How Australia’s zero-tolerance approach to illegal migrants stopped the boat crossings in their tracks
THE tiny island of Nauru is no place for anyone wanting to start a new life.
Mid-Pacific, some 190 miles from the nearest civilisation, it is smaller than Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and has nothing to recommend it.
Unless you fancy touring abandoned phosphate mines or taking a dip in shark-infested waters.
Once upon a time this was one of the richest places on Earth, thanks to its mineral reserves.
These days it is stony-broke, its main claim to fame as an asylum- seeker detention centre for Australia.
With nothing to do there, and no prospect of escape, it makes Rwanda in East Africa — where our own illegal migrants are supposed to be sent — look like the land of milk and honey.
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No wonder so few illegal migrants risk ending up there.
For the past 20 years, Australia has taken no prisoners when it comes to asylum seekers.
Not for them the warm blankets and welcome packs dished out to Channel migrants who rock up on England’s South Coast.
Australia does not expect its taxpayers to provide luxury hotel accommodation, food vouchers, free legal advice and a bunch of other benefits to such individuals.
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Oh no. Anyone who tries to sneak into Australia is immediately turned back — either to wherever they came from or a much worse place, Nauru, some 2,500 miles away.
The result? Australia is no longer a magnet for chancers and desperados hoping to slip into the black economy, or enter the criminal underworld, after a perilous journey by sea.
Unlike the criminal gangs making millions from Britain’s soft-touch approach, the people traffickers who once plied the routes between Indonesia and Sri Lanka and Australia have had to take their grotesque trade elsewhere.
Decomposed corpses of women and children
Those genuinely fleeing persecution simply make their case through official channels, applying for so-called protection visas from the relevant authorities.
But it wasn’t always like this.
During the 1990s, Australia had a huge problem with illegal migrant crossings.
The numbers involved were never anything like what the UK’s Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has described as the “invasion” of our southern coast.
Still, enough people were tempted to make the hazardous journey, which would result in terrible loss of life.
At one point, some 18,000 people a year were risking their lives on boats resembling dilapidated double-decker buses. Hundreds would drown.
Australian seamen are still traumatised by scenes they witnessed after the sinking of rickety vessels packed out with migrants.
In a recent court hearing Down Under, a naval officer said he was haunted by the horror of plucking the decomposed corpses of women and children from the water — including the body of a baby so small that one of his colleagues mistook it for a doll.
Matters came to a head during 2001, when the Australian government refused to let a Norwegian freighter — the MV Tampa, carrying 433 Afghan refugees rescued from a sinking fishing boat — enter Australian waters.
Facing a general election and knowing voters were fed up with the issue, the then Prime Minister John Howard refused to budge.
When the defiant captain tried to enter Australian waters any-way, Howard sent in his Special Forces.
Naturally, the so-called Tampa Affair triggered a mass outbreak of hand-wringing about moral responsibilities and human rights.
Instead of capitulating to the virtue-signalling #BeKind brigade, the Australian government doubled down. Within days they introduced draconian new border-control legislation, confirming Australia’s sovereign right to determine who enters and lives in their country.
That’s when they struck a deal with Nauru, offering the poverty-stricken island a sackful of cash to manage a grim offshore processing facility.
It sounds a bit like the controversial arrangement our own Government made with Rwanda.
The big difference? The Aussies actually meant it.
The message to criminal master- minds running illegal boat rackets — and their potential passengers — was loud and clear.
Anyone attempting to enter Australia illegally by sea would be turned back, or dispatched to one of the remotest places on the planet.
And guess what? It worked.
Earlier this month I travelled to Sydney and interviewed some of the political leaders behind this highly successful approach.
Among those I talked to was Tony Abbott, a titan of Australian politics and former leader of the Liberal Party (the equivalent of our Conservatives).
Born in London, Abbott studied at Oxford University and loves this country.
He has been watching in disbelief the UK Government’s abject failure to deal with the growing tide of illegal migrants crossing the Channel, knowing from his own experience that the crisis is entirely resolvable.
As Prime Minister of Australia between 2013 and 2015, he imposed Operation Resolute.
The clue was in the name — it was a whole-sale government effort to protect Australia’s borders through round-the- clock surveillance and an immediate no-nonsense response.
As Abbott stressed to me when we spoke, there is nothing inhumane about this approach. On the contrary, it has saved thousands of lives.
The Australian government always ensured that migrants were returned to their homelands safely.
Some were sent away in futuristic-looking orange lifeboat “pods”. which were air-conditioned and fitted with safety and navigational equipment and stocked with food and water.
Successive governments of all political colours continued the policy, including Australia’s newly elected Labour administration this year.
Some hoped left-wing Anthony Albanese would prove a softer touch.
But within 24 hours of being elected, his government showed they, too, meant business, and they turned back a boat of Sri Lankans.
Of course, there are differences. The Australians are not encumbered by the European Court of Human Rights, which intervened at the 11th hour to ground the first flight to Rwanda. They also have more control of their waters.
The Channel is, of course, shared with France, which is unlikely to agree for all migrants to be returned.
Here in the UK, we will always be proud to welcome our share of those genuinely in need of refuge.
Voters are simply furious at the systematic failure to discriminate between those fleeing war zones and the vast majority of those who cross the Channel in dinghies — the chancers and criminals.
Facing down the bleeding-heart brigade will take courage, but Britain has had enough.
Forget sending yet more of our precious money to the French, who have repeatedly shown they have no real interest in helping us out.
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As for tea and sympathy for illegal arrivals, it only fuels this awful trade.
Australian-style zero tolerance is the way ahead.
- Isabel Oakeshott’s interview with Tony Abbott will air on Talk TV this week.