“Stop the boats.” The white-on-red slogan on Rishi Sunak’s podium on Tuesday was – word for word – the slogan used by Tony Abbott to win the Australian prime ministership a decade ago.
To Australian audiences, so much of the rhetoric emerging from the UK over its small boats policy is reminiscent of two decades of a toxic domestic debate.
A succession of Australian prime ministers have led the rhetorical charge against asylum seekers, insisting that their arrival is an issue of “national security” and “border protection”. They are “illegals”, “queue jumpers” and “terrorists”, Australians have been told, while people-smugglers are the “scum of the earth”.
That hostile and militarised language has held a potent place in the Australian political debate for 20 years. And the language is the fundamental basis of the policies that flow from it: of deterrence and forcible turnbacks, of “offshoring” and indefinite detention.
The rhetoric not only allows governments to create for asylum seekers a “hostile environment”, it compels it from them. This too has been copied in the UK straight from the Australian playbook.
Even many of the characters are the same. Alexander Downer, Australia’s former high commissioner to the UK, argued in the Daily Mail on Tuesday in support of immediate deportation and a lifetime ban from Britain for “anyone caught trying to enter Britain by a dangerous ‘irregular route’, such as a Channel crossing in a small boat”.
Downer was a foreign minister in the conservative government of John Howard that first implemented the “Pacific solution” of warehousing refugees on foreign islands.
The Tory strategist Sir Lynton Crosby was the federal director of Howard’s conservative Liberal party, overseeing his four successful election campaigns.
And Crosby’s protege Isaac Levido, later an adviser to Boris Johnson, was deputy campaign director for the Liberal party’s 2019 election campaign, bolstering the premiership of Scott Morrison, who came to prominence as the architect of the adamantine Operation Sovereign Borders, and who famously adorned his prime ministerial office with a trophy of a boat engraved “I stopped these”.
In late 2001, in the lead-up to a closely fought election and in the shadow of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Howard government hastily established its Pacific solution – exiling refugees and asylum seekers to detention centres in the remote Papua New Guinean island of Manus and the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru, where many languished for years.
Two decades later, it has proved to be no solution. On Wednesday in Canberra, the parliament voted against a private member’s bill that would have brought the 150 people still held on Nauru and in PNG to Australia. Most of those have been held offshore for more than 10 years. They will remain on the islands indefinitely, pending a so-called “third country” – probably the US or New Zealand – offering them a resettlement place.
Australia has twice implemented policies of offshore processing – the model on which the UK’s Rwanda plan is based – between 2001 and 2008, and since 2012. The most recent iteration of Australia’s offshore detention regime has been plagued by scandal and has cost upwards of A$10bn (£5.5bn). At least 12 people have died in the camps, including being murdered by guards, through medical neglect and by suicide. Psychiatrists sent to work in the camps have described the conditions as “inherently toxic” and akin to torture.
The United Nations has repeatedly said Australia’s system violates the convention against torture, and the international criminal court’s prosecutor said indefinite detention offshore was “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” and unlawful under international law.
The detention centre on Manus Island was ultimately ruled illegal by the PNG supreme court and ordered to shut. Australia had to pay more than $70m in compensation to more than 1,000 people it had illegally incarcerated on the island.
Nauru, however, persists. The 2016 Nauru files, a cache of leaked internal working documents written by staff, exposed repeated acts of sexual violence against children as young as six, violent assaults against detainees, and systemic neglect.
And offshore processing proved ineffective at “stopping the boats”. In the first 12 months after the policy was implemented, government figures reveal more people arrived by sea seeking asylum than at any time in Australian history. Within three months, Australia’s offshore processing centres were overfull, and the government had to stop sending people offshore. No one has been sent offshore since 2014 – those that remain there have been there since then.
The arrival of boats on Australian shores has been dramatically slowed, however, largely through the intervention of Australia’s navy physically intercepting the boats and forcing their occupants back to the countries they left, sometimes in their own vessels and sometimes in lifeboats given to them by Australian authorities.
Australia’s pushbacks of asylum seeker boats are illegal under international law and “may intentionally put lives at risk,” a UN report has said. On occasions, Australian government agents have even paid boat skippers to turn their vessels around, leading to allegations of government-sponsored “people trafficking”.
Boat arrivals retain their political potency in Australia. On the morning of the last federal election, in 2022, in what would prove to be one of its final acts in power, the Morrison government sent text messages to thousands of voters warning that an “asylum-seeker boat” had arrived in Australian waters and that a change of government would restart widespread boat arrivals. This time, the move failed to sway voters.
In parliament on Wednesday, David Pocock, once the Australian rugby union team’s captain and now an independent senator, lamented two decades of “our collective political failure”.
He said: “For more than 20 years the plight of asylum seekers and refugees trying to reach Australia has been politicised. Successive governments have been in what seems to be a race to the bottom, campaigning on fear, division and cruelty.”
