From Tampa to The Justice Project: When a Crisis Creates a Civic Response

The Tampa affair was one of them.

• Isla Hera

In August 2001, a Norwegian cargo ship, the MV Tampa, rescued more than 400 people from a dangerously overcrowded fishing boat in the Indian Ocean. Most were asylum seekers from Afghanistan.

What followed was no longer simply a rescue at sea.

It became a national argument about borders, refugees, political responsibility, international law and, ultimately, the kind of country Australia wanted to be.

Twenty-five years later, Tampa remains important not only because of the policies that followed.

It also matters because of the civic response it helped inspire.

Among the organisations that emerged from the wider human rights debate of those years was The Justice Project.

Its story reminds us that difficult moments can produce more than division.

They can also produce engagement.

A ship became a political question

The basic facts remain striking.

Hundreds of people were in danger at sea. Captain Arne Rinnan and the crew of the Tampa rescued them.

Australia refused permission for the asylum seekers to disembark on Christmas Island.

The confrontation escalated. Australian Special Air Service personnel boarded the ship. Legal proceedings followed. Political debate intensified.

Within days, an emergency at sea had become one of the defining political events of modern Australia.

The consequences extended far beyond the people aboard the ship.

Tampa became an important catalyst for what became known as the Pacific Solution, under which asylum seekers arriving by boat could be transferred offshore for processing.

It also became central to the 2001 federal election debate.

Something fundamental had changed.

Migration policy was no longer simply about how Australia received people.

It was increasingly about how Australia prevented certain people from reaching it.

The question behind the policy

Governments have a legitimate responsibility to control borders.

That principle should not be dismissed.

States need functioning migration systems. They need to know who enters their territory. They have responsibilities toward security, social cohesion and the integrity of legal migration pathways.

But Tampa exposed another question.

What happens when border control and humanitarian responsibility collide?

A person does not cease to possess human dignity because he or she arrives without the correct document.

A refugee does not become less human because the journey was irregular.

And rescue at sea cannot easily be separated from centuries-old principles of maritime responsibility.

Tampa therefore became more than an immigration dispute.

It became an argument about limits.

How far should a democratic state go in preventing arrival?

What protections should remain available even to people whom a government does not want to admit?

And who speaks when fear becomes politically more powerful than compassion?

The lawyers who stepped forward

The legal profession became an important part of the response.

One of the most prominent figures was barrister Julian Burnside.

Burnside became deeply involved in pro bono legal work for asylum seekers, including the Tampa litigation, and later established Spare Lawyers for Refugees, encouraging lawyers around Australia to contribute their professional expertise without charge.

More than 250 lawyers eventually became involved.

This was significant for a simple reason.

Rights written in legislation, constitutions or international conventions mean very little if vulnerable people cannot obtain the assistance required to exercise them.

The lawyer in such circumstances does more than argue a case.

The lawyer helps ensure that power can still be questioned.

From protest to organisation

But legal cases alone could not answer the wider political problem.

By 2004, a group of Australians from remarkably different backgrounds came together around a broader idea.

They included Julian Burnside, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, academic and public intellectual Robert Manne, and Hugh Evans, who had been named Young Australian of the Year. Others involved in the organisation included Gillian Triggs, Jessie Taylor and John and Peter Zapris.

Together they helped establish The Justice Project.

That diversity mattered.

The organisation was deliberately non-partisan.

Its concern was not whether human rights belonged to the political left or political right.

Its argument was simpler.

Some principles should survive changes of government.

Some protections should apply even to unpopular people.

And some questions are too important to be reduced to party loyalty.

Beyond Tampa

The Justice Project initially concentrated strongly on refugee policy reform and opposition to mandatory immigration detention.

But its ambitions extended further.

It supported stronger protection for human rights and became involved in the debate about a Charter or Bill of Rights.

This represented an important evolution.

Tampa had begun as a dispute involving several hundred people on one ship.

The response increasingly became a discussion about the protections available to everyone.

That is one of the most interesting aspects of the story.

A society often discovers the weakness of its safeguards at the margins.

People without political influence test institutions in ways that powerful citizens rarely do.

Refugees.

Detainees.

Prisoners.

Minorities.

People without money.

People without votes.

People whom public opinion finds easy to ignore.

The protection offered to them tells us something about the strength of the system protecting everybody else.

Malcolm Fraser and an unusual alliance

Malcolm Fraser’s involvement was particularly significant.

He had been a Liberal prime minister.

His presence made it harder to dismiss concern about refugee treatment as belonging exclusively to one side of politics.

Fraser increasingly argued that questions of liberty, human dignity and refugee protection should transcend party divisions.

His collaboration with people from very different political and intellectual traditions demonstrated something that has become increasingly rare in democratic life.

People do not need to agree about everything to work together on something important.

Indeed, serious civic movements often become stronger precisely because their members arrive at the same principle from different directions.

One may begin with liberalism.

Another with social justice.

Another with law.

Another with religious conviction.

Another simply with the belief that unnecessary suffering should not be accepted.

The destination can still be shared.

Human rights need infrastructure

There is a tendency to think about human rights mainly as ideals.

Freedom.

Equality.

Dignity.

Justice.

But ideals require infrastructure.

They need lawyers prepared to act.

Journalists prepared to investigate.

Citizens prepared to organise.

Academics prepared to examine policy critically.

Institutions capable of reviewing government decisions.

Community groups prepared to help people who have little political influence.

And sometimes they need organisations such as The Justice Project to connect these different forms of engagement.

Democracy is not maintained by elections alone.

It is maintained by the spaces between elections in which citizens continue to question, organise, argue and participate.

Twenty-five years later

The Tampa affair now belongs to Australian history.

But the questions it raised have become global.

Europe struggles with irregular migration across the Mediterranean.

The United States continues to debate its southern border.

People cross the English Channel in small boats.

Refugees flee wars, persecution, economic collapse and climate-related pressures.

Governments face genuine difficulties.

There are no simple solutions.

Open borders are not a serious answer.

Neither is pretending that deterrence has no human consequences.

The challenge remains the same one exposed by Tampa:

How can a state protect its borders without losing sight of the people standing at them?

What Tampa left behind

Tampa’s most visible legacy was political.

It helped reshape Australian border policy and contributed to a system of offshore processing whose influence continued for many years.

But there was another legacy.

People organised.

Lawyers volunteered.

Citizens protested.

Former political opponents found common ground.

Human rights organisations strengthened their advocacy.

And The Justice Project emerged as part of that broader civic response.

This does not mean that its founders agreed on every political question.

They clearly did not.

That may be precisely the point.

Democracy is strongest not when everybody thinks alike, but when people who think differently can still identify principles worth defending together.

Perhaps that is the more enduring lesson of Tampa.

A crisis reveals the choices of governments.

But it also reveals the choices available to citizens.

We can watch.

We can turn away.

Or we can decide that something requires our involvement.

The people aboard the Tampa could not have known that their desperate journey would become part of Australia’s political history.

Nor could anyone have predicted all the policies, court cases, organisations and debates that would follow.

But history sometimes moves this way.

One event creates another.

One injustice awakens a response.

One response becomes an organisation.

And an organisation becomes part of a larger effort to ensure that the next vulnerable person does not stand entirely alone.

Justice does not always begin with institutions. Sometimes institutions begin because someone first refuses to accept an injustice.

• Isla Hera is an independent researcher and writer focusing on international affairs, migration, geopolitics and sustainable public policy, with a particular interest in the social, economic and humanitarian dimensions of global challenges.