Eleven years after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared that no refugee who arrived by boat would ever be settled in Australia, Kaldor Centre research shows how Australia’s offshore policy has failed and become a notorious stain on Australia’s human rights record.
It was another Friday, 11 years ago today, when then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd stood before reporters in Brisbane and made a declaration.
‘No matter where people smugglers try to land asylum seekers by boat in Australia, they will not be settled in Australia,’ he said. ‘This is our core, unshakeable position.’
The announcement was a political gamble made during an era of widespread fear-mongering about the ‘threat’ posed by asylum seekers to Australia’s border security. Yet its impact would reverberate far beyond the next election cycle.
Today, Kaldor Centre Senior Research Fellow Madeline Gleeson said: 'The long-term effects of this policy – both within Australia and abroad – may not have been realised at the time, but it has gone on to pose a serious threat to the very foundations of the international protection regime.'
Rudd’s announcement marked a radical extension of Australia’s ‘offshore processing’ policy which, since 2012, had seen people seeking asylum sent to Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Permanent protection in Australia would now be denied to people who arrived by boat, even if they were determined to be refugees and had strong connections to Australia.
Gleeson explores the implications of the policy in her acclaimed book Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru (UNSW Press, 2016).
‘This proposal would, for the first time in Australian history, close off the country completely to refugees arriving spontaneously at the border by sea,’ Gleeson writes.
Rudd described his own policy as a ‘very hard-line decision’. Amid claims by the Opposition that asylum seekers reaching Australia by boat constituted a ‘national emergency,’ the embattled Labor government had installed a new leader, resurrected the Pacific Solution, and excised the entire Australian mainland from the migration zone.
In reality, while just over 20,000 people arrived by boat to seek asylum in Australia in 2013, this ‘flood’ was equivalent to less than 0.1% of the Australian population. Yet within seven weeks, the Rudd Labor government would be deposed and the Abbott Liberal-National Coalition government elected on a now-infamous slogan: ‘stop the boats.’
For those who arrived in Australia by boat on or after 19 July 2013, a difficult, dangerous journey had only just begun. Some 3,000 people were forcibly transferred to detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, where many languished for years as they awaited processing.
In a 2024 paper, ‘“Offshore Processing” in Australia’, Gleeson and fellow Kaldor Centre scholar Natasha Yacoub document ‘the profoundly destructive effect of offshore processing on the physical and mental health of people subject to it.’
This builds on their earlier work, including the policy brief ‘Cruel, Costly and Ineffective: the Failure of Offshore Processing in Australia.’
‘Since its reintroduction in 2012, 21 people have died offshore (or in Australia, following medical evacuation),’ Gleeson and Yacoub write in the 2024 paper. Men, women and children were denied access to appropriate medical care, exposed to rape and sexual assault, and suffered from high rates of severe mental illness.
‘The cruelty to which asylum seekers and refugees were exposed offshore appeared to be deliberate and systemic,’ Gleeson and Yacoub conclude.
Offshore processing became a notorious stain on Australia’s human rights record. UN and other experts condemned Australia’s treatment of people who arrived by boat. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants wrote in 2017 that those detained ‘experience their treatment as harsh punishment for a crime not committed.’
Even the headline policy objective of 19 July 2013 – that no person who arrived by boat would ever settle in Australia – became untenable in practical terms.
‘After sustained exposure to extreme harm offshore, the Australian government was eventually forced to medically evacuate back to Australia almost everyone still in Nauru and PNG by 2019,’ Gleeson and Yacoub write. ‘By 2023, the vast majority of those who had not already been resettled or returned to their countries of origin were back in Australia.’
There was another group of people who – almost by chance – ended up onshore, in Australia, where they endured a lost decade in limbo.
‘Between August 2012 and 1 January 2014 there was a group of people seeking asylum who were subject to being transferred to Manus Island or Nauru for processing, but, because of capacity issues there, they were kept in Australia, and they became what is known as the ‘legacy caseload’,’ Kaldor Centre Founding Director Jane McAdam said.
‘We’re talking about around 30,000 people,’ McAdam said. ‘They were in Australia, but because they were in theory subjected to this offshore processing policy, they weren’t allowed to ever settle permanently in Australia.’ The UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants termed this ‘the unbearable uncertainty of “permanent temporary” situations.’
Members of this cohort of over 30,000 asylum seekers and refugees share their stories in the Kaldor Centre’s award-winning podcast series, Temporary. Many were destitute, barred for long periods from work or study, and with access to only minimal welfare.
For Zaki Haidari, ‘life was put on hold’. A member of the Hazara ethnic minority, he fled Afghanistan as a 16-year-old after facing persecution by the Taliban.
‘For me,’ said Haidari, ‘it was very painful. I was always getting up early in the morning and I was sitting in front of the house and [watching people] going to school with uniforms and stuff, and I was like, “Look at my life. I have nothing to do but sit and watch them.” I really wanted to go to school. It was the most painful thing ever to witness. Every morning you get up and have nothing in life to do, and these people could go to school... I was hating myself every day.’
‘We were free in a way, free to live not with security guards, but we weren't free mentally,’ Haidari said.
Years later, he would be instrumental in efforts to provide Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) and Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEV) holders pathways to permanent residency in Australia, which has offered a way forward for more than 16,000 members of the legacy caseload. This change does not apply to any new arrivals to Australia.
Australia formally terminated its regional processing arrangement with Papua New Guinea in December 2021. However, media reporting indicates that around 52 men and their families – including 28 children – remain in the country, some with no prospect of resettlement.
In late 2023, following nearly a decade’s hiatus, Australia began once again transferring people who arrive by boat to the detention centre on Nauru. An estimated 100 people are now detained there.
Eleven years on, the legacy of 19 July 2013 lingers. But as Gleeson and Yacoub’s work shows, Australia’s offshore processing policy ‘does not deter irregular maritime migration, ‘stop the boats’ or ‘break the business model’ of people smuggling networks; does not ‘save lives at sea’ or achieve any other humanitarian objective; and suffers from other policy failures, including enormous financial costs for Australian taxpayers, violations of fundamental rules of international law, numerous legal challenges and systemic cruelty.’
The anniversary marks its enduring failure. Australia’s offshore processing policy should immediately be brought to a formal end by providing everyone who has been subject to the policy since 2012 with settlement in Australia or another appropriate durable solution. The laws and administrative arrangements underpinning the policy should be repealed.
For more information, visit the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.