Click for menu
Australia's Welcome to uninvited and unannounced asylum seekers

You're welcome, if we're interested

In the lead-up to the 2004 election, neither the government nor the opposition wants to be seen to be 'soft' in its approach to refugees and asylum-seekers. Differences in policy are only slightly more pronounced than in 1972.

Will the winner of this coming election pursue a more compassionate policy once the immediate risk of forfeiting votes has passed?

The example of Australia's response to Asians from Uganda suggests that this is by no means certain. It also suggests that the agency entrusted with implementing a more compassionate approach would ideally be different from that administering the present policy.

Related:

12 June 2004: The Curious Ambivalence of Australia's Immigration Policy - The 2001 Alfred Deakin Lecture, delivered by Marion Lê OAM, who is the 2003 Human Rights Medal winner, a winner of the Austcare Paul Cullen Award, and was presented with the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1990.

2 March 2008: Klaus Neumann, Seeking Asylum in Australia: A Historical Perspective - The debate about Australia's response to refugees and asylum seekers is largely devoid of a historical perspective. In this paper, historian Klaus Neumann demonstrates the benefits of such a perspective when reflecting on the terms 'refugee' and 'asylum seeker'.

Dear Mr Downer...

by Klaus Neumann
Australian Policy Online
3 June 2004

Klaus Neumann is a senior research fellow at Swinburne University's Institute for Social Research. His book Refuge Australia: Australia's Humanitarian Record is published in the Briefing series by UNSW Press, $16.95. This article first appeared in the Australian Financial Review. It also appeared under the title 'Dear Mr Downer...' in Australian Policy Online.

'It becomes increasingly difficult to be proud of Australia,' the correspondent explained to Alexander Downer. Because of the government's refugee policy, she, an Australian living in London, felt she could no longer encourage her children to love Australia 'the way I used to'. Downer was sympathetic to her plea that the government be more generous in its response to non-European refugees: 'My own personal view is that the Australian Government should be prepared, on grounds of humanity, to accept some of these unfortunate people.' He told her that he had 'put this view to my colleagues in Canberra strongly'. Indeed, in a letter to the Prime Minister, Downer argued: 'A concrete offer to accept some of these people would win us plaudits far and wide.' But his argument fell on deaf ears.

Could this be evidence of a rift between Downer and John Howard over the government's refugee and asylum-seeker policies? No. The concerned expatriate wrote on 1 September 1972 - to Australia's high commissioner in London and father of the present Minister for Foreign Affairs. Six weeks earlier, Uganda's president, Idi Amin, had given all non-citizens of South Asian ancestry 90 days to leave the country. Between August and November 1972, more than 50,000 Asians, including many of those who had taken out Ugandan citizenship after 1962, fled the African nation.

Many of the Asians living in East Africa still held British passports, and in the end Uganda's former colonial master resettled the majority of those expelled. But Britain's willingness to admit tens of thousands of Asians from Uganda was no foregone conclusion, and it seemed unlikely that it would accommodate Asians other than those who were British nationals. Other possible resettlement destinations included India and Pakistan, as well as countries that had invited large numbers of European displaced persons and refugees after World War II, namely the US, Canada and Australia.

But from very early on, the McMahon government tried to rule Australia out as a major destination for Asians from Uganda. On 17 August, the then immigration minister, Jim Forbes, said: 'Applications by Asians in Uganda will continue to be considered on their individual merits in accordance with our non-European immigration policies. These policies reflect the firm and unshakeable determination of the Government to maintain a homogeneous society in Australia.' Forbes told parliament that he did not expect Australia to be approached by Britain about the resettlement of Uganda's Asians.

Yet the British, unable to cope with the Ugandan crisis on their own, did call on the McMahon government to help. The British high commission made its first, informal approach the day after Forbes's statement in parliament. But the Australian government rejected suggestions that it offer a certain number of resettlement places, and relax its immigration policy to accommodate Asians from Uganda. On 29 August the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London submitted an annotated list of potential resettlement countries to the British prime minister. The entry under 'Australia' included the following observations: 'The Cabinet have decided that they cannot depart from their normal immigration policy ie to take only professionally qualified immigrants. It appears that Ministers are unwilling to risk forfeiting votes in the forthcoming elections.'

In 1972, the White Australia policy still largely determined Australia's response to prospective immigrants of non-European backgrounds. Six years earlier, the Holt government had, however, significantly revised Australia's immigration policy to facilitate the admission of highly qualified persons who would otherwise have been ineligible on account of their ancestry and skin colour. Now, 'normal immigration policy' provided that non-European applicants could be exempted from the usual racial requirements - for example, if they were persons 'with specialised technical skills for appointments for which local residents are not available'. Since the 1966 immigration reforms, on average about 3000 non-Europeans had migrated to Australia every year.

After Amin's announcement, the Department of Immigration was willing to fast-track applications from Asians living in Uganda. But as Australia did not have its own mission in Kampala, these were processed in Nairobi, and then forwarded to Canberra. It was only on 20 September, with half of Amin's 90-day deadline gone, that JH Paddick, the immigration attache based at the Australian high commission in Nairobi, was dispatched to Kampala for a one-week 'routine visit' to hand out forms and interview applicants.

He was inundated with inquiries and remained in Kampala for more than six weeks.

But Paddick made it clear that the Australian presence in Kampala was evidence not of 'a rescue operation but simply [of] an acceleration of our normal processing of persons who would have appealed for admission to Australia in the normal course of events in the next year or so'. Few of those desperate to leave Uganda were acceptable to the Australian authorities. The immigration department applied 'normal immigration policy' scrupulously. On 27 September 1972, for example, the department advised Paddick: 'Applications by engineers in all branches of engineering with exception of civil, heating and ventilation, instrumentation and refrigeration may be rejected without reference unless special circumstances apart from conditions in Uganda exist.' Paddick noted: 'If policy was relaxed I consider we could select 1000 good types with useful trade and semi-professional qualifications.'

But Australia was interested only in highly qualified, highly skilled and readily employable applicants.

According to Paddick's figures, between August and November, about 2000 inquirers were told not to bother putting in an application. About 400 applications were 'rejected locally' (that is, in Kampala or Nairobi), and another 37 by the immigration department in Canberra. Australia approved a total of only 190 applications covering 491 persons from Asians living in Uganda. At the same time, Canada accepted more than 10 times as many, and provided regular charter flights to move successful applicants out of Uganda.

Medical doctors with degrees from British universities, and others who were considered a 'migration gain' by the Australian immigration authorities, had no trouble finding a new home. They often went 'visa-shopping', applying simultaneously to migrate to Australia, the US, Canada and Britain. It was thus unsurprising that only a comparatively small number of those approved for migration to Australia eventually arrived here.

When Alexander Downer wrote to prime minister William McMahon urging him to adopt a more generous approach to Asians from Uganda, he continued a tradition of senior diplomats unsuccessfully taking issue with Australia's refugee policies.

In 1938, for example, one of Downer's predecessors, high commissioner (and former prime minister) Stanley Bruce, had urged the Lyons government to issue a substantial number of visas for refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

Downer expressed a view widely held in the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time, namely that Australia's reputation was at stake and that it was essential to at least demonstrate a willingness to help. In late October 1972, a meeting of senior foreign affairs and immigration department bureaucrats contemplated arranging a charter to airlift those approved for entry to Australia. One official noted that 'this would be favourable to Australia's image' and that 'a charter flight would have more 'impact' on both press and the public than spasmodic arrivals'. But as Paddick had not selected enough Asians to fill a plane, the idea was not pursued.

In spite of generous responses from some countries, most notably Britain, India and Canada, by late October 1972, several thousand Asians, nearly all of them stateless, were still waiting for a country to take them in. On 20 October, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadruddin Aga Khan, made a confidential appeal to the Australian government. In his response, foreign minister Nigel Bowen offered financial assistance, but ignored a specific request to resettle further Asians from Uganda.

With the deadline fast approaching and the situation in Uganda becoming increasingly volatile, the UNHCR, assisted by the Red Cross and the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, evacuated the remaining expellees to transit camps in Belgium, Italy, Malta, Austria and Spain. In November 1972, more than 4000 Asians were still awaiting resettlement.

In 1972, Australia's immigration policy no longer enjoyed bipartisan support. The Labor Party attacked the non-European policy, and the Whitlam government abolished it the following year. But while the Australian Council of Churches and humanitarian organisations criticised the government's handling of the Ugandan refugee crisis, and, in the words of a senior foreign affairs official, 'the predictable people and papers quickly said and printed the predictable things', the federal opposition did not argue strongly for a more generous response.

In fact, the government's fear that its response to the Ugandan refugee crisis could become a liability in the 1972 election campaign suggests that it was concerned the Labor Party opposition could exploit a weakening of Australia's resolve to adhere to 'normal immigration policy'. If Labor had wanted to promote a tougher line than the government, it needed only to close ranks behind outspoken former leader Arthur Calwell. In May 1972, Calwell had warned of a 'chocolate-coloured Australia' and claimed that some Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Burmese, Mauritian and Ceylonese Burgher migrants settling in Perth 'live on the smell of an oily rag and breed like flies'. In October, he said in parliament that 'the overwhelming majority of Australians do not want to see any Ugandan Asians brought to Australia' and voiced his fear that the government would allow Ugandan refugees to come on humanitarian grounds alone. This fear was, of course, unfounded.

Whitlam and the ALP leadership distanced themselves from Calwell's views. But they did not distance themselves from the government's approach to Asians from Uganda. Did they fail to do so with an eye on the coming elections? In early December 1972, the ALP won government. Arguably, Whitlam and his cabinet, when formulating their approach to the refugees from Uganda in late 1972 and early 1973, were not as constrained by the perceived mood of the electorate as McMahon and Forbes had been a few months earlier.

On 21 December, Whitlam announced that Australia would provide an extra $US75,000 to the UNHCR to help pay for the accommodation of expellees in transit camps. On 2 February 1973, Whitlam and his minister for immigration, Al Grassby, decided that Australia would offer resettlement places for 50 families of stateless Ugandans in transit camps. These families would not even have made up for the shortfall between the number of Asians from Uganda approved for migration to Australia in 1972, and the number who had already arrived or were likely to do so. But it was an important step, the more so since Grassby instructed his department to relax its selection criteria.

Australian selection teams visited the transit camps and interviewed dozens of candidates put forward by the UNHCR. But by 25 June 1973, of 4416 persons initially accommodated in the five transit centres, Australia had resettled only nine. By then, the US had resettled 1308 expellees from the transit camps, Canada, which had already taken thousands the previous year, 438, and Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands another 896 between them.

While the immigration department relaxed its non-European selection criteria, it did not abandon them. Australia was still looking for expellees who would prove a migration gain, rather than admitting refugees on the basis of their individual need. In late March, a UNHCR representative complained that of the 17 'best' families presented to the Australians by the high commissioner's office from the transit camp in Spain (which the Spanish government threatened to close), Australia had considered only two beyond the preliminary interview stage. Of 12 families presented to Australia's selection team in Malta, only six were interviewed. The immigration department also rejected some applicants strongly recommended by its own interviewing officers, because Australia had not been their first preference or because their employment prospects were considered to be poor.

Evidence from recently released government files suggests three reasons why Australia's response to Uganda's Asians remained comparatively hard-hearted, even after the change of government. First, the immigration department had almost no experience in selecting migrants on the basis of their, rather than Australia's, needs. In postwar Australia, refugees had been admitted principally because they were considered a migration gain and not for compassionate reasons.

Second, the ideas that had underpinned the administration of the White Australia policy were too ingrained to be easily abandoned. Selection officers considered an applicant unfavourably if his or her 'integration prospects' were deemed to be poor. They commented critically on women wearing saris rather than Western-style dresses. About a couple in the Maltese transit camp, who were of mixed Asian and African descent and were Muslims, the interviewing officer wrote:

'both have African appearance, dark complexion, frizzy hair ... Would feel that overall have less chance of integration because of ethnic origin and religion and unlikelihood of acceptance of qualifications.'

Third, the department was not entirely sure how exactly to interpret Grassby's directive to relax the selection criteria. Immigration officers trying to discern the new government's position may have been frustrated by the lack of unambiguous instructions from Grassby, but they had little trouble divining Whitlam's position. Asked during a visit to London in April 1973 whether the abolition of the White Australia policy meant that Australia would accommodate more Asians from Uganda, Whitlam replied:

'If they have got qualifications such as entitle people to come to Australia, then certainly they can come.'

Officers in the immigration and foreign affairs departments duly added his statement to the relevant policy files.

Whitlam's position hardly departed from that advocated by his predecessor. Six months earlier, an ABC journalist had asked McMahon about Asians from Uganda:

'Is compassion grounds for migration?' 'I think our own interests must come first,'

McMahon replied,

'and consequently we should be able to choose those migrants that are going to make the greatest contribution to the development of this country.'

As far as the Asian expellees were concerned, a bipartisan approach prevailed. In September 1973, Grassby referred to this approach in the House of Representatives - without trying to be ironic:

'I think the position in Australia reflects great credit on both sides of the parliament.'

In the lead-up to the 2004 election, neither the government nor the opposition wants to be seen to be 'soft' in its approach to refugees and asylum-seekers. Differences in policy are only slightly more pronounced than in 1972. Will the winner of this coming election pursue a more compassionate policy once the immediate risk of forfeiting votes has passed? The example of Australia's response to Asians from Uganda suggests that this is by no means certain. It also suggests that the agency entrusted with implementing a more compassionate approach would ideally be different from that administering the present policy.

From http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/items/00706.shtml