The Pacific Solution

You’ve got to wonder sometimes, who comes up with these policies and which bright spark gets to name them. Clearly the lights were off and no one was home in the halls of power when our government came up with its policy for diverting asylum seekers and called it the Pacific Solution. Obviously everyone at that meeting hadn’t heard of a little thing called WWII and the other famed ‘solution’. Nice work.

Our current immigration policy is pathetic. It is based entirely on the premise that we need to make Australia seem like a foreboding, unapproachable fortress – else the hordes of Asia descend on us. Now I’m not saying Howard and the boys haven’t done a good job of making us look like heartless bastards. They legislatively reduced our immigration inclusion zone, established a raft of offshore and remote mainland detention centers, holding some applicants for more than three years. Pretty intimidating stuff, but hardly pleasing to human rights watch groups, like Amnesty International. So far, the government had been able to get away with it for one simple reason: hating and fearing foreigners is currently fashionable in the USA (who are building a fence along their 3000 km border with Mexico) and Europe (where right wing nationalists keep coming to power on a tide of xenophobia). Way to go with the flow.

Obviously, there are better solutions to this issue, but it isn’t practical to merely grant visas to everyone arriving on our shores. There is a necessity to process new arrivals, both in terms of the validity of their refugee status and their health – before putting them into the community. The key to a workable policy in this area though is simple: definitive detention periods. For example, let’s say 3 months (I’m no visa processing expert, but I think that’s a fair time). That’s the limit, no exceptions. In that time, asylum seekers can be given medical treatment and health checks, English lessons to help them make their way in our society, and offered vocational training if they wish, to make them more employable – all while their paper work is verified. Independent, free legal representation and translators can ensure that are treated fairly. At the end of that time, you have happy, healthy people ready to join our community – with the bonus being that we no longer have to be ashamed at how we treat those less fortunate than us.