The first boat in Australian history with asylum seekers on board reached our northern coastline in April 1976. Over the next 34 years a further 24,000 boatpeople, as they came to be called, arrived. One of the most intriguing and puzzling questions of Australian politics is how so apparently minor an issue has had such an impact on our national life for such a protracted period of time. No political question has more clearly separated Australia’s ‘battlers’ from the inner-city ‘elites’. No ideological issue has more sharply divided the Left from the Right. The asylum seeker issue dominated the 2001 election. It cast its shadow across the 2010 campaign. It has blighted the careers of two Labor leaders, Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd.
The first boatpeople were South Vietnamese fleeing from the communist victory of 1975. Between 1976 and 1982, 2000 reached our shores. In order to stem the flow, the Fraser government accepted more than 50,000 Vietnamese from the archipelago of refugee camps in Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Australians were easily panicked by the spontaneous arrival of a small number of boats. They were comfortable and relaxed about a far larger refugee program under government control. In the history of Australia and boatpeople, these were the halcyon years. The Fraser government treated all these refugees, including the spontaneous boat arrivals, with exemplary generosity. There was no talk of mandatory detention or temporary protection visas. Fraser could not have accomplished this alone, however. The success of the settlement relied on the existence of a bipartisan consensus within the Australian political elite. With the boat arrivals, the Labor Opposition under Whitlam, and then Hayden, resisted the temptation to exploit underlying racist or anti-refugee sentiment for party political gain. Even the Cold War ideological divide was blurred. The Right supported the refugees as escapees from communism; the Left as part of the project of burying White Australia.
No boats of asylum seekers arrived for several years after 1982. In the early 1990s, however, a new wave of mainly Cambodian asylum seekers landed in the north. In response, the Keating government erected Australia’s first anti-asylum seeker deterrent barricade – mandatory detention. In the mid 1990s, a larger number of boats arrived bearing mainly Chinese or Sino-Vietnamese. The asylum claims were rejected. The repatriation process was so swift, ruthless and efficient that few Australians are even now aware that it took place.
