The former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer has appeared front-and-centre of a UK Home Office video promoting the British government’s controversial “new plan for immigration” which includes sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“Well, basically it’s a racket which is run by people smugglers to make money – and they make huge amounts of money,” Downer says in the video.
Downer says it is important to “transmit a message to people smugglers” that no one will end up being able to reside in the UK if they paid a people smuggler.
“You can only destroy their model by guaranteeing that people cannot get to the UK courtesy of a smuggler otherwise you can’t destroy their model,” he says.
🌐 Who is profiting from the global migration crisis – and what can be done to help fix it? 👇pic.twitter.com/XaFEfPzkRl
— Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) April 13, 2022
The UK home secretary, Priti Patel, announced last week that people seeking asylum in the UK will be flown more than 7,200kms to Rwanda as part of a government crackdown on unauthorised migrants. The plan has triggered criticism, including from Conservative peers and MPs.
Downer, who is one of several figures to appear in the video posted online by the Home Office, was foreign affairs minister in the Howard government, which instituted a hardline approach to asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat.
That issue came to a head in August 2001 when a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, rescued 433 asylum seekers from a sinking vessel that had been heading towards Australia’s Christmas Island.
The Australian government refused the Tampa permission to land any of the asylum seekers on Australian soil, insisting it wanted to send a message to others to avoid the dangerous journey.
When the Tampa anchored off Christmas Island, Australia sent aboard 45 SAS troops, who seized control of the ship.
Peter Tinley, second-in-command of the SAS that day, would later report he had found “400-plus ordinary refugees, very hungry, some who needed some medical attention, very scared and uncertain about what was happening [and] a particularly concerned sea captain who just wanted to offload his human cargo and discharge his duty according to international law”.
The then prime minister, John Howard, introduced offshore processing of asylum seekers, including in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, and campaigned on the matter in the lead-up to the 2001 election.
“We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” Howard said.
As foreign minister, Downer repeatedly defended those policies, saying the government was declaring Australia “closed to people smugglers”. He later served as Australia’s high commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018.
In February this year, the British government appointed Downer to review the country’s border force, months after he urged the UK to adopt Australia’s controversial boat turn-back policy.
“My advice to Miss Patel would be to introduce the ‘push-back’ policy without fanfare, and to keep the French informed on a need-to-know basis only,” Downer wrote last year.
Unions in Britain condemned Downer’s “deeply concerning” appointment to the review, citing his role in Australia’s “inhumane” immigration policies.
The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said on Monday it was important to show “resolve” to people smugglers. Morrison characterised the past arrival of asylum-seeker boats as an “armada”.