The Australian way

 Sydney

Most ordinary Australians are shocked that our immensely civilised country is reviled in polite society here and abroad, when the world has so many blatant human rights abusers. The latest accusation comes from a New York Times article complaining that our policies on asylum-seekers are harsh, insensitive, callous and even brutal, and urges European nations not to copy them. Yet the policies on border protection of Tony Abbott and John Howard before him should be a lesson to Britain.

At the heart of the matter is a firm but fair post-war policy that mass migration is conditional on government control over ‘who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’, as Mr Howard famously put it. Our population has grown from 7 million in 1945 to about 23 million, largely because of influxes from abroad, especially Asia in recent decades. Our large-scale immigration intake, in conjunction with an orderly border protection policy, is a declaration that Australia is in charge of its destiny, never mind what any charity, UN committee or Guardian letter-writer demands. If the compact with the Australian people is undermined, public support for high levels of immigration will collapse. Consider the Howard government’s experience from 1996 to 2007. In the late 1990s, some 8,000-plus people are known to have paid for unauthorised passage to Australia. The result: Pauline Hanson — Nigel Farage without the sophistication — was able to fan the flames of racism. But when a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, packed with asylum seekers from Afghanistan (via several ports), entered our waters in late August 2001, Mr Howard refused them entry. That upset the metropolitan sophisticates: he was denounced as an Antipodean Enoch Powell. But his stance won praise across middle Australia, guaranteed a third election win on the trot, and consigned Pauline Hanson to the ash heap of history.