Quota unmet in humanitarian disaster

Mr Woldring completely misunderstands the problem if he thinks that processing refugees in Indonesia will remove the incentive for asylum-seekers to take unauthorised means of reaching Australia ("Most refugees are highly motivated", p. 15, 23 July).

There are already hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been cleared by UNHCR for resettlement, and Australia has committed to taking 13,500 a year (although the announced figure seems to vary slightly) out of this number.

However, the authorities have, for many years, not accepted even this number, which suggests that there is a deliberate intent of keeping down the number of refugees admitted, given that there is no shortage of approved applicants.

Therefore, processing even more refugees will be of no help, if those processed know that approval does not materially affect the likelihood that they will be admitted to Australia.

Any refugee who is admitted to Australia, no matter whether he-she arrives through the formal approval process, by air with false papers (as about 90 per cent of asylum-seekers do) or by boat, is counted against the quota.

Most people do not realize that the 4000 proposed refugees from Malaysia would similarly only have been counted against the quota, so that they would have merely displaced other possible applicants from other sources and not increased the number of entrants.

As far as I know, nobody has ever debated the appropriate number of refugees that Australia could accept (the present quota, even unmet, seems quite arbitrary), but this might be a good starting point for a rational discussion that has, so far, been sadly lacking in the whole asylum-seeker scandal.

Mr Woldring is quite right that asylum-seekers in general and boat people in particular are highly motivated.

Who else would take the life-threatening risks associated with an unauthorised journey to Australia?

It is interesting that authorised arrivals (the largest number come from China) seem to fail the refugee test more frequently than unauthorised arrivals, that is boat people, at least until recently.

With the Government's view that Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan no longer pose a threat of persecution to minority groups, the success rate of boat-people applicants has fallen.

Of course, if the applicants' native countries refuse to accept their return and if no other country will accept them, the Government then has no option but to place the rejected applicants in indefinite detention, another unsatisfactory outcome of the present system.

The asylum-seeker-refugee issue is a complicated one.

However, if Australia purports to adhere to the international conventions that it has adopted, it cannot continue with the present arrangements which are in clear breach of both refugee and human-rights obligations.

How many people are aware that the Refugee Ombudsman (how many people even knew that there was such a post?) has recently resigned, citing lack of support for his work and the overwhelming load placed on his office by present practices?

It is unlikely that we shall see any early resolution of this humanitarian disaster, given that neither of the main two political parties has anything but a rhetorical approach to the problem.

Email, 24 Jul 2012

Bruce Hyland, Daleys Point