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Q&A: Flagship TV program airs debate on Australia’s refugee policy

Published on the 01 Nov 2016

Nearly half a million viewers tuned in to Australia’s national broadcaster when its flagship debate program, Q&A, took on the issue of immigration.

Questions ranged from offshore detention, to temporary protection, to the cost of Australia’s policies to national budgets and to human beings. Answers came from a select expert panel including Kaldor Centre Director Jane McAdam.

Other panellists were campaigner Shen Narayanasamy; refugee and entrepreneur Huy Truong; priest and law professor Frank Brennan; and co-author of Australia’s deterrence-led Operation Sovereign Borders strategy, Jim Molan.

Molan defended the multi-pronged strategy of turning back boats, temporary-protection visas, and detaining asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru with no prospect of settlement in Australia. “We have set in place a process that has worked,” he said.

The weekly live and interactive television show features pre-recorded and live audience questions. One of the most poignant in this program came from a high school teacher whose students are on temporary protection visas and face a future in limbo.

Q&A host Tony Jones said students themselves had submitted questions but withdrawn them, “afraid that their temporary protection status would be looked upon badly by the government.”

See Professor McAdam’s response here. 

Another audience member asked what was stopping the world today from responding to the refugee crisis as people had after World War II.

“The Refugee Convention has been a very flexible and dynamic instrument over time,” Professor McAdam said. “The biggest deficit it has was recognised from the start: the then-UN Secretary General said it really needs to have a responsibility sharing mechanism in it, an allocation mechanism, and states weren’t prepared to accept that.”

Watch this part of the discussion here

Professor McAdam noted that “in 2013-14 Australia spent the same amount of money on offshore processing, Operation Sovereign Borders and the like, for a few thousand people as the whole UN refugee agency had to care for, at that time, some 50 million displaced people.”

Questioned on how governments can afford to protect refugees, Professor McAdam said, “One of the misunderstandings is somehow that there is a fixed pie of wealth and it has to be divided up more and more, the more people we have. That’s not true at all. The more people there are, the bigger the pie becomes and that is borne out in all the research studies that have been done, going back 30 years or more in Australia.”

Hear that discussion here

Issues raised in the program will also feature in the Kaldor Centre Conference on 18 November 2016, which brings together world-renowned thinkers to explore refugee law through the lens of time.

 How do concepts of urgency and delay, temporariness and permanence, refugee emergency or protracted exile, play out in the design of law, policy and institutions – and what is their impact on the refugee experience?

You can explore the program here and register here. Video of the full 10 October 2016 Q&A program is also available online.