Australian government structure and functions

Australian Federal Politics

One of the most disillusioning things that can happen to a citizen of a democracy is to discover that one's own government - the legal and political extension of oneself - has lied to one. This is far more damaging both to an individual's belief in his or her government and in the end to that government itself than is a citizen's disagreement with that government. This does not, of course, only happen in Australia. Many Americans (to look across the Pacific) believed that their government should not go to war with Iraq, but even as they disagreed with their government's actions approval for American President Bush remained high. However, after it was discovered that the Bush administration lied to the American people about its claims for the necessity of going to war and going to war quickly, more and more Americans have begun to have an unfavorable opinion of their government - and rightly so. If there is a single obligation that a democratic government has to its people it is to tell them the truth. The Australian government has itself recently failed to do this and as a result deserves to lose the confidence of the people that it claims to represent.

One of the most shocking examples of the government's lying to the Australian people occurred last year as a part of the administration's attempt to limit the number of foreigners who are seeking asylum - often by desperate stratagems. To understand the specific incident that this paper examines - which involved asylum seekers putting children overboard in an attempt to be rescued by the HMAS Adelaide - it is important to understand something of the background of the current influx of people seeking asylum in Australian. Many of these come from the Middle East and North Africa and, according to the department of immigration, are often shuttled to Australia via Bangkok, which is the capital of an established smuggling route. The demographics of the asylum-seekers as of 2000 (and it has not changed greatly since then) is as follows:

Iraq: 51%

Afghanistan: 27%

Iran: 5%

China: 4%

Malaysia: 4%

South Korea: 2%

New Zealand: 2%

Sri Lanka: 2% (http://us.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/08/28/asylum.facts/).

Australia was also for a time the site of refuge for many seeking refuge from the war in Kosovo.

The Australian government - ignoring the irony of a nation that has been built through the hard work of people who were not wanted elsewhere now denying refuge to those who are themselves unwanted - has denied entrance to ships bearing refugees. It has offered other nations promises of both funds and aids to take refugees bound for Australia, a policy that could well be seen as an attempt to bribe other nations. This policy that earned it a rebuke from the international human rights group Amnesty International:

The recently-elected Australian government must seriously consider the consequences of its dispersal policy. "While the world has been focused on the humanitarian and refugee crisis unfolding in and around Afghanistan, the Australian government has been sending boatloads of Afghans and other asylum-seekers around the Pacific," Dr. Pace added.

The policy has clearly failed to stop desperate asylum-seekers trying to reach Australia, and the people smuggling rings have not been broken. While the government has been creating a 'fortress Australia', hundreds of men, women and children fleeing persecution and attempting to reach safety, are being arbitrarily detained in camps and on boats, often in very poor conditions." (http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engASA120102001?Open&of=eng-aus)

While Australia has been censored by international agencies (including the United Nations) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1659410.stm) such censure clearly has not affected the ways in which the majority of Australians themselves see the problem of immigration: John Howard was reelected to office in 2001 on a hard-line anti-immigration policy that since the summer of 2001 has used Australian naval vessels to prevent refugees from landing. Even with the support of the citizens who voted it into power, Howard and his government have failed to be open about their actions; this lack of disclosure and resistance to independent monitoring has made many Australians suspicious of their government even when there is no reason to be so (http://www.caa.org.au/campaigns/refugees/still_drifting/).However, in the case under examination here, there does indeed appear to have been ample reason for the government to be secretive about its actions and for the people to feel that they have been betrayed by Howard's administration (http://www.caa.org.au/campaigns/refugees/pacificsolution/execsum.html#exsum8).

While the population has generally been supportive of turning away refugees (as evidenced by the Howard government's showing at the polls in 2001), there are limits to what even an anti-immigration public will put up with, and the intentional abandonment of children who may drown is one of them. The intentional lying to the public is another thing that that public is unlikely to support. One of these two things happened on Oct. 7, 2001. At that time a SIEV (suspected illegal entry vessel) entered Australian waters. The Howard government - as a part of its reelection campaign - claimed that at least one child had been thrown overboard from the vessel in an attempt to bolster its hard-line claims that refugee seekers were barbarians who would do anything to ensure that they were given asylum in Australia, even risk the death of innocent children.

However, while Howard and his government might have believed that this was a productive claim to make, the fact that there was photographic evidence denying that any children were thrown overboard damaged the government's credibility. An innocent mistake on the part of the government would have been one thing, but it was clear relatively quickly that the government was not simply mistaken, it was lying: