How Australia stopped the migrant boats

Around 20 years ago, people smugglers set up a racket designed to game the Australian asylum system. Australia had – and still has – a rigorous immigration regime. Migrants can come as skilled workers, as part of a family reunion scheme or be re-settled as refugees. In every case they need to get a visa. That way, we can control who comes to our country and the number of people who arrive.

The people smugglers dreamt up a fourth pathway. For a considerable fee, they brought people to Australia by boat from Indonesia and prepped them on how to be accepted as refugees. The migrants were told to throw away identity documents and make claims that they were being persecuted in some far-off land. This game was not only hugely profitable for the people smugglers but was making a mockery of Australia’s immigration policies.

Finally, enough was enough. The Australian government decided it wasn’t going to allow this racket to continue. To start with, we tried to persuade the Indonesians not to allow migrants to set off in little boats to Australia. The Indonesians made some effort to stop them but without great success.

So we knew we had to act ourselves. The key to success was going to be the destruction of the people smugglers’ business model. We had to find a way of stopping potential customers buying passages on boats to Australia. We had to send out a very simple message: under no circumstances would an unauthorised person who paid a smuggler to get to Australia be allowed to settle there.

Initially, the smugglers told their customers that it would be impossible for Australia to stop the boats. So we did two things.

First, when the boats were intercepted, we took the asylum seekers to an offshore processing centre. There were two, one in Nauru and the other in Papua New Guinea. If the asylum seeker was found to be a genuine refugee, then we would look for somewhere to resettle them, ideally not in Australia. If the asylum seeker was found not to be a refugee, they would be sent straight back to their country of origin. The advantage was that the smugglers were unable to guarantee to their customers delivery to Australia. The demand for this racket started to decline.

To supplement this tough approach, the Australian government turned back boats when it was safe to do so. Obviously, if the sea was turbulent or the boat was sinking, it wouldn’t be practical to turn the boat back. The smugglers soon got onto this and gave guidance to asylum seekers on how to sink the boats or sabotage the engines so that they couldn’t be turned back. This was a tough problem to solve. We bought a number of specially designed boats whose engines could not be sabotaged and which could not be sunk by the passengers. We then transferred the asylum seekers to these boats and sent them back to Indonesia.

The combination of these techniques destroyed the people smugglers’ model and now there are almost no incidences of small boats bringing unauthorised arrivals to Australia.

To be frank, there was a lot of opposition in Australia to these policies. But the point is: the vast majority of the public were supportive because they wanted the government to decide who should come to Australia to live, not people smugglers.