Explaining the cuts in Australia’s quota of African refugees to journalists in Melbourne last Monday, immigration minister Kevin Andrews observed that “some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life”. The give-away phrase is “don’t seem”. As the week progressed, it became clear that the minister had no hard facts to back up his claim. African refugees are experiencing the predictable difficulties of settling into Australia after years in exile from their home countries, often in camps, but the evidence that this is translating into higher levels of crime is non-existent.

On Tuesday, David Crawshaw from Australian Associated Press asked a spokeswoman for the minister to provide concrete details about problems among the Sudanese - the largest group of African refugees in Australia. The evidence, she told him, was “anecdotal”, which is hardly a satisfactory response and might explain why the minister’s office quickly cobbled together a more detailed statement, released to the media on Thursday. One newspaper called this a “dossier,” but in fact it simply listed a series of unsubstantiated allegations about African communities alongside some statistics on the changing composition of Australia’s refugee intake and a brief defence of the humanitarian program.

The minister’s anecdotal evidence can be countered by accounts from people much closer to the action than he is. When Gary Tippet from the Sunday Age in Melbourne decided to check the evidence about crime and anti-social behaviour among Sudanese for the Sunday Age. He looked at a number of hot spots, including a transport hub in Sunshine where Sudanese gangs had allegedly been involved in a string of incidents. Scott Mahoney, a local police officer, played down the problem. “Africans are the minority of offenders,” he told Tippet. “The majority are Caucasian.”

He then made an important point that helps explain this week’s controversy: “A lot of people in the media lately are talking about African gangs, which is just so wrong... The majority of this issue is just lack of understanding: the African people are very social people, they gather in public places and more often than not they’re doing nothing wrong. But because they’re tall and they stand out, people notice them and seem to immediately fear the worst.”

On Melbourne radio station 3AW this week the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, Christine Nixon, echoed those comments, saying that “because they’re obvious and tall” the Sudanese “clearly stand out more than other groups do... but when we look at the data what we’re actually seeing is that they’re not, in a sense, represented more than the proportion of them in the population.” On Radio National Breakfast, another police officer, Ian Gillespie, based in the outer suburb of Dandenong where many Sudanese live, said, “There’s absolutely no problem with Sudanese youth any different from any other culture... Our figures actually show that they’re underrepresented when it comes to the crime rate.”

When he first announced the cutback in African refugees six weeks ago, Kevin Andrews said that the decision was based on changed circumstances in Africa - less conflict and more refugees returning home. The latest figures from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees do show a fall in the number of refugees in Africa during 2006, down 6 per cent on the previous year, although Sudan remains the third largest source of refugees in the world (after Afghanistan and Iraq).

But the UNHCR still argues that 50 per cent of the refugees resettled worldwide should come from Africa. The key factor here is the number of what the UNHCR calls “protracted refugee situations” in Africa. Many refugees in East Africa, the Horn of Africa and southern Africa have been stranded outside their home countries, in camps and urban areas, for long periods; the countries they’ve escaped to are poor and often unsafe, so resettling in a country like Australia - a major player in the international resettlement program - provides the only realistic chance of escaping poverty and insecurity.

Mr Andrews also argued that Australia’s priorities need to change in response to new crises and demands. He mentioned the Burmese refugees who have been living for years in Thailand and the Bhutanese in Nepal, and the UN’s plea for western countries to take more of the estimated 2.2 million refugees who’ve fled from Iraq. In the case of the Iraqis, the High Commissioner was clearly asking for an extra effort from countries like Australia, rather than for us to substitute Iraqi refugees for equally desperate Africans.

Mr Andrews’s comments on the “rebalancing” of the resettlement program presuppose a rigid limit of 13,000 entrants. In the early 1980s, when the overall immigration program was much smaller, Australia took over 20,000 refugees a year. Given our role in creating the problem in Iraq and neighbouring countries, there’s no good reason why we shouldn’t expand our program to help Iraqi refugees whose chances of returning home seem bleak.

The great tragedy of Mr Andrews’s comments is that they suggest a reversal of the positive developments in Australia’s refugee resettlement program over the past decade. Nine years ago, despite enormous numbers of refugees across the continent, just 16 per cent of our refugee intake came from Africa. By 2002-03, the proportion had grown to 48 per cent, and in the following year it reached 70 per cent. The biggest group was from Sudan, coming via Kenya, a reflection of the size of the Sudanese refugee population after decades of war and the historic links between Australia and Kenya, a former British colony, which hosted two large refugee camps.

Not only did the number of arrivals from Africa increase, but the immigration department began taking seriously the accusation that it had been “cherry picking” the most easily integrated refugees. The refugee program is meant to select people on the basis of their needs rather than ours, and the department’s practices became attuned to this fact. As a result, recent refugees from Africa are a more diverse group with more complex backgrounds and needs, reflecting the dire circumstances that drove them from their homes. The government also significantly increased funds for settlement programs in Australia. In contrast to Australia’s hostile treatment of asylum seekers, the resettlement program was being administered with flexibility and humanity.

All that progress is threatened by Kevin Andrews’ reckless comments this week.