Thank you very much and thanks for the opportunity to be here at Frank. When I was approached about it, I had no idea what Frank was and I’m absolutely blown away from the short time that I’ve been here already and seen the impressive list of speakers. In fact, I suspect there may be a few tomatoes in the audience given the earlier speakers and what I’m going to be telling you about the Australian asylum seeker experience. But please hold those to the end. Hold those to the end. I was in many conferences that I spoke at, prone to opening up by saying, hi, I’m from the government and I’m here to help you. We know that’s a lie right away and of course I’m no longer in that role so I won’t use that. And just so we can clarify, I am a migrant. I was a Canadian who migrated to Australia, became an Australian many years ago. I’m still doing the accent by correspondence course or online. So that may confuse some of you and I know in my role at the Australian Embassy in Washington for four years I often would be stopped by people and they’d say, sorry, what embassy are you from again? Because I didn’t have the quintessential Aussie accent. But that aside, what I want to talk to you about today is the Australian experience in managing the flow of asylum seekers. And it’s not necessarily a given that an asylum seeker is a refugee. That’s a purely technical argument. I think most of us would accept that when someone is fleeing and is seeking our protection, they’re probably a refugee. However, the Australian government, both sides of the political realm, played fairly hardball on this. And their policy for several decades now has been if you arrive in Australia without a lawful visa or a lawful purpose, you get locked up. And you get locked up until the government Department of Immigration works out whether you in fact have a right to remain. And that was one of the tough parts of the job as the official spokesman for the department for eight years. And this campaign I want to talk to you about was called by boat, no visa. And essentially it said if you jumped into a boat, not a cruise boat, if you jumped into a fishing boat off the Java coast in Indonesia and headed down to Australia and you arrived without a visa, and most people did, you wouldn’t be given a visa on arrival. You in fact would be locked up. Now both Australia and the United States have proud, proud records as being resettlement and safe resettlement countries for refugees. We both are migrant nations built on migrant flows, particularly after the Second World War. So we both have reasonably good reputations. I think in Australia’s case we’re taking a bit of a hit. From this chat, I hope that from this talk, I hope that you’ll take from it some of the challenges that bureaucrats like I was, the challenges that we have to manage when it comes to the political dynamics of both sides of politics. When you’re working for the government of the day, your own political beliefs really don’t come into it at all. Certainly you don’t want to do anything that’s wrong, that’s legally or is unlawful. But you may not agree with the policy, but as a public servant, and we don’t have schedules, see appointees as you do here, but as a public servant, you give professional, objective advice without fear, without favor. And you allow the prime minister, the minister of the government of the day to make a decision on which course of action they want to follow. You’ll also, I think, hear about how we harness the energy of the diaspora communities, the ethnic communities whose family members were heading down in these boats, many of them drowning at sea. And they played a valuable role in helping us finesse the language and helping us reach out up the pipeline, as it were. We had to be responsive. The mainstream media was particularly interested in this as a story. Migration is an incredibly topical issue in the media these days and with bloggers and with talkback shows. And so that meant a huge demand on the staff. I had between 40 and 50 staff in the communications branch of the department right around Australia. And in fact, as the detention network began to expand, we would send people to different parts of the network to manage the media there. We also did all of our creatives in-house. We didn’t do the research. We didn’t do the focus testing in-house. But we had the videographers, we had the copywriters, we had the media planners, we had the copywriters, we had the snappers. We did that all in-house. Saved us a lot of money, a lot of money at the start-up in 2005 when I joined the department. But it paid dividends down the track when we didn’t have great budgets. One of the great lessons I learned, and I hope that you’ll pull out of this, is in communication we communicate, communicate, communicate. And just when we think we’ve said it enough times, we keep communicating and we listen. And I think someone else said that as well today. Listening is such an important part of the communications business. So the backstory here is we’ve had boats arriving in Australia, post-Vietnam War, just before the turn of the century out of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. We then had a lull labor left the center, almost a Bernie Sanders-type government, but let’s not get too carried away. But we then had labor and power in 2007. And they humanized the situation around asylum seekers coming by boat. And that kind of sent a signal to the people smugglers. And I know one person’s people smugglers, another person’s Oscar Schindler, and I’m not here to have that debate. But the reality was people smugglers with criminal intent, some with good intent, but most with criminal intent, were packing hundreds and hundreds of people seeking protection onto small fishing boats and sending them down the Indian Ocean towards Australia. So we’re looking at people coming from the region, but further up the pipeline from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, from down in Sri Lanka. The policy settings the government kept resetting meant the campaigns had to be reset as well. The messaging had to be reset. So we had to be incredibly agile and responsive to their needs. We also noticed that the community was beginning to turn against the humanitarian caseload. And you’re in big trouble when domestically you’ve been a country that has welcomed migration. One in two Australians is either born overseas or has a family member, a parent born overseas. And yet they were now turning against the very humanitarian caseloads that were following. It didn’t make sense, but that was the reality. And the reality was was thus because they perceived they being those who turned against, and that was many, they perceived that border security when tenuous, when uncertain, meant that their lives were uncertain and insecure. And we had to battle that in our campaign. In 2012, the Australian government reopened processing centers. It sounds like a sausage factory, but reopened processing centers for asylum seekers in two little island states in the Pacific, Nauru and Papua New Guinea. So they essentially subcontracted their UN obligations to other countries because money talks and these poor nations are struggling. Their infrastructure is broken ass, if ever it was. And Australia just gave them lots of money and said, look, you look after our problem. And the people, as in Australians, we all seem to accept that. A federal election was called in 2013. And for the first time ever, the government invoked national security legislation to justify running a major campaign against asylum seekers and people smugglers. Thirty seven million dollars they assigned. And they said, Sandy, you got to spend it in six weeks. I said, there’s no way you can spend that sort of money in six weeks. And that’s just off. It’s wrong. We had all the research. We had the focus testing. We had we had community insights that we had collected over over a number of years. So we were able to turn the campaign out fairly quickly. It was a big ask and we had big sticks in a sense. And so the various riot squads and police came out and showed their stuff. And of course, mainstream media lapped it up. What we were seeking to do was to change behavior and think about it. What was the behavior we were trying to change? The human will to survive. People fleeing dangerous, precarious, horror situations and doing trying to do the best for their family, seeking to survive. And we were trying to change that behavior. It was masked in a sense around the drownings as we’d had 1200 drownings. And that’s really tough work for people on the front line fishing bodies out of the sea. I can tell you, I’ve been there close to it. I haven’t had to do it, but I’ve witnessed it. And it’s tough work for those people doing it over and over. And we knew that many, many more people were going to drown because that is the nature of the people smuggling business. They really didn’t care about the boats that they were putting these people on. The strategy also had to speak in language. We had to speak in Farsi. We had to speak in Arabic. We had to speak in Sinhalese. We had to speak in a range of dialogues and dialects, rather, and make sure that that language was correct so we were able to use our community networks, our diaspora community networks, to get that right. But we also went big in mainstream media because we wanted the multiplier effect of people at work, people at school, the doctors, the dentists, the counselors talking to the diaspora community members to impress upon them that this is serious, mom, this is serious. Whereas hitherto it had been mainly targeted in the ethnic media. The big challenge was reaching out as far up the pipeline as we could because think about it, if you’re on the road, you’re heading for safety. You’re a refugee. You’ve been blasted out of your town. The further you get away and the closer to safety and security you get, the harder it’s going to be to be disabused that you should stop your trip and go back. Just go back. So we had to try and reach them before they left their source because in some instances they might have been Hazara in Afghanistan and the Hazara have been done over by just about every tribe and every the Russians, the al-Qaeda, the Afghan government, they’ve all had it in for the Hazara. And so trying to convince the Hazara where there wasn’t actually a war necessarily underway, what’s a bit of a challenge? But that was work that had to be done. One of the big targets here was many of these people had never seen water. They came from landlocked countries. They had no idea what they were about to encounter. So this was a 30 second TVC that we cut. Sadly, it worked. The boats dropped from 50 a month to 25 to five. And by the end of 2013, after there had been a change of government, a toughening of policy, I didn’t believe it could get tougher, but it did. We were down to zero boats. And the government, the new government was able to say, terrific. Look at that. We stopped the drownings. But really all we were doing was we were putting our fingers in this side of the bucket where the leaks were. And the leaks just came out the other side of the bucket. But of course we weren’t seeing that because it was around the other side. But it stopped the boats. It was tough language that was, I guess, echoing tough love. The government introduced something called turnbacks where they were stopping boats on their way in international waters, in contravention of maritime law, frankly, and taking people off those fishing boats because they were in danger and putting them into lifeboats, very expensive lifeboats with enough fuel, a GPS and food, and sending them back to the Indonesian coast to Java. So they weren’t even letting them reach an Australian territory or the Australian mainland. The measure, I think, represented a hardening of the collective Australian artery. This was really now a kind of, we can’t go back from here moment for the government. They’d established this policy. They were going to introduce turnbacks and they were doing it and the message had got out there. Now, interestingly, public support for migration in Australia, for the government’s policy around the numbers and the approach, it sits about 60% approval, which is in direct contrast to the United States and Europe, where in 2014, the last time that we saw those numbers, it was disapproval of around 60%. It’s between 60 and 70% out of EU countries and out of the United States around migration programs. So for some strange reason, we lapped it up down under. Now, that moment went for me. That moment went for me was, I guess, two moments, but it was one moment collectively between October 2013 and December, because I’d often said to my staff, before you go out and make a decision, before you go out and deal with the clients, walk in their shoes for a moment, for an hour, for a day. What would you do if you were in their shoes? And I’d finally come to the realization that I couldn’t keep, I couldn’t keep spouting this line, because what we were doing bore no resemblance to a humanitarian response. And I know there’d be many activists back in Australia who said, Sandy, you should have realized that eight years ago. You shouldn’t have waited eight years. But that was the moment that hit me, and I thought for the public good, I got to get out of this work. I’ve got to get out of representing these policies from both sides of the political spectrum, both the left and the right, which it was, and I got out. So three takeouts, because I’ve run out of time, three takeouts from this. The public campaigns that we ran around the regular flows and trying to stop them, all it did was stop one side of the bucket that was leaking and the water ran out the other side. To solve this, we need to burden share. There needs to be regional cooperation. This is not going to stop. The irregular flow of people is not going to stop. It’s been going for centuries, and it’s going to get worse and worse with climate change, rising seawaters, atolls in the Pacific are going to lose their land, people will have nowhere to live. What do we do? We don’t just leave them there to drown. We don’t put our hands up and say, no, go back, go back to what? So we need to share the burden and we need to be serious about that. And it needs to be done in a regional way. And thirdly, most importantly, I made sure that our detention facilities were open to the media. Journalists could come in, could see with their own eyes what was going on. We have to make sure governments are held accountable, that there is transparency. And as we say in Australia, we’ve got to keep the bastards honest. Thank you.