COMMENT After announcing a refugee swap deal with Malaysia on May 7, and despite strident protests by Australian human rights groups, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen signed the agreement with Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur on Monday.

 

Eight hundred new boat people who arrive in Australia illegally will be expelled post haste to Malaysia to be processed by the UNHCR. In return Australia will take 4000 UNHCR-certified refugees who have long languished in Malaysian detention centres and camps.

 

But given Malaysia’s appalling - and still worsening - human rights record, what could be Australia’s moral imperative in signing a deal with the Umno-led Malaysian regime?

 

NONE Answer: The growing political desperation of the Labor government led by the beleaguered Julia Gillard ( right in photo ).

 

After the initial hurrah of becoming the country’s first female prime minister, her popularity has sharply nosedived, even in her own constituency. Australian voters have neither forgotten nor forgiven Gillard for backstabbing her boss Kevin Rudd to wrest power. Not that many liked Rudd.

 

Australians inherently distrust Gillard, with the Labor brand suffering, thanks to a litany of policy farces, blunders and wasteful use of public monies. Programmes like cash-for-clunkers, new school hall buildings, home insulation and solar panels installation were ill conceived but nevertheless rolled out to help broaden Labor’s support.

 

The in-part secretive mining tax has miners railing against her. Business leaders question her competence. Then she introduces the carbon emissions tax after telling voters at the election campaign that there would not be one under her watch. Her hypocrisy is stunning, but Gillard is better at producing spin than real changes.

 

The carbon tax will increase living cost pressures by more than the monetary recompense she has offered voters. Yet few Australians are entirely convinced if the tax will avert climate disasters. So paltry is her political efficacy that her parliamentary backbench is wondering if she has become a re-election liability after Labor’s pathetic one-vote majority win in 2010.

Policy described 'as a dog's breakfast'

Nowhere is Gillard’s incompetence more clearly expressed than in her boat people policy. The Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has aptly described it as inhumane and a “dog’s breakfast”.

 

Since her ascendancy, 90 boats carrying some 6,000 asylum seekers limped into Australian territorial jurisdiction. From January to April this year boat people arrival rate was less than half the corresponding period last year. In the six weeks since announcing the in-principle deal with Malaysia on May 7, 554 boat people arrived in Australia, which takes 13,500 refugees annually in its offshore resettlement programme.

 

NONE Nothing here to spook Gillard, so why the policy overkill? Conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott, who reads the insularism of Australians as well as Gillard does, has her hurtling toward domestic populism to save her political neck.

 

Last week Malaysia rejected all the 554 asylum seekers in what Gillard had hoped would become a retrospective agreement. The deal will cost Australian taxpayers A$300 million. But analysts say it could blowout to A$800 million.

So far Gillard has refused to divulge details of this expenditure (at roughly A$75 million for 1,000 refugees taken from Malaysia each year over a four-year period). Nor would she say how much Australia is paying the Malaysian government for this live refugee export trade.

 

Equally unclear is whether Gillard has sought ironclad guarantees from the Malaysian government of its treatment of refugees sent from Australia. Being a non-signatory of the UN refugee convention leaves Malaysia open to continue its abuse of these asylum seekers with impunity.

 

On July 9 Malaysian police unleashed a wave of brutality on the peaceful street protest rally organised by Bersih 2.0, a loose coalition of political activists and NGOs demanding reforms to an electoral process that has long been bastardised by the regime to garner itself political advantage at every poll since the 1969 elections.

 

Indeed many of the 90,000-plus refugees who have been languishing in Malaysian detention centres and camps for years have endured ongoing abuse of their human rights at the hands of Malaysia’s security forces - the army, police and state-sponsored vigilante groups like Rela. Add, too, unscrupulous Malaysian employers who exploit those refugees who are allowed minimal work in Malaysia to be well underpaid.

 

Malaysia would happily trade in human cargo without any ethical proclivity, given that its regime is morally bankrupt. It makes a mockery of Malaysia’s national philosophy, the Rukunegara (National Principles), amongst which are the rule of law, courtesy and morality. Tenaganita, a non-government organisation in Kuala Lumpur, has a catalogue of claims of abuse of migrant workers longer than the Petronas Towers’ sum height.

Constant persecution by the authorities

And for more than a decade Tenaganita’s president Irene Fernandez has been constantly persecuted by the authorities for exposing human rights violations by Malaysian employers and state institutions alike. Such abuses are as rampant and routine as the unfettered corruption within the Malaysian government and private sectors and between them.

 

immigration department and refugees Gillard and Bowen were too hasty in drawing up a refugee-swap deal with the Malaysian government. It could have used its embassy’s political staffers to check on the horror stories told by, say, Burmese asylum seekers of the beatings and political, racial and sexual harassment meted out to them by Malaysian authorities.

 

Worse, to pursue a deal on human misery with the Malaysian government that regularly persecutes political dissidents and refugees alike, often with surveillance and violence, shows the character, calibre and immorality of Gillard government. For domestic political expediency, Gillard has dumped Australia’s human rights commitments and sold out long-cherished principles of democracy and magnanimity of spirit - freedom.

The so-called Malaysian Solution is a heartless and gutless betrayal of the boat people who, at this most horrible low-point in their lives, especially after years of being in limbo in refugee camps and detention centres in South-East Asia, need the compassion, help and urgency of Australia and regional governments, not more desolation.

 

MANJIT BHATIA is an Australian academic, writer and journalist. He is also research director of AsiaRisk, a risk analysis consultancy. He now divides his life and work between Australia, Britain and the US.