Melbourne (Australia) - As Australians head to the polling booths on Saturday to elect a new government, and the issue of asylum-seekers arriving by boat has played a major part in the election campaigns of both major parties, Malcolm Fraser, a former prime minister, says tough asylum-seeker policies have damaged Australia's reputation.
Fraser served as a Liberal prime minister between 1975 and 1983, a period in which the country saw refugees arriving following the end of the Vietnam War.
Now an outspoken critic of the Australian government's treatment of asylum-seekers, Fraser told Aljazeera
that so much of what the political parties claim about asylum seekers is wrong. For example, the claim that people who come by boat are "illegals".
The people who come on boats have, over the years, been found to be the most deserving, he pointed out.
When the Gillard government stopped processing, in August, 12 months ago, at that point a little over 90 per cent of people who arrived on boats were found to be genuine refugees.
"I think a lot of people are worried that the political parties are focusing not on the fundamentals but on things that they think are going to be popular in the short term", he said, adding that, "Papua New Guinea is a very poor country and would not have the capacity to accept and assimilate a large number of asylum seekers proven to be refugees. It would lead to more problems with Australia because you can cross between PNG and northern Queensland in a canoe. Most of all, Australia is relatively a wealthy country. We should not put the responsibility that should rest on our shoulders on to a struggling country like PNG".
"When the Gillard Government held the Houston Enquiry [into boat arrivals], evidence was put before that committee making it perfectly plain you could stop the boats and people drowning at sea; emphasising that for the programme to work you would have to take all the recommendations, not just one or two - but the government cherry picked. Why it chose to ignore several key recommendations, which resulted in more people getting on boats, I don't understand. John Howard [the former Liberal prime minister] claimed he stopped the boats. It's true he introduced harsh policies and the boats stopped, but the harsh policies had nothing to do with the boats stopping. Changed circumstances in the countries from which people flee led to the numbers dropping - not the deterrent policies. That situation has never been explained to the Australian public. The political parties forget that and the Liberal Party gets away with the claim that they stopped the boats in the past", he noted.
"I fear in Australia a return to the sectarianism that divided society between Protestant and Catholic following the conscription debates during the First World War, which put a divide in the Australian community which didn't start to die until the late 1950s. I fear the debates over the last 10 years have created a Christian-Muslim divide in Australia. There's obviously no concern about these issues amongst our politicians - they don't care if they fan that kind of hatred. I just hate to think that this has taken hold in Australia but I fear that it has. People were received with extraordinary generosity and that was the real Australia - the Australia that both parties have betrayed over the last ten years, and especially over the last 12 months", Fraser concluded.
