This article draws on material that will appear in a forthcoming book by Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn, titled The Labor Party: Between Bosses and Workers, to be published by Cambridge University Press in late 2010.

Labor’s latest attack on refugees, its decision to freeze the processing of Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers, has shocked many. Deakin University law professor Mirko Bagaric told the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 April “This is probably the most repugnant refugee policy of any Western country that is a party to the international refugee convention. I know of no precedent of anything approaching a Western democracy doing anything as brutal to refugees as this”.

Some supporters of refugees, however, are suggesting that the Rudd government is simply trying to “neutralise” a potential source of attack by Abbott & Co in the run-up to the coming federal election. The government is not really racist, the argument goes, it is just taking action to avoid a racist backlash from the electorate stoked up by the Liberals. This ignores the fact that the ALP is every bit as culpable as Howard and Abbott in whipping up racism towards asylum seekers. For the past 35 years, Labor’s words and deeds, both in office and in opposition, have contributed significantly to racist hostility towards asylum seekers, and Labor’s current policies are just the latest in a long line of attempts to fish for votes in this cesspit of racism that it itself has helped to foster. A careful examination of Labor’s record tells the story.

The Whitlam government

Whitlam is remembered for ending White Australia and passing the Racial Discrimination Act. Less known are his attacks on immigrants and asylum seekers. The Whitlam government responded to the onset of a severe economic crisis in late 1974 by slashing government spending and the immigration intake. Immigration was cut from 132,000 in Whitlam’s first year in office to only 53,000 in 1975-76.[2]

Whitlam’s attitude to Asian refugees was revealed when the first Vietnamese began setting off on boats through pirate-infested waters, heading for shelter in Thailand. Whitlam told Cabinet that he was “not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into this country”.[3] Political expediency, based on a suspicion that the Vietnamese would all vote for the conservative parties, trumped any humanitarianism from the government. Academic Nancy Viviani writes that “the intention of [Whitlam’s] policy was to be as restrictive as possible”. [4]

The Hawke and Keating governments

Fine words from the Hawke government about racial harmony and multiculturalism in the 1980s clashed with its actual policies. In 1989 the government passed the Migration Legislation Amendment Act which greatly reduced room for discretion by immigration officers and sought to remove the potential for unsuccessful applicants to appeal a rejection of their application for refugee status in the courts. The Act also included provisions for mandatory deportation of “illegal entrants” and granted the Department of Immigration the power to sell their possessions with a view to covering the costs associated with their detention and deportation.[5] In his speech to the Senate, Immigration Minister Senator Robert Ray said that he made “no apology for the toughness of the new laws as far as illegal entrants are concerned”.[6]

Also in 1989 the Australian, the Vietnamese and governments from other host countries for Indochinese refugees drew up a Comprehensive Plan of Action whose main aim was to put an end to future claims for refugee status by Indochinese boat people. The effect, academic James Jupp wrote in 1993, was dramatic: “The thrust of all administrative and legal change since 1989 has been to make on-shore asylum seeking a very difficult and, for most, impossible road to permanent settlement”.

The collapse of Yugoslavia, war in Afghanistan, repression in Iraq and an exodus following the end of the war in Cambodia caused an increase in the number of refugees heading for Australian shores by boat, the first such rise since the 2,000 Vietnamese boatpeople who arrived in the 1970s. [7]

The Keating government’s response was to introduce, under its Migration Reform Act 1992, what Jupp describes as “a system of mandatory and irrevocable detention whereby anyone arriving without a visa or identification would be detained until their status was determined, including for the entire period when they might be appealing a previous decision”.[8] The restrictions were onerous, as described by Jupp: “They could not be released by court order, could not live or work in the community and were not allowed beyond the perimeter of the detention centre”.[9] Only a fraction of the mandatory detainees could be housed at the Villawood and Maribyrnong centres, and Labor had already sold off the migrant hostels. So the government transported the asylum seekers to a new detention centre at remote Port Hedland where shocking conditions prevailed and temperatures reached the mid-40s in summer.

Very few Western countries forcibly detained immigrants beyond their initial reception, and most had limits on how long people could be kept in custody. The Keating government had no such compunctions - 14 of the 104 Cambodian boat people detained at Port Hedland in October 1991 were still there five years later. Australia’s policy on the boat people became an international scandal. The UN High Commissioner on Human Rights said that Australia’s detention of children was “in serious danger of breaching international covenants protecting children’s rights”.

If their application for refugee status was not successful, asylum seekers experienced yet more brutality as they were deported. In November 1994, 57 Vietnamese boat people of Chinese extraction were forcibly deported, having lost their appeals to stay. Because they were determined not to return to the hell from which they had fled, they were trussed up hand and foot with ropes and handcuffs by the immigration authorities and dragged kicking and screaming onto aircraft at Darwin airport.

During the summer of 1994-95, when 500 boat people arrived on the shores of the Northern Territory, “Yellow Peril” hysteria reached a crescendo. The Brisbane Courier Mail led with headlines warning of a “Refugee Invasion”. The boat people were also attacked by the Immigration Minister, Nick Bolkus. Evoking the arguments of the extreme Right, Bolkus simply ignored the (in any case, harsh) processes established by his own department and warned the boat people “our message to you is that you won’t have a chance”. Despite the internationally acknowledged legal right of asylum seekers to do just this, Bolkus insisted that “these people have got no right to come and impose themselves on Australian shores in the way that they have”.[10]

Attempts were made by the Hawke and Keating Governments to discredit the boat people; Hawke described them as “economic migrants” not genuine victims of persecution.[11] One recurring theme was that asylum seekers arriving by boat were “queue jumpers”. This charge of queue jumping had no basis in fact. Many of those fleeing hardship or war were leaving countries or regions in which Australia had no facilities to process any application for refugee status. Further, it was the Labor Government’s decision to slash the immigration intake from 145,000 in 1988-89 to 70,000 in 1993-94 that created the queue.[12] If thousands of asylum seekers were left rotting in offshore refugee centres it was not because a grand total of 2,500 boat people washed up in Australia as “unauthorised arrivals” between 1989-90 and 1995-96 but because the migrant intake had been cut so savagely. Throughout this entire period, Labor limited the annual refugee and humanitarian intake to 12,000, and in some years to less than 8,000. This was a tiny fraction of the number of refugees taken in by a variety of much poorer countries, ranging from the Ivory Coast and Guinea to Pakistan and Thailand, and a drop in the ocean compared to the global total of 15 million refugees estimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

In December 1994, the government took steps to override the decision of the Refugee Review Tribunal which in June 1994 ruled that 51 Sino-Vietnamese fleeing China were entitled to refugee status because of the Chinese government’s one-child policy. The government had already appealed and lost in the Federal Court and now took no more chances by simply changing the law. The effect of the new legislation was to retrospectively deny refugee status to Indochinese people who had already settled elsewhere (thereby denying entry to those from Beihai) and to those claiming persecution on the basis of China’s one-child policy. Further, the legislation prohibited repeat applications for refugee status. With this legislation, the Labor government effectively rubber-stamped China’s repressive human rights regime.

Labor tails Howard

Labor’s racism only became more extreme once the Howard government had taken office. In the late 1990s, the number of boats heading for Australian shores, filled predominantly with Iraqis and Afghans fleeing persecution at home, rose from 13 in 1997-98 to a still-paltry 75 in 1999-2000.[13] Sensing an opportunity to distract the public from many of its more unpopular measures, the Howard government adopted more and more of the One Nation Party’s policies.[14] To the Labor government’s demonisation of “economic refugees” and “queue jumpers” in the early 1990s, the Coalition now added “people smugglers”. Ministers issued press releases warning alarmingly of “the biggest assault on our borders ever”.[15] A series of legislative measures and changes to regulations followed which, inter alia, criminalised “people smuggling’, gave the Commonwealth and States powers to intercept boats at sea, and introduced sub-standard Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs).[16] The media chimed in with increasingly hysterical warnings about “invasions”. The ALP backed the Howard government.[17] In June 1999, Shadow Immigration Minister Con Sciacca boasted that the ALP was “as tough as, if not tougher than, the government when it comes to illegal immigrants”.[18] Labor condemned the government for playing wedge politics and stoking racism, but passed the government’s bills.[19]

Refugee supporters began to mobilise in opposition to the new measures, but it was the actions of the asylum seekers themselves who did most to highlight their appalling plight. Their protests ranged from hunger strikes and sewing their lips together to a mass breakout from the Woomera detention centre in 2002. However, they received no comfort from the leadership of the ALP which tailed the government.

Labor’s capitulation to racism reached its nadir in the last week of August 2001 when Captain Arne Rinnan of the Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, headed to Christmas Island intending to land 433 asylum seekers picked up from an Indonesian fishing vessel which had broken down in international waters. Captain Rinnan never made it to Australian soil: on 29 August the Tampa was boarded and turned back by the SAS on the orders of the Howard government.[20] Parliament was in session and the issue dominated proceedings. Beazley had already backed the government prior to the SAS operation.[21] Hearing that the SAS had effectively hijacked the Tampa, Beazley defended the Howard government, saying that “In these circumstances, this country and this Parliament do not need a carping Opposition”.[22]

Labor did vote against the government’s Border Protection Bill when it was tabled in Parliament on the evening of the Tampa hijack. The bill retrospectively validated the government’s actions and denied those on board the right to claim asylum.[23] More than that, it empowered the government to direct police, customs officials, public servants or members of the armed forces to seize “any vessel”, using force if necessary to remove the ship and its crew and passengers “outside the territorial sea of Australia”. Actions taken in pursuit of this, even if they should lead to deaths or injury, would not be subject to criminal or civil proceedings, or “any other law”.[24] The bill was so draconian that legal challenges were immediately mounted in the Federal Court. The Senate rejected it, with Labor joined by the Democrats, the Greens and the independents. Less than four weeks later, however, Labor dropped its opposition and voted for an amended version of the bill and other government measures that underpinned what the Prime Minister called the “Pacific Solution”. These measures made life even more miserable for refugees seeking asylum.[25]

During the ensuing election campaign Labor advertised its “tough” position. When in early October the government denounced a group of asylum seekers for throwing their children overboard, a claim later proven to be untrue, Beazley joined in the condemnation.[26] Not even the sinking of the SIEV-X and the drowning of 353 of its 397 passengers on 19 October was enough to shift the ALP from its support for the government’s drastic measures.[27] Only months later did the ALP move, with the support of the minor parties, to establish a Senate Select Committee to examine the “children overboard” incident and the sinking of the SIEV-X.

Did the ALP have any alternative if it wished to avoid annihilation at the polls? Years of government-sponsored racism towards asylum seekers had had their effect. Surveys by the ALP and the Australian Workers Union at the time of the Tampa incident demonstrated that a large majority of the public supported a tough stance and the continuation of mandatory detention.[28] When Labor initially blocked the Border Protection Bill, Beazley’s office was inundated by calls demanding that the party allow it to pass, and a poll run by the Herald Sun newspaper found 96 per cent opposed to allowing the Tampa’s passengers to land.[29]

Yet, contrary to some despairing liberal commentary at the time, the public was not inherently racist. Two years earlier the public had generally welcomed the arrival, on “safe haven” visas, of 4,000 Kosovars and nearly 2,000 East Timorese fleeing war and persecution in their homelands. In 2001 Labor controlled every state government, had guaranteed access to the media, and hundreds of parliamentarians in state and federal parliaments, tens of thousands of members, and a mass base in the trade unions. Had the ALP defended the rights of Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it is possible that it could have swung the public debate. It was not as if there was no audience inside the party and amongst a broader activist layer for the ALP to build upon. In November 2001, two Young Labor activists, Matt Collins and Siobhan Keating, set up Labor for Refugees, which quickly drew support from many in the party, including Carmen Lawrence on the Left and the Right’s John Robertson, secretary of the NSW Labor Council. A combination of speeches and press releases from the party leadership condemning the government’s treatment of asylum seekers, together with support for Labor for Refugees and the broader refugee solidarity movement could have opened up the space for a much more powerful opposition to the government.

Labor did the opposite: the party leaders contributed to public opposition to boat people by invoking Labor’s own record in office and through their current rhetoric in opposition. Instead, it was the Greens, a party with only one Senator, 2,000 members, and a primary vote of only two per cent at the 1998 election, who took the fight to the Howard government over the Tampa, helped create a debate in society and gave heart to the hundreds of thousands of Labor supporters dismayed by their own leader’s capitulation to the government. The Greens were rewarded with an additional 330,000 votes at the 2001 elections. Beazley’s stance, by contrast, disgusted thousands of Labor supporters. Former Whitlam ministers Tom Uren and Moss Cass were only the most prominent Labor figures to endorse the Greens at the 2001 election. Other lesser known Labor activists helped by handing out how to vote cards for the Greens on election day.

Attempting to neutralise refugees as an election issue by surrendering to the Howard government only shifted political debate in Australia to the right. Even if the ALP had not convinced a majority of the electorate to oppose the government’s demonisation of refugees, a firm stand against it would at least have given voters a reason to vote Labor, serving the party well in the future, as had Labor’s opposition to conscription in 1966. Instead, voters were left with a choice between two parties both vowing a “hard” line on “illegals” but with one which was actually in government and implementing draconian measures. What was the incentive for people to vote for the carbon copy when they could have the original?

The Rudd government

Although the Howard government’s vicious treatment of asylum seekers had contributed to its election victory in 2001, its racism towards refugees had begun to count against it in the following years.[30] Increasing numbers of Australians were registering their disquiet at the government’s attacks on refugees, thanks to years of sustained campaigning by refugee activists and the refugees themselves.

Labor for its part did not attack the government on the issue during the 2007 election campaign but promised some minor reforms, including the elimination of some of the more repellent features of the Pacific Solution. In the final days before the election, however, Rudd also told The Australian newspaper of his commitment to turn back seaworthy boats headed for Australia,[31] something that had originally been strongly condemned by Labor when the notion was first advanced by Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s.

On taking office the Rudd government made some minor changes to the Pacific Solution, including closing down the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres and abolishing Temporary Protection Visas,[32] but for the most part continued the same racist policies.[33] Mandatory detention remained, and Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island continued to be “excised” from Australia for the purpose of processing claims by asylum seekers.[34] Australia’s refugee intake, at 13,750, was retained at the same low levels as under the Howard government. Breaking an election promise to take the detention centres into public ownership and management, the government simply replaced G4S, whose record in running detention centres had become notorious during the Howard years, with another private contractor.[35]

Labor’s maintenance of the Coalition’s strategy of interception, disruption and excision of offshore islands had another tragic consequence on 16 April 2009, when asylum seekers whose boat was being boarded by the Australian Navy set fire to it, causing an explosion which killed five people. Rudd described people smugglers as “the vilest form of human life” who “should rot in jail’, a tactic which, although not directly damning the asylum seekers themselves, cast aspersions on them through guilt by association.[36]

Labor’s determination to maintain much of the Howard government’s basic approach to asylum seekers became evident on 13 October, when 255 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers heading for Christmas Island were intercepted by the Indonesian Navy at the request of the Rudd government and had their boat turned around and towed to the Indonesian port of Merak in Western Java.[37] The Tamils demanded resettlement in Australia or another Western country. They were refused, promptly went on a hunger strike and refused to disembark until their demands were met. In the same week, the Australian Customs ship Oceanic Viking picked up another 78 Tamil asylum seekers in Indonesian waters. On being told that the captain was taking them to an Indonesian detention centre, the Tamils on board also started a hunger strike and refused to get off the boat. Indonesia was not a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and already held 3,000 refugees in detention centres in appalling conditions.[38] Refugee advocates quickly dubbed the Rudd Government’s new arrangement the “Indonesian Solution”.This arrangement had other uses too, other than simply repelling refugees – it could be used to justify closer police and military relations with Indonesia, strengthening the repressive apparatus of both the Australian and Indonesian state machines.

The Rudd government sought to deflect criticism of its actions in October 2009 by turning public attention once again to the “people smugglers”.[39] However, it now came under heavier criticism from refugee advocates than it had done in April. Two unions, the MUA and CFMEU, jointly donated $10,000 to the asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking.[40] AWU official Andrew Casey, whose own family had used a people smuggler to escape from Hungary after the working class revolt in 1956 was crushed, spoke for many when he wrote in The Age:

“For Kevin Rudd to throw around this simplistic name-calling about people smugglers makes me shudder. He has no right to judge either the smugglers or the people who use them. I am sure that now, as then, the people smugglers play an important role in the struggles of these poor, bedraggled people to escape oppression. I am also sure that some made lots of money out of the business. But others I know did it for more altruistic reasons. Good on all of them. I make no differentiation."[41]

As a result of their dogged determination, the 78 Tamils held on the Oceanic Viking were eventually offered rapid assessment of their claims and the opportunity for resettlement in Australia or another Western country. Their compatriots in Merak were not so fortunate, and six months after their arrival more than 200 were still stranded at the port refusing to get off their boat.

Conditions at the Christmas Island detention centre, which quickly became full to capacity, were also coming under more scrutiny. In September 2008 the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, told the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Migration that it “has all the characteristics of a medium-security prison”.[42] The Rudd government had promised to end detention of children but in February 2010 147 children were being kept in “alternative temporary detention in the community” on Christmas Island[43] where conditions were not much better than the detention centres, with strict curfews and barbed wire. Detention was to be used “as a last resort and for the shortest practicable time” but in February 2010 46 asylum seekers had been incarcerated on Christmas Island for more than a year.[44]

Whatever new centres were built, whatever changes were made to the detention regime, nothing could alter the fact that mandatory detention of asylum seekers was an affront to human rights and was conducive to the abuse of asylum seekers. The only humane solution to the sorry plight of asylum seekers was to let them all land and process them onshore. Labor was not interested in doing this as the demonisation of asylum seekers played a role in welding workers to the project of Australian nationalism – the notion that “we” all had a common interest in “protecting our borders” against external threat, that Australians, rich and poor, were all bound together by a common interest in repelling maritime “invasion” by a few thousand bedraggled refugees. Such nationalism was integrally associated with calls for “the nation” to sacrifice, whether in the form of wages or lives, in the pursuit of an edge in the economic and military competition with rival powers.

Further, day to day resentments concerning lack of housing, lack of jobs, and competition for other scarce resources could be directed at migrants and asylum seekers who were allegedly taking “our jobs”, driving up house prices and bludging off the public purse. This was a strategy that suited the interests of the capitalist class which was keen to ensure that the majority of those who produced the wealth in society were distracted fighting amongst themselves rather than uniting against it. Labor put itself at the service of business in this quest.

Rudd’s latest decision to freeze the processing of many asylum seekers and, indeed, Labor’s entire record for the past 35 years demonstrates that the ALP, as much as the Coalition, is dedicated to the racist harassment of asylum seekers. Just as we rightly targeted Howard, Ruddock and Vanstone as inhumane monsters willing to use the plight of the most wretched for their own electoral advantage, so we must now turn our fire on the Rudd government for doing just the same.