When I served as Australia\u2019s High Commissioner in London, I was naturally flattered by how often British politicians and officials invoked Australian precedents as examples of successful policy. Nowhere was that more evident than with immigration and border control.<\/p>\n
The \u2018Australian-style points system\u2019 became a clich\u00e9 for describing best-practice migration policy. I remember a meeting with the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, who frankly \u2013 and not a little ruefully \u2013 told me: \u2018Whenever we want to get the public to think something is a good policy, all we have to do is put the prefix \u201cAustralian-style\u201d in front of it.\u2019 So it came as no surprise that when Nigel Farage recently announced Reform\u2019s new border protection policy, he invoked the Australian experience as proof of concept. As political rhetoric, it sounded great: Britons are well aware that Australia has solved the problem of illegal boat arrivals.<\/p>\n
The policy \u2013 Operation Sovereign Borders \u2013 introduced in 2013 by the then prime minister Tony Abbott, was initially controversial. Predictably, it was denounced by the left. But it proved so successful that the opposition was forced to accept it, and ultimately adopt it as its own. Today, the Labor government of Anthony Albanese enforces Operation Sovereign Borders with the zeal of the converted.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one thing to intercept dilapidated\u00a0 boats on the high seas, quite another to halt swift dinghies in the Channel<\/p>\n
Its architect was Scott Morrison, then the minister for immigration and border protection. The legal advice underpinning the policy was provided by me, as attorney-general. Some years later, as high commissioner, I was invited to brief the Cabinet Office here on how the Australian policy worked.<\/p>\n
The problem with Reform\u2019s attempt to adapt the Australian policy is that, while Farage and Zia Yusuf emphasised the superficial similarities \u2013 in particular, boat turnbacks \u2013 they conveniently ignored the very significant differences between our two countries\u2019 circumstances.<\/p>\n
The Australian policy is not just about turning back refugee vessels on the water. It is a three-legged stool, no one element of which is sufficient for success. Those three elements are boat turnbacks, interdiction at source and offshore processing. None of them would work in Britain.<\/p>\n
The geographical differences between the UK and Australia are the most obvious impediments for Reform\u2019s policy. The closest distance between mainland Australia and the southern shores of Java (from which the people-smugglers\u2019 boats once embarked) is 1,600 miles. The distance across the English Channel is little more than 20 miles.<\/p>\n
Australian boat interceptions took place in international waters in the Timor Sea, just outside Indonesian territorial waters. There are no international waters in the Channel in which boat turnbacks could occur.<\/p>\n
The Indonesian people-smugglers used old wooden fishing boats, unmanoeuvreable and slow, which were easily intercepted by Australian naval vessels. The interception of the swift motorised dinghies used to cross the Channel would present operational challenges and hazards unknown to the Australian operations.<\/p>\n
It is one thing to intercept dilapidated old boats on the high seas in a vast, empty maritime domain; it is quite a different thing \u2013 operationally and legally \u2013 to do so within a narrow stretch of water, defined by adjacent territorial waters, comprising the world\u2019s busiest seaway.<\/p>\n
The second necessary element of the successful Australian policy was interdiction at source, carried out by Australian agencies in cooperation with local Indonesian law enforcement counterparts.<\/p>\n
In a recent history of the period, Paul Kelly, the \u00e9minence grise of Australian journalism, wrote of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS): \u2018It was involved in the OSB mission through covert operations in Indonesia against the people-smugglers. A senior official said: \u201cI believe the disruption achieved by ASIS was as important a factor as the turning of the boats. I think about half the boats planning to make the voyage were interrupted by ASIS working with Indonesian authorities.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
(ASIS is the Australian equivalent of MI6. According to Kelly, Abbott relied heavily upon the advice of director-general Nick Warner, the Australian \u2018C\u2019, in executing that aspect of Operation Sovereign Borders.)<\/p>\n
There may have been occasions when local Indonesian authorities turned a blind eye to Australian agencies\u2019 more robust disruption measures. It is unimaginable that the French government would cooperate in enabling British disruption activities on French soil. It has shown, at best, lukewarm interest in enforcing its own laws with its own agencies. ASIS making life difficult for people-smugglers in obscure ports in southern Java? Maybe. MI6 doing the same in Calais and Boulogne? Hardly.<\/p>\n
The third element of Australia\u2019s policy is offshore processing. This is the one area where neither geography, nor the need for French cooperation, pose impediments. All that is necessary is to find a third-party country willing to accept asylum-seekers. This was the genesis of \u2018the Rwanda solution\u2019 \u2013 a direct copy of Australia\u2019s \u2018Pacific solution\u2019, whereby asylum seekers were transferred to the South Pacific island nation Nauru.<\/p>\n
The \u2018Pacific solution\u2019 was upheld by Australia\u2019s High Court, our equivalent of the Supreme Court. Offshore processing was found to be valid under Australian law and not to be in breach of international human rights instruments to which Australia is a party. But Australia is not, of course, a party to the ECHR, which creates a legal barrier to British policy.<\/p>\n
So, Australia\u2019s successful policy depended on three things: the feasibility of boat turnbacks on vast, uncluttered international waters; a high level of cooperation from authorities in the source country; and the validity under domestic law of offshore processing. The effective execution of all three policies solved Australia\u2019s problem. None of them is available to the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I served as Australia\u2019s High Commissioner in London, I was naturally flattered by how often British politicians…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":854045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,9281,44,113926],"class_list":["post-854044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-immigration","tag-news","tag-nigel-farage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}