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Australian Asylum Policy: The Tampa Effect

2005; ANU Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.22459/ag.12.02.2005.02

1447-4735

Timothy J. Hatton, Audrey Lim,

Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, rescued 433 asylum seekers from their vessel the KM Palapa 1 that was in distress in the stretch of ocean between Christmas Island and the coast of Indonesia.At the insistence of the rescued passengers, the captain of the Tampa asked the Australian government for permission to land them on Christmas Island -a request that was refused.There followed a week-long standoff while the world watched the drama unfold.Eventually a settlement was reached under which a third of the passengers were taken to New Zealand and the remainder to the small Pacific island of Nauru, in exchange for an aid package of AUD 20 million from the Australian government.The Tampa saga redefined Australian asylum policy in the eyes of the world and it was watched keenly from Europe where stories about the clandestine entry of asylum seekers had been regularly hitting the headlines for a decade.Throughout the 1990s the countries of the then EU-15 had grappled with the issue of mounting numbers of unsolicited asylum applications, a number that increased from 92,410 in 1982 to a peak of 675,455 a decade later before falling to about 300,000 per annum for the rest of the 1990s.European governments progressively toughened their policies in an atmosphere of popular backlash against asylum seekers that increasingly painted them as illegals and scroungers, or at best as 'economic migrants'.Those policies took the form of tightening access to individual countries' borders, toughening refugee determination procedures and providing conditions for asylum seekers that were less and less hospitable.They were aimed at deterrence and they were intended as a clear message to asylum seekers: 'don't come here'.Yet there is disagreement about the effectiveness of such policies in the European context.Some have found that asylum seekers interviewed after arrival had only the vaguest notion about their host country's policy.Some suggest that the fall in applications after 1992 owed much to changing conditions in source countries and relatively little to policies in destination countries.And others point out that trends in applications across the countries of the EU apparently bear little relation to differences in the toughness and the timing of policy changes in the respective EU countries (see Zetter et al., 2003; Theilemann, 2003;Hatton, 2004).In this paper we examine the links between asylum policies and the flow of asylum applications in Australia.While Australia was the focus of attention (and