Toughest test for new PM
The Tampa rescue is a point of NZ pride – but we’re too gutless to do it for Manus Island.
What might Jacinda Ardern have wished for, on her very first trip official overseas trip as prime minister? A cosy PM-to-PM chat over tea, a tour of Kirribilli House, a kayak on Sydney Harbour with selfies? A polite get-to-know-you with Malcolm Turnbull (and, bonus, no risk of running into Julie Bishop!) Just the one slightly awkward topic to face – the decline of the rights of Kiwis living in Australia.
Oh, if only. Today’s flying visit now has the black cloud of Manus Island hanging over it.
It would be very much against Ardern’s nature to disregard the plight of 600 refugees now on the point of starvation, barricaded inside the abandoned detention centre in Papua New Guinea. The public statement she made on Friday said as much: ‘‘It’s hard to ignore the human face of this situation and nor should it be ignored.’’ She will again make an offer for New Zealand to take 150 of them.
It will be a tough conversation to have at her first face-to-face meeting with Turnbull.
Refugee advocates say most Australians are disgusted by their government’s callousness, but you’d never know it from the media coverage.
Once you find the brief reports they read like a horror script: PNG soldiers are blocking attempts to get food donated by local people to the starving men, military leaders who just a day or so ago promised not to move against the blockade are now poised to drag the refugees out by force.
Australia’s asylum-seeker policy, which once looked workable on paper, is a macabre joke now. And yet the Australian Government would rather we all avert our gaze.
Even the Papuans are starting to rebel. The man PNG look to as their chief elder, twotime PM Michael Somare, says that having closed the camps, Australia is now trying to walk away from its responsibility to resettle the asylum-seekers properly in existing communities on Manus.
That idea’s a fantasy too. Expecting 600 damaged men to find jobs and a life in a town of 4000 without intensive help is absurd. Life in PNG is brutal and hard even when you have a job, or an established subsistence lifestyle (yes, I’ve been there, and seen it). These men have nothing, just a promise of accommodation which refugee groups say is an unfinished group of shanties in the middle of a mud bath.
New Zealand’s offer to take 150 was made
in 2013 and has hung there, ignored, until now – but yesterday Australian Opposition leader Bill Shorten flipped Labor’s previous stance and urged the Government to accept.
And then, what? Perhaps criticism that we did not take them all when plainly we have room? Fear of the ones that are coming, who desperately need intensive mental health care?
Turnbull has been clear on why he keeps saying no to the Kiwi offer; it would open a ‘‘backdoor’’ for the refugees to enter Australia down the line, as Kiwi residents, and encourage the boats to start up again.
Journalist and campaigner Tracey Barnett, who’s followed the Manus story closely for years, says this is rubbish. ‘‘You have to ask yourself, after the living hell that Australia has put these men through for four years now, why would they possibly want to still go there?’’
She says we should chuck the current deal
out and take all 600 asylum-seekers as a oneoff, insisting Australia close these ‘‘modernday Gulags’’ for good.
Barnett’s not the only one who thinks this is a good idea, but it would be a tough sell for our PM and she knows it. With an 88 per cent rate of mental illness, these men would need ‘‘a huge embrace of care to heal’’.
‘‘I can’t think of a nobler, more important contribution for our prime minister to make as her first political legacy, something that would be remembered as a source of pride for generations to come.’’
She’s right when she reminds me we did it for the Tampa, and look at what stellar Kiwis those folks have become.
Can we do it again? In a perfect world I’d like to think so, but given the state of the trans-Tasman relationship right now, I don’t see it happening.
Ali Mau is the host of RadioLIVE Drive, 3-6pm weekdays.