Here’s some news commentary to jog your memories, if you’re over the age of 40.  From The Saturday Paper, August 29, 2026, p.3 “Inside Labor’s migration crackdown“:

“The planned migration crackdown cannot be separated from the sharp rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation over the past year.  Asylum seekers and refugee rights advocates hold grave fears that this will shift migration policy to the right.”

This was in the context of the government’s proposal to remove work rights from refugee applicants refused at their Administrative Review Tribunal hearing, but who have sought review of that decision, as is their constitutional right (see s.75(v) of the Constitution).

One of those who lost their work right (presumably under a dry run of the proposed policy) said:

“The government needs to set policies based on what’s best for the country and the impact on people, not necessarily as knee jerk reactions to another political party.”   

The same informant, Atena Kashani, an Iranian refugee, also said:

“It’s a concerning direction that the government is going in. This is picking on the people with least power in society to try to prove a point. It’s policy on the run.” 

Picking on the least powerful in society: surely not. That’s not the Ozzie way. We’re true blue and decent blokes (and sheilas). To remind myself of the calibration on whom we bestow truly bluish and decent qualities, I sat down to the ABC three-parter on the Tampa.

Afghan refugees, 433 of them, predominantly Hazaras, were fleeing the monstrous Taliban regime in August 2001 (history chiming some more), on board an unseaworthy and foundering fishing boat in the Indian Ocean.

The screen turned to an ancient Paul Kelly, archpriest in the Murdoch Empire. And this is the strength of this program: the interviews, 25 years after the events with the principal protagonists.  Condemnation falls on them from their own mouths.

Kelly appears by way of introduction flanked in a photo from the distant past by cherubic Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. He explains in the present that the arrival off Christmas Island of the Norwegian freighter Tampa, which had rescued the Afghans, “was an emergency”: the Howard government was being challenged.  

Kelly intoned that in the light of the election due before the end of 2001, this was an opportunity, a test of Howard and his Cabinet.

Cut to Abbott in the present pronouncing on not losing control of your nation, and then to Howard in parliament in 2001: “We are not a soft touch”.

The then Labor leader, Kim Beazley, promptly backed Howard’s emerging hard line on the Tampa survivors, leaving David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, both journalists at the SMH in 2001, to remark that only the press was now going to hold the government to account.

The practical problem confronting all parties was that a giant freighter in the modern era is designed to be sailed by a crew of not more than 20. Hence stocks of food and medicine and bathroom facilities will be limited.

Now the Tampa had an extra 433 souls on board, and given the limits on sanitation, the Afghans were falling ill very quickly. The owners of the ship, Wallenius Wilhemsen, took the view that the Law of the Sea required Australia, as the nearest party, to provide assistance to those helpless at sea.

That help was not forthcoming. Alexander Downer, then the Minister for Foreign Affairs, complained in the present that since the Afghans had embarked from Indonesia, they should be accepted back there.

This ignored a crucial distinction, the elephant in the room that the Howardistas never referred to: the UN Refugee Convention of 1951, of which Australia had been a prime mover.

Australia was a signatory to the Convention (meaning we’d agreed to accept refugee applicants, subject to screening as to authenticity), while Indonesia was not a party.

But the historical footage showed Howard was right in his element, inveighing against queue jumpers i.e. those who didn’t wait in UN organised refugee camps, often for ten years to be screened and allocated to a receiving country.

The Hazaras didn’t have the luxury of asking the Taliban for time to organise themselves into a UN camp. But the rhetoric was amping up, with Howard pronouncing on the flood that would follow if people could just get in (apparently as the Refugee Convention provides, subject to being screened).

To protect our tender feelings, Downer asserts in the present that Aussies aren’t racist, nor against migration, just uncontrolled migration (which unfortunately for his argument, is exactly what the Refugee Convention allows for).

Then one of the few apparatchiks interviewed, then head of PM&C, Max “The Axe” Moore-Wilton, gives the game away: Pauline Hanson was a problem for the Coalition. As Marr noted, Howard was sucking votes back from Hanson.

This really was about politics, and the Afghans were the merest of pawns.

Meanwhile on the Tampa, days were passing, and the state of the ship and its 433 passengers was fast deteriorating. The Australian government was engaged in an arm wrestle with the Norwegian government (based some 13,000 kms away) to the tune of the Norwegians being responsible for the Afghans, as opposed to the Australians, with the Tampa 12 nautical miles off Christmas Island, an Australian territory.

The skipper of the Tampa, Arne Rinnan, declared an emergency based on the state of the passengers, and against the orders of the Australian government headed for the island.

Of this, Moore-Wilton sniffily pronounced that there was no medically qualified person on the Tampa, so there could be no medical emergency.

Later in the show “The Axe” asserted that the ship was not in danger (i.e. not sinking, never mind the survivors suffering dysentery, or the pregnant women among them, or the large number of children), and then announced that the captain was acting in a bloody minded fashion, “and I still hold that view”, followed by what appears to be a letter box smiling.

Howard interviewed now joins in the doubts as to whether there was a medical emergency.

Fishnets Downer, in his element, interviewed in the present, retailed how the Norwegian Foreign Minister “on his high moral horse” demanded that Australia take the 433 Afghans.

Downer responded by telling the Norwegians they had to take them, and then apparently they were no longer on a high horse. This was patently ridiculous, as the ship was unseaworthy with 433 passengers – for a start it had lifeboats only for 40, now no food or medicines, or sanitary facilities.

Downer, never one to leave a pudding un-egged then says: “Anyway, that was the end of that conversation – I went back to sleep for a while”, after which he sniggers.

That was the point at which your scribe lost his composure at Sniggerfull Downer’s exuberant jollity in the despair and degradation of refugee claimants who were being turned into election fodder.

After all this posturing, the story resolved with the arrival of the SAS to commandeer the Tampa and prevent it heading into Christmas Island, and then the arrival of HMAS Manoora to take the Afghans away, on the pretext that conditions would be better on the naval vessel.

Meanwhile, a Melbourne solicitor, Eric Vadarlis, launched his own suit against Phil Ruddock, the then Minister for Immigration, claiming that the Afghans were being deprived of their liberty unlawfully.

Vadarlis won round one, before Tony North in the Federal Court, but the day of the judgment was ominous: September 11, 2001. The government immediately ordered an appeal, which was heard in the next week by Michael Black CJ, Brian Beaumont and Bob French.

We get David Bennett, then Solicitor General, arguwing in his mewodious wisp by reference to the Twin Towers.

Grizzled and avuncular now, he says he “was cashing in on the popular view at the time – whether I should have done is perhaps open to question”.

We are not a racist nation, but those who aren’t safely colour coded white are probably terrorists or criminals was a theme now running steadily in the background.

At this point Howard introduced a Bill that intended to give Commonwealth officers sweeping powers regarding vessels in Australian waters, these powers to be unchallengeable in court.

Bomber Beazley finally found his spine and resisted: such a measure is plainly unconstitutional: see s.75(v).  The Bill failed in the Senate, but Howard won the war, as the Full Federal Court delivered for the government 2-1: Bob French writing a long judgment that embellished the Constitution’s s.61 so that Executive power equated with the Royal Prerogative, which included a power in Kings to push aliens out of the Kingdom.

Brian Beaumont agreed, leaving Michael Black in dissent.

The Afghans were now well on their way to Nauru, strong-armed by Sniggerfull Downer into accepting these beleaguered souls. When they arrived on the Manoora, the unaccompanied children and family groups were flown to New Zealand to the tune of 150. On a population scale, that is twice the number that would be a fair share with Australia, which was still breast-beating about taking none, a view to which it has adhered.

Downer crowed about his success in brow-beating the Kiwis.

Twenty-five years later we are served a lite version of the Tampa.  The Saturday Paper article with which this piece opened observed:

“The Labor government is also considering removing the appeal rights of people seeking asylum if their claim is initially denied …”

There we go again: lock the courts out of overview of Commonwealth action. The question is whether a Hanson government will have the wherewithal to withdraw Australia from the Refugee Convention.

This is needed urgently so that those in peril and need aren’t reduced to low-denomination political chess pieces as Australia winds through its periodic fur balls over migration policy and the horror of non-white people turning up here, the famously non-racist nation.

Withdrawal from the Convention may seem extreme, but Australian politicians cannot be trusted to deal decently with those arriving under its auspices.