they are willing to take action to address their situation, to arrive uninvited, to stitch their lips in protest and are consequently perceived and represented as a threat.

The experience of the ‘safe haven’ refugees is illustrative here. The ‘safe haven’ visa was introduced in 1999, when the Australian government came under intense popular pressure to offer temporary sanctuary to people fleeing the war in Kosovo.

John Howard was on hand with his wife personally to welcome the first Kosovars to arrive in Australia. But when one Kosovar family later led a protest about conditions at the Singleton camp 230km north-west of Sydney, they were portrayed as ingrates. With an invalid grandmother to care for, the family objected to the lack of privacy in shared facilities, and to the fact that bathroom and toilet facilities were hundreds of metres away from the wooden huts where they were to sleep. Government officials described the complaints as ‘totally unreasonable’ and suggested that they could send the family back to Kosovo if they were dissatisfied with Australia. As David Brearly commented in The Australian the charity on offer to the refugees was conditional: ‘A beggar’s gratitude is the prescribed response; anything less renders the whole deal suspect’ .

Nevertheless, the safe haven experience did allow many Australians to get to know the Kosovars and remarkable links were established with the refugees. The open-hearted response of local communities, particularly in country towns, defied the image of Australia as a nation antagonistic to new immigrants. When it came time for the Kosovars to leave Australia, many were understandably reluctant to return to their devastated homeland. They found vocal supporters amongst the Australian population, including State premiers in South Australia and Tasmania, who argued that the refugees should be allowed to settle permanently. By March 2000, there were fewer than 500 Kosovars left in Australia and those without permission to remain came under sustained government pressure to sign ‘voluntary’ departure consent forms or be transferred to remote detention centres in Port Hedland or Woomera. The situation of these last safe haven refugees received detailed and sympathetic coverage in the media and was a factor in prompting some journalists to begin to think more critically about the overall policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers who arrive in Australia without authorisation.

Scrutinising the detention policy

The dramatic and desperate action of the Curtin hunger strikers was not in vain. After the intervention of an outside mediator, small improvements were introduced at the camp. Detainees now have access to a telephone, to a fax machine, and to newspapers. They would be allowed to receive visitors, should any make it all that way to Curtin. According to DIMA, children detained at Curtin are now taken on a weekly excursion to Derby to visit the swimming pool and in September 2000, a year after Curtin was recommissioned as a detention centre, a playground was belatedly erected within the camp.

On the larger canvas, the hunger strike failed to prompt the Australian media to take a serious look at conditions in the camp, or fundamentally to question the policy of mandatory detention. Since the Curtin hunger strike, however, protests and riots at the Curtin, Woomera and Port Hedland detention centres have again drawn the attention of the media and in the last quarter of 2000, the government’s detention policy at last began to receive more serious scrutiny. There was particular focus on the detention of children following allegations that a child at Woomera had been sexually abused by his father. A belated investigation found no evidence to support the claim of abuse. However, the case highlighted the vulnerability of women and children in detention, and the inadequacies of the reporting mechanisms designed to prevent abuse. The minister for Immigration was forced to launch an inquiry, headed by a former diplomat, who found that a serious breach of procedure had occurred and who also identified weaknesses in the contractual and administrative arrangements for detention.

As a result of the controversy, the Immigration Minister agreed to consider the release of children from immigration detention under the so-called ‘Swedish model’, which would allow one parent to live with the children outside the detention centre, while the other parent remained incarcerated. This would mark the first significant softening of Australia’s immigration detention regime since it was formalised in legislation in 1992. It is a modest yet welcome concession and it demonstrates that Australia’s policies towards asylum seekers are not set in stone. Scrutiny by the media can influence both government decisions and public opinion.

Peter Mares is the author of Borderline: Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, published by UNSW Press (Sydney, 2001). He is also the presenter of ‘Asia Pacific’, a regional current affairs programme broadcast on Radio Australia, the international service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.