ADI’s first Public Policy Forum for 2020 was held on Tuesday, 18 February, with refugee experts and advocates, Dr Jeff Crisp, Behrouz Boochani, Hoda Afshar and Sahar Okhovat discussing refugee policies from a range of perspectives.

Organised by Dr Amy Nethery and Professor Greg Barton, the booked-out event was co-hosted with the Comparative Network on Refugee Externalisation Policies (CONREP) and examined the externalisation programs many wealthy countries now use to deal with incoming asylum seekers.

Since 2001, when the Howard Government introduced the Pacific Solution, Australia has been at the forefront of externalising asylum seeker policy, nearly 20 years later the policy is still in place and as divisive as it ever was.

The policy forum opened with a talk by visual artist and lecturer, Hoda Afshar about artworks she made on Manus Island with detainees, followed by a screening of her film, Remain. Made in collaboration with detainees, the film juxtaposes images of the men standing in the idyllic surrounds of Manus Island as we hear of their experiences in detention. “The men that I saw and spoke to were basically traumatised to the level that they were dead souls in moving bodies. They were unable to communicate on even the most basic level. The level of depression and anxiety was so extreme,” Afshar said. Describing the process of working with these men and her approach to her art, she added “I told them ‘The Australian government has made you invisible and made your voices inaudible…we’re going to make your pictures as big as possible and as bold as possible.’”

The film screening was followed by Dr Jeff Crisp (Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University) presenting his talk, “Global Refugee Policy: Where are we heading?” With the last decade characterised by widespread violence and disregard for humanitarian law, by governments in Myanmar and Syria, by drug cartels in Central America, and by extremist groups in Somalia and Nigeria, forced displacement is at an all-time high. But the international response has been far from optimal and humanitarian resources have been seriously overstretched – last year the UNHCR received less than half of its required $8.7 billion budget. Dr Crisp described the outcomes of the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit 2016 and 2019 Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, which present a new paradigm in the approach to refugee policy that aims to reduce refugee strain on host countries, assist refugee self-reliance, expand third-country solutions, and create conditions for safe, voluntary return to country of origin. Though these aims are noble, Dr Crisp warned that they are not a silver bullet. As countries of the global North continue to use externalisation in their refugee policies, Dr Crisp raised the questions of legal opposition and civil advocacy to put pressure on nations and the UNHCR to resist externalisation.

Kurdish-Iranian journalist and scholar Behrouz Boochani then joined via video conference. He was in detention, first on Manus and then Port Moresby, for 6 years before he was allowed to leave for a conference in New Zealand last year, where he remains today. Boochani has documented his experiences on Manus Island in several articles and his award-winning book No Friend but the Mountains, but at the policy forum, he focused on the political situation in Australia that allows its harmful external refugee policies to continue. Boochani highlighted government rhetoric and secrecy, and a disengaged public as reasons for the long-running inhumane policies. “People of Australia are not engaged with politics,” he said, “That’s why Australian politics is broken.”

Boochani also pointed to the rarely acknowledged collateral of the local communities.  “This policy is established on a colonial mentality. They never cared about the people in Manus and Nauru.” This was a point picked up on by the final speaker of the night, Sahar Okhovat, a senior policy officer with the Refugee Council of Australia. Okhovat spoke of the betrayal felt by the population of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, over the way the island had been portrayed as a living hell, ruining any tourism opportunities and destroying livelihoods. There are also ongoing issues for the children (40 officially, but maybe up to 60) born to Manus mothers and detainee fathers, who are in limbo, with an uncertain future, uncertain citizenship, and uncertain land rights. What happens to the mothers and children if the fathers are offered resettlement in the US or removed on medevac to Australia?  These, and other issues continue to plague Nauru and Papua New Guinea, adding another layer of complexity to the issue of external refugee policies.

These various, often-unexplored perspectives drew several questions from the audience, leading to a Q and A session that delved deeper into some of the issues discussed throughout the event.

Watch the full forum below.

This event was supported by the Comparative Network on Refugee Externalisation Policies at Melbourne University, and the Erasmus Program of the European Union.