ABSTRACT
Australia has implemented some of the most restrictive asylum policies in the world. Alone among Western liberal states, Australia requires the mandatory detention of asylum seekers for the duration of the refugee determination process and provides fewer socio-economic rights for successful claimants than most. In 2001, it implemented the Pacific Solution, in which the Australian navy intercepted asylum seeker boats and forced the asylum seekers to third states, some of whom were not signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Only the United States and Italy have implemented similar types of militarized intervention. Why Australian governments would resort to such measures is not imme-
diately obvious. Australia is a settler society that has historically been open to immigration and has relied on it to sustain its workforce and population. Its explicitly racist immigration policy was done away with in the 1970s, around the same time as in the United States and Canada. And, asylum seeking is not a particularly large problem-on a per capita basis it receives far fewer asylum seekers than other Western liberal states. Furthermore, it is an economically prosperous state that has experienced near continuous economic growth since the early 1990s. In addition, the Australian state has demonstrated a commitment to refugees, evident in its large refugee resettlement program and its contributions to the UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations. Given these factors, the intense securitization of unauthorized migration in
Australia is puzzling. Examining how humanitarian migration has been portrayed as a security threat provides insight into the factors that have contributed to the implementation of such policies. In this chapter, I examine the implementation of mandatory detention and naval intervention as the outcome of two separate securitization processes. The first occurred in response to the “the second wave” of boat arrivals between 1989 and 1992. It was a “quiet” securitization marked by modest media attention, and that was focused primarily on “internal” threats, such as activist judiciaries and immigration lawyers. The second occurred in 2001 and is referred to as the Tampa crisis, a securitization process in which governing elites, aided by intensive media coverage successfully securitized the issue of asylum seeking, by reconstructing the asylum seekers as a threat to the state and thereby gaining
the support of the opposition. These two cases demonstrate the multiple paths of securitization, as each followed very distinct processes, entailed different strategies and differentiated between internal and external threats.
