People Seeking Asylum - Australia

A major rescue operation is continuing tonight on remote Christmas Island, where at least 27 asylum seekers have lost their lives. We're listening to a news report from December 15, 2010. Their cripple boat was overwhelmed by wild seas as it approached the Indian Ocean outpost and swept onto the jagged rocks of flying fish cove. The boat was filled with over 100 Iraqi and Iranian people who were trying desperately to reach the shore of a 52 square mile Australian territory in the Indian Ocean called Christmas Island. Residents of Christmas Island watched helplessly from a cliff above, unable to do more than toss life jackets into the water below. The Australian Navy intervened and attempted a rescue, but the exact number of people who died that day is still unknown. And for those who did survive, their ordeal was far from over. See, Christmas Island was home to one of Australia's offshore immigrant processing centers, where a detention of people seeking asylum can last for years, or in some cases indefinitely. In response to this disaster, the Australian public began to take a harder look at the country's policies surrounding people seeking asylum, seeing this as the tipping point and proposing new changes to the country's immigration laws. This is brave new words, and I'm a not shanker oesorio. As a communications consultant working with advocates for human rights, equality and justice, I believe the job of a good message isn't to say what's popular. It's to make popular what we need said. I examine people's underlying assumptions and perceptions in order to understand why certain messages resonate where others falter. And now, with the help of some of the world's boldest, most strategic, and accomplished campaigners, I'm exploring the words that have won us progressive victories. These six episodes can provide a playbook for how to engage our base, persuade the middle, and reveal the opposition for the outliers they are. So in the years after the tragedy at Christmas Island, Australia's treatment of refugees and people seeking asylum began to attract more and more scrutiny from human rights watch groups. In particular, they began looking closely at the government's controversial use of offshore detention centers. In late 2012, both Amnesty International and the UN Refugee Agency released reports condemning Manus and Nero detention centers as breaching human rights laws. But in September 2013, the Australian government began a new, drastic military-led initiative, Operation Sovereign Borders. The government's messaging? No way. You will not make Australia home. It is the policy and practice of the Australian government to intercept any vessel that is seeking to illegally enter Australia and safely remove it beyond our waters. The rules apply to everyone, families, children, unaccompanied children, educated and skilled. There are no exceptions. The message is simple. If you come to Australia illegally by boat, there is no way you will ever make Australia home. On the same time, human rights experts began reporting serious abuse taking place in detention centers. Sexual assaults, hunger strikes, and thousands of children detained, many showing signs of the rare psychological condition, resignation syndrome. Basically, they just became catatonic. And by 2015, there were thousands of people seeking asylum imprisoned on Manus and Nero. Many of them were completely in the dark as to when their detention might come to an end, and many people's claims weren't being processed at all. Despite these horrors, public opinion was largely on the side of the Australian government. In 2015, a Monash University poll found 54% of respondents agreed with the policy of sending people seeking asylum to Manus Island in Nero. More than half of Australia's population agreed. People and note that this includes babies should be imprisoned without any due process for the legal action of trying to remain alive. That's when I was invited to run a research project with the Asylum Seeker Resource Center. In collaboration with allied organizations informed by people who had sought or had family members seeking asylum, we explored how people make sense of and come to judgments about this issue. Through analysis, focus groups, and online dial testing, we wanted to figure out how to shift public perception and with it when real policy changes. It's basically a locus for racist anxieties. That's Shen Narayana-Sami, Director of Human Rights at Getup, an organization that campaigns across a host of progressive issues by mobilizing supporters online and through direct action. And what's been served up is an kind of age-old trope, which is of the dark-skinned criminals coming across the borders in boats, taking your stuff. And that's what the debate is like. So for instance, in the most recent thing that we did, which was a bill to get medical care to asylum seekers who had been detained offshore, because we had so many deaths and deaths clearly due to negligence and a failure to treat, that we were just trying to get a bill through to provide treatment, and the government's response and to a degree the negotiations amongst all the other parties who we were trying to convince to support the bill was all about what if they're criminals, what if they're rapists and murderers? And we were like, well, we've held them for seven years. We know everything about them. When they come to Australia for treatment, they will be held in detention. This is not in any way legitimate, but you will believe it, and you believe it partly because that's the anxiety we're provoking. It's got no basis in reality whatsoever. So the discourse from the government around safety, security, the Q jumping, what was the response of your sector, the human rights sector, advocates who are working on behalf of changing these policies? What were the kinds of arguments? What did they sound like that you were trying to fight back with? Well, actually, let me just interrupt for a minute, because the thing I think is that the underlying debate is always been about race. It's not actually about population growth or infrastructure, or criminal law, or cues or anything. It's actually always been about race. It's always been about who was arriving, like the colour of their skin, their faith, and that they were the other. And that goes to how our sector attempted to respond. So for the last 12 years, apart from more radical elements, what the human rights sector in Australia has responded to this debate with has been sound arguments about international law, the right to seek asylum, justice, logical arguments about money, logical arguments, about numbers, logical arguments that, well, you've got to be pretty desperate to come by boat rather than plain, all of these logical arguments. But over the last 15 years, what we have failed to address at every point was the underlying racism. And indeed, when we did the messaging research in 2015, we tested exactly what Shana's referencing, the status quo message that came directly from how advocates in the sector were framing this issue. It sounded like this. It is not illegal for refugees to come here. And Australia must fulfill its humanitarian and legal obligations to asylum seekers and refugees under the international law and the refugee convention. Seeking asylum is a humanitarian issue rather than an issue of border security or defence. And people fleeing persecution, violence and torture must be treated with compassion and dignity. Mandatory detention in offshore facilities is cruel and inhumane. A signatory to the refugee convention. Australia must fairly and efficiently assess the applications of all asylum seekers who arrive in Australian territory, including territorial waters. A respective of their mode of arrival. This message garnered high marks from the advocates themselves, and it did well with the base. But it was unpersuasive to 80% of Australians. It was lower rated than the opposition's message, which their base ate up and was happy to repeat to those in the conflicted middle. So we came up with and tested new messaging. "No matter our differences." Most of us believe that all people deserve to live in peace. Or policies for people seeking asylum through respect human dignity and take place in full public view. Doing what's right means upholding people's basic rights, safety and fairness. We cannot turn an issue of human rights into political bickering. We all have a stake in making the world a safer place. So we need to fairly examine each person's asylum case in a safe space and quickly integrate the people requiring asylum into our communities. This isn't a matter of right or left, but quite simply a matter of right and wrong. [MUSIC PLAYING] This winning message didn't just earn high marks from the advocates in the base. It was also persuasive to those conflicted people in the middle who had rated the opposition's message highly as well. Because here's the thing about those middle of the road voters that the political class around the world misunderstands. They're not actually seeking some moderate in between answer. They toggle between competing assumptions about quote, the way the world works and what's common sense. They're capable of buying into opposition narratives of fear, resentment, and xenophobia. But they're also able to understand how people seeking asylum are just that. People who merit the same rights and recognition as anyone else, regardless of what they look like or where they happen to be born. The task of a good message, what we tested for here, is to engage the base, to move them past, just simply agreeing with what we say, to wanting to repeat it. Otherwise, the message has no way to spread. And the message needs to prove persuasive enough that once the middle hears it over and again from the base, it sounds true and bright and like common sense, drowning out the opposition's story that their base is always willing and eager to repeat. But it's a huge distance from completing research to actually implementing it, a process that's sort of a kin to forcing yourself to write with your non-dominant hand. Its cumbersome takes longer, the outcome looks messier, at least at first, because you're just not used to it. Yet this is what campaigners in Australia were able to do. So Shen, one of the first campaigns with the new messaging was Let Them Stay. What did that campaign sound like with the new language? And if you had to guess, what would it have been like with the old messaging? So it's actually a useful example in the sense, because it started from a significant problem, which was the loss of a high court case. So what had happened was there had been an incredible legal attempt by a network of lawyers. For whenever anybody touched ground in Australia for medical treatment, so often it was women who were giving birth or children who were ill, they would slap an injunction on to prevent them being sent back. And they joined all of these cases to one high court case, and they attempted to argue in that high court case that Australia didn't have the power to then forcibly send these people back offshore. And if it had been the old way of doing it, we would have run a campaign about the numbers, how unlawful it was. And it would all have been focused on how awful off-shore detention was, I think. But what we did instead-- and this was a really interesting thing about this. And to me, this is critical in using this new messaging. You have to work really solidly together with the people impacted to make it authentic and genuine, and not just a rewriting of their experiences that flattens, invalidates, or could potentially undermine them. And we went up-- so a lot of these people-- some of them were living in the community, but some of them were detained in Australian detention centers. And we went up and said, tell the story of the kids and tell the story of their lives, what it feels like to hold a newborn, what your hopes are, that they're just like you and me, speak to the essential anxieties that underpin this debate, and unfortunately, you have to prove your humanity. The first step, after you've been othered, is to try and get the person other in you to acknowledge that you're in fact human. So we were like these are the ways that we have tried before to get people recast as human. And what do you think we should do? And not everyone agreed by all means. I think the vast majority of people at the end of all of this and lots of discussions and questions were like, OK, we see what you're doing. We want to do it. We think it will work. But some people were like, no, this feels invalid. Like, why should I have to prove my humanity, which I think is totally valid? And then we ran the campaign. And the campaign was around, let them stay. Not let them go back or not. It's all horrible. It's, here is a child, here is a family. Their story is like you. I literally wrote a copy that was like, this woman likes Beyonce and described one of the families. And it's all authentic memories. We spent a long time then talking to people about it. And this woman, they were Iranian refugees. And that had a terrible situation. But it felt horrible because you're asking people literally who've been tortured and traumatized. Like, what's your favorite music? It just feels terrific. But she was telling me about, after she first got married to her husband, they didn't have any kids. And they would put on just before they would go to work in the morning. They would put on Beyonce and dance to it as a little romantic thing to do in the morning. And we ran stories across Australian women's weekly about that. And we just got all these stories, which basically illustrated people's humanity to a population, to whom the great anxiety and the great debate was about othering them and not seeing them as human. And we just smashed it across everything. Shen is voicing a moral quandary. Human rights advocates confront that has no clear resolution. We shouldn't live in a world where it's necessary to have to humanize our fellow humans. And so asking them about their favorite music feels trivializing. But on the other hand, forcing people to perform their pain for us as the condition of granting them their humanity is equally wrong. Our standard approach of only depicting the harms done and horrors survived reduces people to victims, not three-dimensional beings. As we heard, being able to speak about aspirations about who you are and what you seek is, for some, a welcome relief. And simply put, it's more effective at mobilizing the public support required to affect real world change. And we suddenly pulled people from across the political spectrum. It just went incredible. And so it shifted. I mean, public opinion shifted nearly 15% in a month and a half, 15%, 20%. And we saved them. The government gave up, basically. And on the heels of Let Them Stay, you had another campaign called Bring Them Here. What was that? So that was, I mean, straight after Let Them Stay, because obviously this was a wonderful success in the sense that nearly 400 people from the offshore detention centers, which at the time numbered around 2,500 offshore, we'd kind of scraped these people from the jaws of hell and protected them here in Australia. But we obviously still had all the people offshore. So then we tried to turn around and apply the same lessons of that campaign to offshore. In the meantime, we had a federal election. But the government had also been really smart. It's not just about the racist anxieties. The government had deliberately put these offshore detention centers on remote Pacific islands and then banned people from going there. The media was banned from going there. So we had to send photographers undercover to these islands to quietly take photos of people. And we made a decision again with the men after looking at Let Them Stay, particularly in the offshore island of Manus, island in PNG, where it was just men that were detained. It's like the Trumpian nightmare, 1,500 men from Middle Eastern, Asian, African backgrounds. We had this specific direction to the men, to the photographers, was we want to hear your stories. We want to hear who you are, what your aspirations are. We want you to smile. Some of the men found it a really interesting experience because they've been talked at so long about a deficit about their failures. And the thing is, the reality is, many of these men are just incredible heroes. The stuff that they've gone through for their families. To get on a boat is an incredibly brave, somewhat full, hearty thing to do. And the people that do that are extraordinary in many ways. And so it was an opportunity for them to tell those stories. And actually, I'm sitting in my office now in front of some of the old posters, and I'm just looking at them. And there's one man, Aziz. And he's a really prominent activist over there. And every bit of collateral about him is a tall, young, very handsome, actually, sort of needs man. But he's always angry in all of the stuff they portray. And he's smiling and he's saying he's aspirations in this big photo. And we pushed out that campaign. And we started to see a similar swing. Then we moved into kids off Nauru, right? What was the purpose of-- I mean, it's kind of implicit in the name. What was the approach of that campaign? Well, I mean, to think about it, you've got to think about it in a trajectory, right? And this is-- I make decisions as the human rights campaign director working on refugees very differently, or offshore detention to be specific. very. differently to how I make decisions on other human rights issues that I would characterize as more slow burn. So to understand kids off an hour, you've got to understand that to go back to international law for a moment, there is a credible case that what we are doing offshore is a crime against humanity. It's a massive civilian offense of unlawful detention, arbitrary detention under international law, which means detention without trial or judgement on a civilian population for a long period of time. Our idea was the easiest way to jump over that hurdle of the other is with children all across the world. I mean, it's just that one thing that even people that are prone to see adults of different colour or faith is different, there is a broader sympathy for a child. But at the back of my mind, I'm thinking about this not just obviously for the desire to get every kid off and it is legitimate, I think, to get the children off first. It's a principle of emergency evacuation everywhere. Children elderly vulnerable go first. But in the back of my mind was always strategically how do I then leverage any momentum from this for the liberation of everybody. And so we made a swift pivot when we were successful with kids off Nauru, with a legislative approach, we had put forward legislation that we tried to crack the bipartisan support for offshore detention by just putting forward legislation to free the kids. And when it looked like the government in an effort to forstall the passage of this legislation was pulling children off that one point, they flew 30, 40 kids off in one flight on one week, sorry. We amended the legislation to allow for medical evacuation if anybody deemed sick. Because of course at the same time the crisis was a human rights crisis. It also became a medical crisis. We had put people in a terrible situation with very little medical care. You know people who had diabetes, people who had heart problems were stuck in 40 degree heat with no very little food, water, etc. So we pivoted into what we call the Medivac Bill, which eventually passed Parliament in February this year just ahead of our federal election, which would allow for the transfer to Australia of anyone that two independent doctors had seen as requiring medical treatment despite the position of the government. So it basically bound the government's hands to accord by the wishes of independent medical assessments, which of course it was the first, it was a 90 year defeat, no government sitting government of the day had had legislation pass against its numbers on the floor of the house. So as the kids off Nauru campaign led into the fight for the Medivac Bill, how did the messaging change? The critical thing with Medivac was how to articulate, essentially people being transferred here are, for medical treatment, pending a permanent outcome, hopefully in the US or New Zealand or maybe in Australia, but wherever. And so we focused on the most broadly accepted value, but also the right thing, which was that we should never deny someone medical treatment, that no matter where they are, where they come from or what the outline. For example, who's critically ill should be provided treatment regardless of the circumstances. And we would do that for a murderer, we would do that for a good person, we would do that for anybody. And also it helps in Australia, obviously, that some of the most respected messengers in public discourse are, in fact, medical professionals. And so many, I mean hundreds of thousands of doctors stepped up, it was amazing. And they went on radio, they went on TV, they featured in ads, they went and saw politicians and the movement just hung back and supported them. So did this incredible campaigning work? From the vantage point of 2019, guest and no. We just heard about incredible victories, one under a conservative government that has long used scapegoating of people seeking asylum to gin up fear and fury in order to get and stay in power. We've seen very real strides that Australia has made in the last few years, but there are caveats about grave abuses and injustices still in full effect. The Australian Labour Party changed their platform to support bringing some refugees to onshore facilities for processing. Manus and Nauru are in the process of being closed, and many people seeking asylum were settled to New Zealand or Canada. Still others, 600 people in the case of Manus either remain at the detention centers or have been moved to Papua New Guinea, where they face poverty, harassment and bigotry from locals and no access to necessary services like healthcare of any kind. But according to a recent Sky News poll, public opinion has shifted. A majority of Australians now support a maximum of 90 days spent in detention awaiting processing. So looking at the progress made in Australia, I asked Shen what advice she would have for immigrant rights activists in other countries. It's been a hard lesson to learn as a human rights lawyer that the way we talk about these issues in many ways is talking to ourselves and we're not usual. But in situations where you have to shift public opinion, your messaging has to be the stuff that actually does. And in some ways that's more radical. It means that rather than concentrating on international law or the reasons people gave when asked about why they feel the way they feel about refugees and people seeking asylum, it meant speaking to the essential realities which only really the more radical left had outlined and the refugees themselves. This is about racism. And that was constantly invalidated. But it was only through messaging that addressed that racism, addressed the other thing that was happening that we saw the biggest shift. So I would encourage people to both take a radical analysis to what's happening and then take an approach that shifts that and that may mean not focusing on victimhood, not focusing on trauma, not focusing on horror, but articulating the essential humanity and similarity between all people and using that as an extension as to why we should care and take action on behalf of these people. The other thing that I would say as well is you can't start from a position of you are bad to have done this thing or you're evil to have done this thing or you're bad people because you're just not going to pull anyone along. You almost have to close your eyes to what they may have previously thought and just pitch it at a values base, almost aspirational as to who they would like to think of themselves as. So never mind if they've said before, "I don't want these people in this country," you just want to pitch it to them as, "Well, you're a father and he's a father and surely you would also want him to see his kids." The anti-micron, anti-refugee, anti-asylum sentiment on display in Australia is becoming the norm around the world. We need to get better at telling our side of the story and making an affirmative case for people seeking asylum. As well intentioned as they are, testing shows that appeals to human rights laws or UN treaties are no match for the raw emotion triggered by the race baiting and fear mongering of right-wing populists on the rise around the world. Instead, we must root our messages in the universal values and aspirations we share. This can mean evoking the golden rule as we've seen work with more religious audiences, or a straightforward assertion that no matter our differences, we all want pretty similar things. In short, we must demonstrate the full three-dimensional humanity of people seeking asylum. This starts with not labeling them asylum seekers, a phrase that reduces people's whole identity to an action they were forced to take, and not at all surprisingly made respondents in our testing less open to our policy solutions. And it extends to not just focusing in on the horrific conditions people have fled, nor the barbaric detainment they encounter from our governments. While these approaches make our nurse sympathy, at best this is an appeal to feel sorry for those people. What winning messages must evoke is empathy, an ability for persuadable audiences to see themselves in people our opponents have intentionally demonized and made the other. People who have quite literally made a way out of no way do not need our pity or even our assistance. They have saved their own lives, demonstrating a courage and tenacity beyond what most of us can ever imagine, and merely need us to get out of their way so they can integrate into and contribute to our communities, like anyone else. And we need to make these narrative shifts now and repeat what works relentlessly, because there are myriad of countries implementing similar practices as Australia's, even as we uproot displays and force more people to make perilous journeys for the sake of their survival. Including the United States. In fact, when the Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull summarized Australia's immigration policy. over the phone for the newly elected U.S. President. Trump responded, "That is a good idea. We should do that too. You're worse than I am." Then this year, Trump praised Australia yet again for not just their policies of indefinite detention, but also their cut to the chase absolutist messaging about it. And the fight continues there as well. After the Medevac bill passed in February, current Prime Minister Scott Morrison ordered the detention center on Christmas Island to be reopened. I'm a not chinkar osodial. Brave New Words is produced by Western Sound for ASO Communications. Our theme song is "Somewhere to Begin" by TR Richie. Brave New Words is made possible thanks to support from the Narrative Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to making justice and equity common sense. Learn more at NarrativeInitiative.org. Special thanks to Arif Hussein and his colleagues at the Human Rights Law Center, Mark Connelly and Renair Jewry of Getup, the Asylum Seeker Resource Center and the Center for Australian Progress. To see photos and videos of all the winning campaigns for people seeking asylum in Australia, go to our website, bravenewwordspod.com, and please subscribe to our podcast, rate it wherever you listen and spread the word. The song is "Somewhere to Begin" to search for something worth believing in. If change is all to come, there are things that must be done. And a song is "Somewhere to Begin."