Australia and Xenophobia

In Australia, whenever a new leaky boat full of desperate asylum seekers shows up, it’s treated with hysteria in the media. If the government of the day doesn’t react with cruelty, it’s considered to be weak on border security. And every time the approach to dealing with asylum seekers wanders further from humanitarian norms, it’s lauded as a solution to he problem.

Well, is it? As former prime minister Malcolm Fraser put it:

no democratic Australia could ever impose penalties or hardships on refugees which could match the terror from which most of them flee

So even if deterrence could work, should Australia attempt that?

And, anyway, is the view that numbers spike when the policy softens and go down when it gets harsher valid?

Correlation isn’t causation. You have to look at the push factors as well, and those definitely are causation. More refugees at source = more arriving at destination. Nothing could be simpler.

Even with the latest increases the numbers are not that high by world standards. If you look at UNHCR stats, 2012 had the highest number of new refugees since 1999. Australian stats for boat arrivals peak in 1999-2000 when numbers at source previously peaked, and they shoot up again over the last year when the number of new refugees shot up.

Some refugee stats here show that Australia does not have a serious problem, and treating a relatively small number of arrivals as a huge crisis for national security is not warranted.

Why is it impossible for any party besides the Greens to be rational on this? Could it be because anything but xenophobic hysteria results in a media beat-up?

Here in South Africa, genuine illegal immigrants (mostly economic migrants from Zimbabwe) amount to 10% of the population, yet all sides of politics condemn xenophobia when it flares up. Australia only leads the world in one respect as far as refugees go: mainstreaming of xenophobia.

Anyway numbers don’t lie so let’s check them. The graph here shows the difference for each year between reported numbers for that year and the year before of refugees (I use the UNHCR’s refugee count, excluding categories like internally displaced persons and Palestinians who are less likely to arrive in a distant country) and boat arrivals in Australia. The UN numbers are for a calendar year, while the Australian reporting period is a financial year (1 July–30 June). This is not a bad thing however as a 6-month delay takes into account the time between a push factor and a boat arrival.

The graph illustrates that upticks in numbers arriving correspond closely to upticks in the number of refugees over the previous year. The green line is the difference between boat arrivals in Australia and the number the previous year, and the blue line is the difference between UNHCR reported numbers of refugees versus the previous year. The lines mostly correspond pretty well, with just the major uptick in refugees in 2006 failing to result in major change in boat arrivals. The 2006 increase may however have arisen from a reporting anomaly (see UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2006, Chapter 2, p  pp 25–26) rather than a major change in real refugee numbers.

Eyeballing data is risky: we should really do the stats. So let’s look at whether the data correlates. The correlation coefficient is statistically significant: r=0.56, and if we do a t-test for significance, the p-value is 0.006. So yes, this is a real correlation that explains the data well. And we can assign a cause to it, so we are not guilty of assigning causality to a coincidence.

So couldn’t the John Howard “Pacific Solution” actually be the cause of the decline in boat arrivals? That started in 2001 when the number of boat people hit a peak. So let’s mark that on the graph. The red arrow points to the 2001 data point where we can see that the push factors were already declining. And the number of boat arrivals also declined. Given that the correlation is also also strong before 2001 (0.60, though we don’t have enough data points for statistical significance, p=0.057), it is unlikely that being tough on asylum seekers actually had a significant chilling effect on boat arrivals. The only data point that lends comfort to xenophobia is the apparent 2006 increase in refugees but as we have seen that is not a real increase (mostly Iraqi refugees of the 2003 war in Syria and Jordan who had not previously been counted).

Anyway I present the data for you to make up your own mind. To me it looks pretty clear that being harsh on asylum seekers is nothing more than bad politics, dragging the political discourse down to the gutter. Mainstream politics, it seems is presented with no alternative but to go this route for fear of vilification by the commercial media. The Greens are the only party of significance that has resisted the politics of fear and xenophobia. Good on them. I hope they do well this election.

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Further Reading

The Guardian has some useful stats on refugees here.

Sad Truth About Australia

When I moved to Australia from South Africa in 2002, I too had been conned by the Australian marketing machine. Of course there's the genuine stuff: the Anzac legend, Gallipoli, exploits in the world wars, and so on. But there’s also the latter-day myth: the bronzed Aussie crocodile wrestler, the nation that can take on any sporting code you can imagine and many you can’t and win, the nation that punches above its weight in wars. It’s that later bit that turns out just to be so much marketing spin.

The harsh reality is that the modern Australia is a nation of crybaby wieners.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

Australia is pretty low on the list of refugee destinations. Countries that really do it tough host millions of refugees (some of the worst as a consequence of bungled wars Australia took part in: Iraq, Afghanistan), and tens of thousands of boat people arrive on the Mediterranean shores of Europe every year. A few thousand people arrive by leaky boat at most in a bad year, and politicians of all stripes are falling over themselves to score points by thinking up new ways of being cruel to people who’ve lost everything. Never mind that seeking asylum is not illegal and Australia is a signatory to a convention that makes it explicitly illegal to punish asylum seekers.

The biggest wiener of all is leader of the federal parliamentary opposition, Tony Abbot, who portrays himself as tough, but he is constantly whining. Tony, here's a hint. Looking buff in a speedo doesn't make you tough. Taking on hard issues fearlessly does.

That takes me to another of Abbott’s can’t do issues, climate change.

Aussie politicians are constantly pushing the line that no problem is too easy, that we can’t rush out and be the first, that we can only punch below our weight. What was that again? Weren’t we supposed to punch above our weight? And in any case, this is all bolstered by a campaign of cowardly lies. The claim that Australia would be a world leader in carbon taxes for example is at least 20 years out of date, and about 15 countries have already put such a tax in place or have plans to do so by the end of 2011.

If it was only Tony Abbott, it wouldn’t be a problem, but the rest of his “Liberal” Party is just about as bad, except a small minority who are largely ignored by the media. And the ruling Labor Party is even more terrified of these issues: they bend to the wind whenever it emanates from Abbott’s rear end.

And far from the physicality portrayed in the movies and on TV, Australia a few years back reportedly overtook the US as the most obese country in the world (to be fair, WHO stats show that neither country is really the fattest in the world, but the numbers are scary nonetheless ... a newspaper got the facts wrong: who would have guessed?).

So there you have it. Australia today is not a nation of all-conquering warlike athletic crocodile hunters. It’s a nation of obese slugs who use their cars to move from the food court to the adjacent supermarket, that punches below its weight and is terrified of taking on hard issues.

I’m moving back to South Africa where the problems are tough but so are the people.

A bit strong?

I wrote this on the back of several days of back to back whining on talkback radio about asylum seekers, and letters in The Australian invoking the Anzac legend as a reason to be cruel to people who are desperate because they’ve fled danger only to be treated worse than criminals (who are entitled to an expeditious trial, not indefinite detention). The Australia of the Anzac legend, the real one, not the version of the whiners, is still there. I saw it in the Brisbane floods when so many people pitched in to help without prompting. There are genuine politicians here who have principles. It’s the constructed national psyche of the Hanson-Howard era that I find objectionable. There are plenty of real people who don’t share that view of Australianness. I just wish the mass media would give them the air time they give the whiners.

The Refugees World Cup

Talk about treating a vulnerable group as political football... there’s a World Cup on for the real thing. Is that not enough?

The announcement by the new Australian prime minister Julia Gillard that she is going to be “tough” (in politics, a synonym for stupid) on refugees and it’s unfair to call harsh attitudes to refugees “redneck politics” has to be challenged. Harsh attitudes to refugees are almost always based on racism, and are generally not factually based.

One example is the claim that refugees receive more benefits than pensioners. I haven’t seen a detailed version of this claim recently, but it appears to be based on a Canadian email hoax that has been translated to Australian circumstances. The Canadian version was full of errors, and the Australian version is no better. In fact, refugees in Australia do not receive the same entitlement to benefits as permanent residents, and become net contributors to the economy once they have adapted to their new home.

Another claim is that we get a disproportionate number of Islamic refugees, as if Islamic countries are not doing their share. Let’s let the numbers speak for themselves.

There are 2.9-million refugees from Afghanistan alone, and 96% of these are in Pakistan and Iran. There are over 1.7 million refugees in Pakistan, and the top three countries hosting refugees, Pakistan, Iran and Syria, host 3.8-million refugees between them. These numbers don’t include Palestinians, who are accounted for under a different system, totalling 4.8-million. So the total refugees arising out of Middle East and Afghan conflicts add up to nearly 9-million. We are quibbling in Australia over a few thousand. In the graph on the left of the page, I illustrate the scale of Australia’s annual refugee intake (about 13,000 per year currently) against Afghan refugees alone. If I were to compare our annual intake with all refugees worldwide, it would be too small to show on the scale of a graph like this.

What I find particularly ironic is that the people most keen on wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are at the forefront of demonising the tiny trickle of the consequential refugees that arrive on our shores. Have you ever wondered why people from these parts of the world hate us?

Back to the main point: is it fair to call these factually inaccurate attacks on refugees redneck politics? Julia Gillard’s claim is that this is an insulting attack on those holding these views. The facts I’ve quoted are very easy to find. Discovering the email hoax took me seconds. Finding the UNHCR’s 2009 Global Trends report, from which I quote statistics showing how tiny a fraction of refugees we see in Australia, was just as easy.

The people indulging in redneck politics are not ordinary people in the street who are misinformed about these issues, though a racist outlook helps them accept convenient myths without checking further. The people who do deserve the label of redneck politics are the people who know better and do nothing to correct the myths.

That means you, Julia.