The Coalition has caused anger over the last week after it announced that it would stop the reporting of asylum-seeker boat arrivals. The Coalition has said it will stop issuing a media alert each time a boat arrives within Australian shores. Instead Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and Angus Campbell, who is the Deputy Chief of the Army and in charge of Operation Sovereign Borders will provide a weekly briefing of the status of the operation. These briefings, it has been said, will provide numbers of arrivals, but will not provide information how many boats have been turned back under the Coalition’s policy. Scott Morrison gave this reason for the change:
“People smugglers use information as a tactic to ply their trade.
“Labor was impotent in response to arrivals, all they could do was announce them and run a water taxi service.”
With a justification like that it is fair enough that the policy has caused outrage. It is an extremely hypocritical position from a party that shouted from the rooftops every time a boat arrived whilst the ALP was in Government. As Katherine Murphy from the Guardian argued:
“Morrison, having benefitted from elevating this issue every day in opposition, having successfully made asylum a proxy measure for whether you can govern effectively or not, now needs to tamp it right down lest the same existential test be applied to him.”
This is a political move, and one designed to reduce the heat on the Coalition if and when their new policies fail to ‘stop the boats’. But take away from the purely political justification and at a basic level, this has the capacity to have quite a good outcome.
I think most are able to recognise that the political debate over asylum seekers arriving by boat is overblown to the greatest possible extent. Boat arrivals have for almost a decade been treated as a national crisis – creating a sense panic in the political class and the media every time a new boat arrives. Of course that is understandable when we see some of the tragedies that have occurred over the past few years – but it doesn’t just happen during the tragedies. It is a national panic that has been stirred throughout what is a normal circumstance in all countries; the arrival of asylum seekers by irregular means.
And of course, our politicians have done a lot to stoke this panic. Putting out a slamming press release every time a boat arrives, running campaigns to ‘stop the boats’, hurriedly announcing ‘hardline’ policies to deal with the issue. Scott Morrison has been one of the greatest perpetrators of this panic. A lot of it however also comes down to the way this is treated in the media. With a press release going out every time a boat arrives, every arrival makes news. Boats become headline stories, and with many often arriving within a week it can start to paint a picture of a flood of people overtaking our shores.
Yet, this isn’t an accurate picture. The amount of people arriving on Australian shores is a fraction of the amount of asylum seekers many other countries receive. The arrival of asylum seekers is not an unusual occurrence – it happens every day, most of the time not by boat. Yet, we seem to treat it as a major news story.
A ‘stop the press releases’ policy therefore has the opportunity to dampen down the hysteria a little. Instead of making every boat arrival a major story it will hopefully place it into a world where it potentially deserves to be; a normal occurrence – one created through push factors that we in many ways cannot control.
That doesn’t mean we should stop talking about asylum seekers. The Coalition’s new policies will deserve significant scrutiny. But at the same time, if all that scrutiny does is jump up and down every time a boat arrives, and scream ‘look, the Coalition can’t stop the boats’ all we will do is continue to buy into a framework that treats the arrival of asylums as an abnormal activity – one we can stop solely through hardline domestic policies. In will push the Coalition into more hardline policies.
On Monday, Brynn O’Brien tweeted:
“Says a lot that the journalistic outcry over boat arrival secrecy far exceeds any protest at denial of media access to detention centres.”
This highlights perfectly where we are at with our debate on asylum seekers. We have developed a sense of almost hysteria about boat arrivals, that exceeds even concern about our Government’s treatment of people in detention centres on other nation’s shores.
It’s time we dampen down the debate. And inadvertently, Scott Morrison’s new policy may end up achieving that. It’s worth us attacking him for his hypocrisy of this issue, and if the Government aims to stop any reporting of the issue it will be worth attacking them for that as well. But in the meantime, let’s use this opportunity to tone it down a little – to get the debate to where it deserves to be.