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Under pressure from popular opinion, politicians’ children and outspoken backbenchers, the government has announced an extra 12,000 places for refugees from Syria. This isn’t the first time Australia has responded in this way, and we can learn from experience
A HUGE roar of welcome surged up from the crowd as the small group of refugees climbed onto the back of the truck that served as a makeshift stage. On that September Sunday in 1999 around 40,000 people had descended on the Victorian parliament. We chanted “Viva Timor L’este!” and “Viva Xanana Gusmao!” and stuffed coins and notes into the collection buckets passing through the crowd. The atmosphere was already highly charged, and now a group of East Timorese was in our midst, recently evacuated from the besieged UN compound in Dili, newly installed in the Puckapunyal safe haven. We wanted to hug those refugees to our hearts, as much for our own comfort as for theirs.
Six months earlier, the arrival of the first “safe haven” refugees from Kosovo had prompted a similar rush of unrestrained generosity. Again, Australians had watched in distant anguish as columns of displaced and dishevelled people streamed over the borders into rudimentary camps in neighbouring states.
Initially, the federal government was reluctant to act. On Easter Sunday, 4 April 1999, John Howard’s immigration minister, Philip Ruddock, flatly declared that “flying planeloads of refugees into Australia would not be an appropriate response” to the Kosovo crisis, despite pledges by the United States, Germany, Turkey and Britain to take in 100,000 people between them…
