Asylum debate: same question, different argument
It was an extraordinary day, August 29, 2001. Nearly 11 years ago now; a Wednesday.
Question Time began with John Howard's announcement that he had just authorised the Special Air Services to seize control of the Norwegian ship MV Tampa. The Tampa had rescued a bunch of asylum seekers from their own vessel, the Palapa 1, and its captain was determined to bring them to Australia; John Howard was equally determined to prevent him from doing so.
Kim Beazley, the then opposition leader, rose and expressed support for the move to repel the Tampa. Carmen Lawrence, the then Labor frontbencher, arrived in Question Time to hear the announcement and Beazley's endorsement, and walked straight out again; she retreated to her office, to consider resigning from politics altogether.
Within hours, Howard had presented Beazley with a piece of legislation that authorised extreme measures against vessels in Australian waters, including exemptions from the Crimes Act for any offences committed by Commonwealth officers engaged in repelling foreign craft.
The Beazley opposition rejected the bill, amid torrid scenes. The parliament rose for a three-week break. Thirteen days later, two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York.
When the parliament resumed, the government and opposition struck a deal. The government watered down the Tampa border protection bill. And the opposition agreed to support four other immigration-related bills it had been opposing; it signed up for the excision of various sections of Australian coastline from the migration zone, the prohibition of class actions by asylum seekers, the removal of appeal rights and changes to the definition of the word "refugee".
Among the new legislation agreed to by the shaken Labor Party was a new section - 198A - for the Migration Act, which provided for the offshore processing of asylum seekers in a designated foreign country.
(Constitutional buffs will immediately recognise s198A as the banana skin on which the Gillard Government, a year ago, slipped on its way to Malaysia by way of the High Court)
The Pacific Solution was underway.
It didn't "work" straight away. In fact, the SIEV X, a boat overloaded with asylum seekers coming from Indonesia, sank killing 353 people about a month after the Pacific Solution bills were passed.
But history tells us that in that momentous calendar year of 2001, 43 boats arrived, bearing 5,516 people. In the following year, after the installation of the Pacific Solution, one boat arrived, bearing one passenger.
This is the stark evidence Tony Abbott means when he says the Pacific Solution worked.
Eleven years separate this week from that one. But unearthly similarities connect them. And it's not just the spectacle of the Australian Labor Party - loathing the human implications of a punitive approach to asylum seekers, and yet racked with fear about the electoral implications of resisting such an approach – caving in to a dominant Coalition agenda.
The main similarity is this: Political impasses, especially impasses in a fraught and diabolical policy area like refugee policy, need catalytic events to break them.
In 2001, it was the arrival of the Tampa, and the direct challenge that vessel posed to Australia's maritime sovereignty. This week, it was the arrival of a retired air force commander, a retired diplomat and a refugee advocate with a sheaf of recommendations.
So exhausted was the body politic with the moribund jostling of its own entrenched interests with the long, bleak history of this issue in the Australian Parliament, that the intervention of three enthusiastic amateurs created a resolution where there had been none.
The Coalition felt it could support the Houston report because it vindicates Coalition policy. The Government could support it because it provided cover for a capitulation.
And suddenly, within 48 hours, two political parties that had fought like ferrets for nearly a year over fairly infinitesimal - in the scheme of things - differences in their otherwise deeply similar support for offshore processing, found swift agreement on quite a hefty new suite of propositions.
That's the thing about catalytic events.
Creating the exhilarating possibility of action and movement where previously there has been nothing but stagnation and despair, catalytic events carry with them the very real seeds of overreach.
Labor, liberated this week from the rack on which it has twisted for a year, endorsed all 22 of the Houston report's recommendations, including the ones whose implications are far-reaching and unknown.
Like the assurance that boat-borne asylum seekers processed on Nauru will - even if found to be refugees - not be released into Australia any earlier than they would have been had they remained in their country of origin.
How is this hypothetical length of time determined? No-one can say, exactly - and yet in its ecstasy of relief, the Government will legislate the lot.
That's the other thing to remember here; it's human beings making these decisions, not legislative autobots. They live, they learn, they remember, and they change their mind depending in which position they find themselves.
For example, it's an article of Labor faith - or was, for a long time - that the border protection campaign pursued by the Howard government 11 years ago was inspired primarily by political opportunism, and the appeal of the dog whistle to a xenophobic populace.
Howard's campaign rhetoric was muscular and patriotic: "We shall decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come."
This Government, when prosecuting exactly the same sorts of measures, uses the language of compassion: We must stop the obscenity of unnecessary deaths at sea.
Motives are important, and there is many a left-winger in the Labor Party who now - haunted by the vision of children smashed on the rocks at Christmas Island - votes to reopen the processing centre on Nauru, where five years ago they might have thought instead of John Howard, and NewsPoll, and adamantly refused.
The question is the same, after all these years. But the argument changes.