Abbott’s accidental ‘gift’ to Indonesian village kids

By Ross Taylor

"Having effectively destroyed the illegal trade in asylum seekers, there now seems to be a good case to expand our formal refugee intake".

Whilst in opposition our (now) prime minister, Tony Abbott promised to ‘stop the boats’ and get the issue ‘off the front pages’ of our newspapers. Love him or loath him, you have to admit the PM, and his immigration minister, Scott Morrison have done exactly what they promised the Australian people they would do.

The paradox with this issue is that the only commentary that still continues over ‘boat people’ is the actions of the Abbott government on humanitarian grounds. And here, the coalition is still receiving criticism for being uncaring to desperate people. Scott Morrison argues however, that preventing hundreds of people from drowning at sea is ‘very humane’. He has a valid point.

But the government’s hard line has produced another humanitarian outcome – albeit somewhat unintended - that has been completely overlooked: the plight of Indonesian children from extremely poor villages throughout the Indonesia archipelago.

During the time of the Gillard government, arrivals of asylum seekers into Australian territory by rickety old boats threatened to overrun the entire border protection system. In its haste to be seen as ‘tough on people smugglers’ the government introduced legislation that would see those involved in the transport of asylum seekers sentenced to mandatory five-year terms in Australian jails. Sounds pretty reasonable one would think, but what happens when the people smugglers seek-out young children from remote Indonesian villages to work as deckhands on these boats? 

The end result was that by 2011 there were over fifty Indonesian children - some as young as 13 years of age - locked up in Australian maximum security prisons as ‘people smugglers’. These kids, most of whom were educated to around year three, were placed in an environment where they were in daily contact with adult male prisoners including murderers, rapists and paedophiles.

The government’s intention was not to intentionally lock-up foreign kids as a result of these new laws; but that is what happened.

The disturbing aspect of this outcome was for the government to simply deny that children from Indonesia had been caught-up in this terrible trade. As a result, some children were incarcerated in maximum security adult prisons in WA for over two years, and without trial!

Can you imagine the reaction here in Australia if a young Australian boy was locked-up in an adult maximum security prison for this amount of time in Java? There would have been outrage at the very least. But young kids from isolated Indonesian villages have very few rights and certainly no voice, and there were at least fifty of them trapped in a justice system gone terribly wrong.

It was only after constant lobbying by a number of caring organisations, and this institute, that the Indonesian government formally took-up the issue with the Gillard government and provided, in many cases, confirmation of the ages of the children; a number of whom were pre-pubescent according to Australian doctors who had examined them.

The then attorney-general Nicola Roxon, facing a diplomatic incident with, and growing anger within, Indonesia belatedly decided to send the children back home. But the damage had been done. Numerous families back in Indonesia had actually thought their children had been lost at sea, or simply had no idea where their sons’ had gone.

The actions of the Gillard government over people smuggling had resulted in the unthinkable actually happening. Poorly crafted and rushed policy saw these kids suffer as no children should; particularly in Australia.

Today, young Indonesian children are not even being approached by the ruthless people smugglers because there is no business to be done. No more ‘fishing’ jobs on offer to children as deckhands. The future child ‘people smugglers’ are now where they should be: in their villages with their parents; a direct result of the Abbott government’s hard line on ‘turning back the boats’.

Even at a senior political level, Indonesian officials acknowledge that since the introduction of the Abbott government boats policy, the flow of asylum seekers coming to Indonesia has slowed dramatically as asylum seekers, who were using Indonesia as a transit point rather than a final destination, realised the back-door into Australia was firmly closed. A ‘win-win’ for both countries, and a huge ‘win’ for the hundreds of Indonesian children who would be otherwise enticed onto these boats by evil people seeking to exploit them for their own gain.

The Abbott government has certainly provided a humanitarian gift to the village children of Indonesia. But what Mr Morrison needs to do now is to expand that ‘humanitarianism’ to assist the thousands of genuine refugees who are currently ‘stuck’ in a number of Asian countries with nowhere to go.

Australia invites around 14,000 refugees into our country each year. Having effectively destroyed the illegal trade in asylum seekers, there now seems to be a good case to expand our formal refugee intake.  

Accepting an increased number of genuine refugees would be a good move for diplomatic relations with Indonesia, and our region. I would also be a decent thing to do for a country that, by any measurement, is able to welcome far more immigrants than it does right now.

Ross B. Taylor AM is the president of the Perth-based Indonesia Institute (Inc).