The offer by the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to take 4000 refugees from Kosovo on its face was a better response than the initial response that that decision reversed made by the Minister for Immigration Philip Ruddock who had said Australia would take no refugees.
Australia should have responded with more generosity than what Mr Ruddock’s original announcement contained.
Nonetheless, later events have revealed that, in at least one respect, Mr Ruddock had a better feel for the situation than his Prime Minister. Mr Howard put a strong caveat on the Australian offer. The refugees were to be given visas for just three months and that there would be special legislation to ensure that the refugees could not get permanent residence. Apparently, there was some fear that there might be a repeat of events after Tienanmen (CHECK SPELLING) Square when 20,000 Chinese refugees in Australia got extension to visas which ultimately resulted in permanent settlement.
The three-month limit in the case of the Kosovar refugees may have appeased some domestic opinion but it had two immediate drawbacks. The most obvious was that it was a poor allocation of resources. Why spend the huge amount of money to transport people half way around the world only to spend the same again transporting them back three months later?
The second thing wrong with moving people now to Australia is that it plays into the hands of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. Mr Milosevic’s aim is to get rid of the Albanians from Kosovo so that the province can become an integral part of Serbia with a majority Serbian population under his rule, rather than an autonomous or independent region with the majority Muslim-Albanian population that it had before he began his ethnic cleansing several weeks ago. If 4000 Albanian refugees were sent to Australia there was always a good chance than many would never come back and that they might attract family members to join them – all adding to the exercise of having fewer Albanians in Kosovo.
In his original decision, Mr Ruddock made the pertinent point that the Australian immigration program is geared towards permanent settlement, not temporary housing of refugees. In that he was right. The absurdity of arranging military barracks and other accommodation, some of it in remote parts of Australia, was proof of that.
The folly of providing temporary shelter in Australia was revealed by the decision of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, to call a pause in the relocation of refugees outside Europe. Commissioner Sadako asked Canada, the US and Australia to suspend their programs. Clearly, the UN saw the possibility of playing into Mr Milosevic’s hands and saw the possibility of more split families.
A better response from Australia would have been to offer the money and material aid that we did plus some more and to say that if after a permanent political settlement in Kosovo there were still homeless people as a result of the war, Australia would take up to 4000 of them, or more, permanently.
The Government obviously faces some political difficulty with making offers to take refugees. The hearts of a large majority of Australians go out to the refugees and they want to help. They recognise the moral obligation for a wealthy country like Australia to help people in need. However, there is also a considerable body of opinion which thinks Australia no longer needs a policy of high immigration, that there are ecological drawbacks to it and that the long-term economic downside outweighs the short-term upside in industries like real estate, or is at best neutral. In short, the immigration program has run higher than public opinion would warrant. As a result the Government was not able to respond as generously nor as effectively as we should have been able to do.