The Pacific Solution

''We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.''

-Australian Prime Minister John Howard, 2001

Groups of asylum seekers without a visa started arriving to Australia by boat in 1976. In response to this steady influx of unapproved arrivals, the government enacted new legislation in 1992 by Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating that required that anyone who arrived without a visa must be detained until they were processed and approved.

In 2001, Prime Minister John Howard announcement a new policy regarding maritime arrivals called the 'Pacific Solution.' This policy was pushed as the answer to what Howard called, "the boat people" and has so far caused the detention of thousands of asylum seekers at immigration centers on small Pacific islands on Australia's neighbors. Proponents justified the policy on the grounds that Australian national security was being compromised when asylum seekers were accepted and housed on the island before being fully processed. For nearly the last two decades, the majority of asylum seekers arriving in Australia are from countries in the Middle East. After the terror attacks in the US earlier that year, it was easy to sell the 'security concern' to the Australian public. 

Prime Minister John Howard
(http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/howard-rates-as-our-best-pm-of-the-past-four-decades/story-fn59niix-1226849689572)

At that time border security was considered one of the two most important issues in Australia, and Howard encouraged fears concerning public safety during his campaign efforts that year, saying in a speech that the 9/11 attack was "an attack on Australia as much as it was an attack on the United States" as it "assaulted the very values we hold dear."

Under the Pacific Solution, asylum seekers who arrive by boat are detained in offshore immigration centers in Papua New Guinea and Micronesia. The conditions in these centers have frequently criticized by the few human rights groups that have been gained access to the centers and detainees have repeatedly gone on hunger strikes and self-mutilated by sewing their lips together.

Detainee at Nauru. Photo taken secretly by ABC News
(http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-22953103)

Tony Abbott, while opposition leader, criticized the Gillard government for not doing enough to protect those attempting the dangerous sea journey, WikiLeaks cables revealed that at that same time, a senior Liberal Party strategist had told a US embassy official that boat arrivals were "fantastic" for their party and that "the more boats that come, the better." The Abbot team later used maritime arrivals to fuel their 2013 federal election campaign in 2013 by spreading the mantra "stop the boats" and boasting on March 14 that no asylum seekers had reached Australian shores in almost three months.

Offshore detention centers were closed in 2008 following the Labor party's Kevin Rudd's election promise to end the Pacific Solution, but reopened under the Labor party in September of 2012.