I take your point that Australia is already not honouring various articles of the convention. I know that various advocates claim that we violate the convention from time to time and was not sure how to treat these claims. If you say we are probably violating then I accept that we are. I would still rather we were able to have our own clear policy and principles rather than build it around a convention whose articles we flout. Perhaps I should have been a lawyer ;)

Adrienne Millbank wrote an excellent Parliamentary Research Paper a few years ago on the Refugee Convention. It was titled “The Problem with the 1951 Refugee Convention” and canvassed withdrawal from the Convention as an option. My post was written speicifically with her paper in mind, which is why I’m pleased you’ve given me the pretext to comment about it. Here are some of the more relevant extracts:

The problem with the 1951 ‘Geneva’ refugee Convention, the basic instrument of refugee protection, is that it offers neither a comprehensive nor a flexible response to the diversity and complexity of forced population movements that are occurring today. It is distorting the responses, and diverting the resources of Western countries from developing coherent and ethical responses to these movements.

The problem with the Convention can also be summarised in simpler terms, of what it doesn’t include. It doesn’t confer any right of assistance on refugees unless and until they reach a signatory country. It confers no right of assistance on the ‘internally displaced’ at all. It imposes no obligation on governments not to persecute their citizens, or to guarantee their safe return. It imposes no mechanism for preventing mass outflows, for burden sharing between states, for ensuring speedy assistance for those most in need, or for maximising the effectiveness of international resources. And it takes no account of the capacity of receiving states.

The problem with reforming the international refugee regime is in what the Convention does provide: a system for providing protection to people at risk of persecution in their own countries. No matter how lost they may become amongst mass claims and backlogs, there are few countries willing to risk turning such people away. …

It is perhaps politically na

AFAIK, no public commentator or politician of any complexion has ever suggested withdrawing from the convention – not even Barnaby. I do not see why it is not even thrown out there as an option. People would no doubt bring up the genuine jewish refugees who were refouled in the war. But you do not need an entire convention to say you will not refoul.

America also has a number of problems that can be blamed directly on the formation of closed ethnic groups. (Can also be blamed on something else, this is not an exact science.)

Avoidance of these problems seems to require mixing of immigrant populations, together with keeping the % of “Australians” (ie. those of mainstream Oz culture) high enough to be to dominant culture that others adapt to, rather than the other way around.

So doubling the population in a short time isn’t so bright. Unless Kev ups the baby bonus to $100k.

The other approach is a major war so that all the youngsters (women too these days) are inducted into the army for 4 years (major cultural brainwashing) plus the rest feel a need to minimise their non-australianism. This works but isn’t worth doing just for the cohesiveness it brings. Besides, what if the Kiwis beat us?

Global warming has a 33% chance of making Australia wetter, (33% no change and 33% drier), let’s face it, we have no idea. So it may just help.

I agree that 15 million more Australians over just 40 years’ time seems a bit too much of a shock to the system (to every system), particularly given present nimbyish attitudes to development. If that was anything other than complete crap, I would expect to see some massive nuclear power plants being announced about now, for example.

If that was serious, I can imagine how it could be done. On one hand the question would then arise as to whether New Waziristan, QLD, would really be an Australian city. On the other hand this is a problem America seems to manage with some degree of success.

No doubt there is a price at which Australia could accommodate a million new arrivals (though not annually). However it’s a price I wouldn’t be prepared to pay, and I’d vote against any party promising such a future. Indeed even Rudd’s professed vision of an Australian population around 36 million by the middle of the century fills me with horror. Why would anyone want to live in an Australia as crowded as that? Even without the spectre of global warming it’s a bizarre aspiration. Has anyone noticed that we live on continent that’s mostly desert with just a narrow fertile fringe around the edges? You can’t really avoid internalising that fact when you live in Darwin as I do and fly over it several times per year on the way to other cities. Perhaps it isn’t so apparent to people living in Sydney and Melbourne, who perhaps imagine that the line from Advance Australia Fair about having “boundless plains to share” is something more than mere poetic hyperbole.

It is also at least possible that this price is actually a lot less than we expect, or a lot more achievable. Surely some of the billions spent every year on foreign aid might just be better spent building desal plants in Australia?

Speaking of which, this was a curious proposition:

Thats why Rudds rhetoric about a big Australia is just cynical, intellectually bankrupt nonsense given his professed concern about global warming.

Why not vice versa? I suspect it actually is vice-versa.

First, neither it nor the cruder LDP plan grapples with the real problem. There are many more people wanting to come here than Australia can ever accommodate, and taking those who can afford to pay the most is in many respects the opposite of taking those in greatest need (which is the whole idea of refugee and humanitarian programmes). Even if we allow refugees to defer payment/take a loan like the HECS scheme, that doesn’t remove the necessity for a scheme to decide who can come here and who can’t. It would also require a fixed fee rather than one determined by the market (which is presumably how the LDP imagined demand would be managed only those who could afford the price of a market-determined permit/visa could come here). A HECS-type fee would require the government to set the charge, and would therefore raise all the difficulties you mention about how to calculate it, whether people get refunds when they leave etc. Those problems would not apply to the LDP’s proposal because it seems to involve markets setting the price. But that would mean only the wealthiest could come here, and they’re unlikely to be the ones most in need. The LDP’s proposal seems to conclusively assume that there’s no such thing as a refugee, that they’re all just economic migrants and therefore selling them passage is both practical and fair. None of those assumptions are tenable.

Moreover, both Jacques’ HECS idea and the LDP market permits concept result in refugees being slugged large amounts of money to come here. While that already happens with “boat people” with the money going to the smugglers, you would rather hope that refugees admitted to Australia would be in a position to seek education and training and become productive members of the community. If we saddle them with large debts before they even arrive, then their capacity to access and pay for education and training is correspondingly reduced.

At the end of the day I think this is a classic example of the standard libertarian delusion that everything is about markets and that markets can solve every problem known to the human race. It’s a perspective mostly only held by complacent, comfortable middle class nerds. Sorry Jacques, couldn’t help myself. I’m afraid I DO find many if not most libertarian proposals rather fatuous and simplistic.

1. If all immigrants should pay a fee because they now get access to our infrastructure, does this mean that all emigrants should get a refund?

2. Does the size of the payment (or refund) depend on the age and hence expected future lifetime of the person? Somebody who has another 5 years to live is obviously going to use a lot less of our value than a newborn baby with an estimated 112 years to go (based on current rate of life expentancy increases)

3. Will this mean a series of payments to or from the person as they move between different countries with different infrastructure/capita levels? Could you move to a third world country and get enough money to retire providing you were prepared to put up with the lower infrastructure levels?

4. What is infrastructure? Sure it is roads and bridges and stuff. But what about something like a democratic liberal politico-social structure? This is valuable (immigrants desire it). It was costly to set up and maintain (world war 2 for one example of some major maintenance expense). What about some really valuable stuff like… the torres strait? Or to give a more applied example the English Channel. Clearly the English Channel is a very, very valuable thing for England to have (WWII again, WWI, Napoleonic wars, etc, etc,). In 1938, a Jewish refugee from Germany would well want to pay a lot more to settle in England than France, largely because of the English Channel.

I’m not using a reducio ad absurdum argument here (or even spelling it correctly). I think that this is an area that is actually worth thinking about to flesh out the implications and see if it should be pursued.

5. On HECS, everyone with a HECS debt hates it, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who could suggest anything better. Not that they can’t agree on anything better, they couldn’t even come up with any ideas.

I agree that the capacity to carry and integrate new arrivals must, in some sense, be limited. But again you can signal this through a free market by having a floating price per place, based on demand.

Relatively cashed-up refugees do exist. We might as well drive smugglers out of business by inviting them here. Utterly destitute refugees exist too, and they could be sponsored in by local charities on a “rotating fund” model. Remember that the LDP proposal refunds any migrant found to be a genuine refugee. While that determination is being made they are free to seek employment, education etc.

Indeed under some variations it might be possible to introduce a HECS-style income-contingent payment plan for migrants found not to be refugees. Because the penalty for being incorrectly adjudged a non-refugee drop from “possible death in home country” to “reasonable debt paid back only when payable”, the system can be streamlined and simplified to speed up that determination.

As for infrastructure, one of the arguments for charging immigrants of all stripes is to reflect that they enjoy the benefits of existing infrastructure without having contributed towards through past taxes.

As I said above, the key issue is actually economic. There is a market for refugees wishing to come to Australia. That market may be unlawful, but it’s still a market. Just as prohibition has failed to stop the markets for drugs nationwide or the market for grog in land council land in the NT, prohibiting people from paying to take refuge won’t stop them from paying to try. We might as well normalise the market. Who wins? The refugees and Australia. Who loses? The people-smugglers making money off misery. Seems good to me.

Economic research also shows that refugees and humanitarian migrants take much longer than other migrant categories to become self-supporting/revenue-neutral. It’s about 5 years on average from memory. No doubt that doesn’t worry the LDP because it probably supports abolition of social welfare in any event. Thus only “refugees” who could not only afford to buy a visa but could also support themselves once they got here could realistically aspire to come to Australia. That strikes me as very close to the antithesis of a humanitarian policy for genuine refugees. On the other hand, if we accept that they would need to have access to social security on an equitable basis (as I do), then the growth rate of public social expenditure compared with the size of the productive economy also imposes finite limits on the humanitarian migration intake.

Eventually no doubt there are also absolute limits imposed by the fact that Australia is the world’s most arid continent and that creating water by desalination doesn’t make much sense given global warming, at least while baseload power (to run desalination plants) can only be generated by carbon-producing technologies. That’s why Rudd’s rhetoric about a “big Australia” is just cynical, intellectually bankrupt nonsense given his professed concern about global warming.

The problem, however, would be that we would be flagrantly and totally in breach of the Refugee Convention to the extent that people continued to arrive irregularly without paying the market price for a visa. What if some of them really WERE people who would be killed or persecuted if sent back to their homeland? That’s why the Refugee Convention was agreed in the first place. The spectre of Jews sent back to the gas chambers because western countries would not accept them is a prospect civilised countries were prepared to agree should never be repeated. My proposal accommodates and avoids that prospect whereas yours implicitly conclusively accepts that they’re all just economic migrants who don’t really face a horrible fate. The reality is that some do, and some of them don’t have the money to buy a visa/permit. The LDP’s policy condemns them to death.

The fact is that people want to come to Australia and are prepared to pay serious money for the privilege. Why not suck the oxygen out of the people smuggling market with a safe, guaranteed alternative?

If it was successful then other countries would emulate our scheme. You’d have a worldwide market in residency with refunds for genuine refugees. Refugees would stop trying to get into the “softest” country and begin to trade off their current wealth against possible earnings. Charities would be able to set up worldwide exchanges to enable refugees to quickly escape the camps into developed nations while their applications are processed.

Refugees follow economics too. What we have now is a quota system with a price ceiling. That is never going to work, no matter how you tinker around the edges. I consider the Pacific Solution, the Indonesian Solution and the Christmas Island Solution to be tinkering.

As an aside, I wonder what the total worldwide “capacity” for refugees is? Demand is pretty seriously outstripping supply by the figures.

The problem with that idea is that there are millions more people who fit the Refugee Convention criteria than Australia can ever feasibly accommodate. Of course, creating a price mechanism would reduce somewhat the class of applicants who could access such a scheme. However, unless you make the price very high, there will still be many more applicants than we can accommodate, so we’ll still need to have selection criteria i.e. it doesn’t adddress the problem. And if you make the price sufficiently high (e.g. through a visa trading scheme modelled on the emissions trading scheme), it would be just as susceptible as the present scheme to the accusation that we’re simply helping the least deserving. The sole advantage is that it would be highlighting that fact, whereas at the moment the bleeding heart lefties get away with spuriously seizing the high moral ground when what they’re really doing is supporting the least deserving to screw those most in need.

In economic terms, there’s consumer surplus here. Australia should get it, not the people smugglers.

Might make better sense if you proposed Macquarie Is, Heard Is, etc — where there is also plenty of environment protection work that needs doing.