Australian Border Protection has a Serious Sounding New Name

Seventy agencies are being abolished or amalgamated by the Government, with thousands of job cuts and a realignment of functions. We're privatising the Mint and Defence Housing, and getting rid of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the National Water Commission and a range of others. The reason? To save money. The real reason? Conservative Liberals like small government. They believe, "In government that nurtures and encourages its citizens through incentive, rather than putting limits on people through the punishing disincentives of burdensome taxes." Except for when there's a budget emergency.

All of these big changes were announced by press release. The one that wasn't was the agency that will take charge of Australia’s immigration, which got its own mini PR campaign. As of July next year Australia’s Customs and Immigration border protection operations will be merged into a single agency with a name that sounds like the title of a bad action movie, the Australian Border Force.

The ABF was one of the suggestions made by the National Commission of Audit, though it proposed the more modest (though no less lame) sounding name Border Control Australia. The idea has been floating around for a while; Labor representatives have said they considered it while in Government. The new agency will do more than handle our illegal immigration and detention centres. It will also be in charge of protecting Australia’s borders from the trafficking of illegal goods (drugs!) and the facilitation of legal trade and the legal movement of people. To highlight just how dearly the government cares about our borders, the ABF will be run by someone with the same standing as the Chief of the Defence Force.

Scott Morrison was on radio, wrote a piece for The Australian newspaper, and made a rather anti-immigration speech at a think tank started by Australia's most financially successful immigrant, the Lowy Institute.

Frank Lowy's family was living in Hungary when the Nazis invaded. He is technically a boat person, having fled Europe on a boat built for 70 people that was carrying 700. He has consistently refused to become involved in Australia’s immigration policies but said in an interview at UNSW that, “the government is responsible for its borders … it’s black and white. But at the same time, [the government] needs to deal with these issues in a humane way… it’s very difficult and various governments try to deal with it differently…  We do our best, but probably the best is not good enough.”

Frank Lowy is an early example of something the Australian Bureau of Statistics has just released in a statement. That the immigrants that come to Australia are not here for handouts. "A larger proportion of those who had recently arrived from overseas had higher level qualifications than the average for Australia”.

The talking points Scott Morrison has been using focus on how the creation of the ABF will streamline bureaucracy while cutting costs. However, this relatively minor amalgamation got its own special focus, while other agencies being reduced or abolished (those related to the arts, the environment or human rights) were put out as quietly as possible – could this possibly be poll driven? The Coalition Government is set to announce unpopular cuts to welfare, a Medicare co-payment, and a broken promise to not raise taxes. So this is an attempt to highlight an election promise they have fulfilled, stopping the boats. That’s why in Morrison’s opinion piece for The Australian, the ABF, ostensibly the reason for the article, is not announced until halfway through. The beginning is filled with matter-of-fact political triumphalism. “This is the fifth consecutive month during which not a single successful maritime people-smuggling venture reached Australia. Under the previous government, this was unthinkable.”

Morrison forecasts that the consolidation will save over $2.78 billion, taking into account the “collapse in illegal boat arrivals” and the closing of “six detention centres, opened by Labor”. A detailed breakdown of how these savings will be achieved hasn’t been released yet but the expectation is some of the savings will come from job cuts. It will be interesting to see how much the figures line up with the $1.81 billion we are sending to regional partners PNG and Nauru to run detention centres. Not to mention the money we could be wiring to Cambodia, the second poorest country in South-east Asia, so they’ll take in some 100 refugees (it’s rumoured to be $40 million).

Potential challenges to achieving the expected savings include a case before the high court regarding the constitutionality of the Manus Island detention centre. While it is likely that the verdict will go the way of the Government, if it were to succeed Australia’s off-shore processing arrangements would have to be shut down. The other challenge is that part of our refugee deterrent program, the proposition of being resettled in PNG, may be falling apart. Although Scott Morrison told ABC radio on Friday, “everyone who's found to be a refugee at Manus Island, they will be resettled in Papua New Guinea,” the PNG Immigration Minister has said his government will decide who stays, and it may be determined based on their professional skills, not on the danger the people face if they were to return home.

Scott Morrison says our current policies have “delivered significant dividends, in both humanitarian and economic terms.” What he’s using the tone deaf word dividends to describe is the “20,000 additional places within our refugee and humanitarian program” that are expected to open up because they aren’t being used by ‘boat people’. Why do we not want these spots used by people who, like Frank Lowy, are desperate enough to risk their lives to find refuge? Scott Morrison says, “Our border creates the space for us to be who we are and to become everything we can be as a nation.” So these people will take away from that. Presumably because honouring our commitments (say, to the Refugee convention) is not a part of who we are or want to be.

Sure, our immigration policies have been condemned by the UNHCR. But when you're down in the polls it's somehow good politics to remind Australians that even though a great deal of us may be out of a job soon, at least those jobs haven't been taken by boat people.

Follow Girard on Twitter: @GirardDorney