Opinion: The Abbott Government hits a new low with their Cambodia solution on asylum seekers

 July 13, 2014 12:00AM
IN CAMBODIA last week I met a Queensland nun who’s spent the past 26 years helping refugees in that country. In the late 1980s, she worked in the city-sized refugee camps on the Thai side of the Thai-Cambodia border, until their estimated 300,000 inhabitants were trucked back to Cambodia in 1992 and 1993.
Since then her work has focused on helping resettle both them and the kaleidoscope of other ethnicities who’ve found themselves in Cambodia after fleeing war and persecution – Sudanese, Hazaras, Rohingyas, Vietnamese mountain tribes, Tamils, Eritreans. Name a persecuted minority and she has worked with them.
An agreement between Australia and Cambodia to resettle asylum seekers from Nauru in Cambodia, she told me, was imminent. Then she paused and shook her head.
“It’s astounding. The moral bankruptcy of it is just amazing.”
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Whether or not you share her view that the Abbott Government’s move is morally bankrupt, it is at the least very puzzling – on many levels. In light of what the Government has already achieved in terms of stemming boat arrivals, it would also seem an unnecessary initiative that’ll only serve to devalue Australia’s standing in the world.


Where do you start to catalogue the misery this country has endured? Cambodians were the victims of a proxy war between Vietnam, Russia and the US for many years, a country left with a legacy of up to six million unexploded landmines and (along with Laos) was bombed to hell by the US. It has been occupied by a European power, seen its borders shift in parallel with the power and will of its neighbours, and was routed by a genocidal dictator and then a brutal civil war.
With average annual earnings of about $830 a year, more than a fifth of Cambodians live below the poverty line, while a small ruling class commands huge wealth, and not always through genuine endeavour. Much of the little infrastructure it does possess is ailing, with scant progress being made despite the huge presence of NGOs and foreign aid in the country.
Cambodia still doesn’t have universal health care or education – just ask the many Australian volunteers who go there regularly to provide the basic health care which the Cambodian Government cannot or will not provide to its people.
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Then there are the questions of corruption and human rights abuses. Transparency International ranks Cambodia 160 out of 177 on its Corruption Perception Index, while its leader and former Khmer Rouge honcho Hun Sen has clung doggedly to power for almost 30 years, controls the country’s media and has been regularly accused of rigged elections. Any sign of protest in the country is quashed mercilessly, such as in January when three textile workers were killed by the army as they dared to demonstrate for the minimum wage to be doubled to $US160 ($170). The Government had countered with $US100 a month.
For Cambodia, though, this is a no-brainer, because it will doubtlessly benefit from a wad of Australian cash. Australia already provides about $85 million a year to Cambodia. But this raises other issues. First there are questions posed by the World Bank, for one, over the leakage of aid money there. And at a time when the Federal Government is bleating about our bloated and inefficient foreign-aid spend, it will throw more money at Cambodia for what seems to be little more than political expediency and an unnecessary immigration solution. Any suggestion by the Government that this is de facto aid to Cambodia is wholly disingenuous. I’m sure we could find far better ways to help Cambodia.
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And where will this partnership leave Australia in terms of its capacity to shine a light on human rights abuses in Cambodia? Can we expect Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to leap up wagging a finger at our new-found friends in the Cambodian Government the next time a few workers are shot in the street?
The Abbott Government has delivered on an election promise to stop the boats which, if only for stopping the tragedy of deaths at sea, can be seen as a good thing. So if this policy is working, why does the Government need to add this extra, mean-spirited layer of Cambodian resettlement on top of it?
Granted, refugees cannot automatically expect “a ticket to a first-class economy”, as Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has stated. Refugees aren’t after a ticket to a first-class economy, they’re after a life without oppression and abuse, they seek a life of aspiration and access to education. Is this really the kind of country in to which we want to dump genuine refugees? If Australia’s international image was already tarnished by its recent immigration practices, then the Cambodia solution puts us in a league of our own.