Philip Ruddock - Australia's gatekeeper

By GREG ANSLEY

This week, as one young man hurled himself on to razor wire at Woomera immigration detention centre, teenagers stitched their lips together and hundreds of men, women and children starved on a hunger strike, a new cartoon of Philip Ruddock appeared.

In it, Australia's Immigration Minister was dressed in jackboots, riding crop and armband; behind him were a car battery and leads, wall manacles and interrogation lights; before him was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

"I mean," Ruddock is saying to the commissioner, "look at it from where I'm standing."

"I can't while I'm tied to this chair," replies the commissioner.

Abroad, Ruddock is vilified as the personification of Australian xenophobia and heartlessness following last year's crisis aboard the Norwegian freighter Tampa and a rising clamour from the continent's remote detention centres.

At home, the analogy of jackboots and concentration camps is growing through graffiti and the loud condemnation of organisations such as the National Union of Students.

"There are disturbing similarities between the Howard Government's stance on refugees and the early days of the Nazi regime, when they were whipping up hysteria against the Jews," said NUS national welfare officer Jillian Ferguson.

Churches, refugee organisations, political rivals and a widening band of middle Australia may use less vituperative language, but among even the most restrained, Ruddock is inevitably bracketed with hardliners.

On the other side of the divide, much of Australia still regards the stamp-collecting 58-year-old father of two as the gatekeeper guarding against the hordes outside, the man whose uncompromising stand against people-smugglers and queue-jumping refugees played such a large role in helping Prime Minister John Howard to return for a third term.

Although an agonising bout of soul-searching is now racking the Labor Party, there is no argument with the broad principle of preventing - forcibly if necessary - boatloads of asylum-seekers from arriving.

And it was, after all, a Labor administration that introduced mandatory detention and created the first remote centres which, from the start, have experienced protests, violence and allegations of neglect and cruelty.

Ruddock inherited the system and was landed with international misery that ballooned to a crisis and led inevitably to the association of his name with images of women and children packed aboard naval vessels, of limbo in the Pacific, and of burning camps, mass breakouts and self-mutilation in outback Australia.

Yet Ruddock has consistently advocated a vibrant and diverse migrant policy, championed the settlement of the persecuted and dispossessed in one of the world's handful of refugee programmes, and argued that control at the borders ensures a humanitarian response to a growing global tragedy.

He was one of the founders of the federal parliamentary branch of Amnesty International, a membership he has stubbornly refused to surrender despite calls for his resignation and condemnation of his policies by the national body.

Politically, Ruddock is regarded as a moderate. His ability to focus on reason rather than rhetoric was a key reason why he was appointed Immigration Minister when Howard won office in 1996. Howard wanted to repair relationships with ethnic Australia, which he had badly damaged with ill-considered remarks in the 1980s.

Howard also handed Ruddock another thankless job, bundling Aboriginal Affairs into his portfolio at a time when the failure of successive administrations to overcome indigenous inequalities and suffering had been compounded by the Coalition's woeful handling of reconciliation.

Inevitably, as with immigration, indigenous affairs has been a minefield for Ruddock.

While Howard has endured much of the political heat for his refusal to formally apologise for the sins of the past, Ruddock has drawn his own fire with Government policy and his own predilection for reason.

When he was asked by France's Le Monde why Aborigines remained Australia's most disadvantaged minority, Ruddock's answer was the eminently reasonable observation of a late start from a low base.

But as in the debate on asylum-seekers, Ruddock gave too little thought to sensitivity. "We're dealing with people who were essentially hunter-gatherers. They didn't have chariots. I don't think they invented the wheel ... "

The response in Australia was predictable.

Nor has Ruddock won many brownie points in Aboriginal Australia for his intervention in the running of statutory indigenous bodies, and his refusal to establish a tribunal to compensate victims of the Stolen Generation, the Aborigines that the state took from their families as children.

When he rose to speak at a conference on racism organised by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, about 100 delegates walked out.

Ruddock was saddened but philosophical: "That's a freedom that they're entitled to exercise ... We in Australia have always been of the view that we have a vigorous, robust democracy in which, if people have alternative views, they express them."

He gained his views during a comfortable upbringing in Sydney as the son of a former New South Wales Transport Minister, education at Hornsby's Barker College and Sydney University, and qualification as a solicitor.

Ruddock was a contemporary of Howard in the Young Liberals. He entered Parliament before his boss as one of Canberra's youngest MPs when he won the seat of Parramatta in a by-election in 1973, later moving to the North Shore seat of Berowa.

In Opposition, he held shadow portfolios in immigration, ethnic affairs and social security, and was given the immigration ministry in 1986 in a bid to calm troubled waters.

But his appointment coincided with the emergence of Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party and a new surge of boat people, which forced tough new laws, action against people-smuggling, the rapid expansion of detention centres and, ultimately, the Tampa crisis.

By nature soft-spoken, almost infuriatingly calm and rational, Ruddock could just about have taken his pick of portfolios after his Tampa performance during the election campaign - he was widely tipped to take defence - but instead opted to stay with immigration.

It is a field in which - regardless of vilification - he has consistently advocated a policy of measured population growth through immigration to compensate for an ageing population and to produce a vibrant, multicultural society stabilising at about 25 million people.

He has been equally consistent in his policy of a compassionate refugee policy accepting about 10,000 a year, and in his absolute rejection of what he describes as queue-jumping by illegal asylum-seekers - many of whom he believes are making lifestyle choices for a better economic life rather that fleeing oppression.

Ruddock maintains that the flood of boat people unfairly hinders the arrival of refugees accepted through formal processing and endangers the refugee programme.

Whatever course he chooses, Ruddock will crash against the conflict between compassion at the border and the danger that easy treatment of one boatload of asylum seekers will spark the departure of dozens more. This is the root cause of his agony now.

To deter the armada of little boats from Indonesia, he has sent abroad films and pamphlets warning of the physical dangers of illegally sneaking into Australia - the risk of death at sea, by crocodiles and snakes on shore, and by thirst and hunger in the desert - and bluntly outlining Australia's equally inhospitable laws of mandatory detention and repatriation.

An even greater deterrent has been television footage of riots, blazing buildings and stitched lips at detention centres now regularly described by foreign commentators and critics at home as concentration camps.

In this, Ruddock remains uncompromising: although there may be modifications, protests and violence will not reverse the policy of mandatory detention: "The deterrent approach to mandatory detention, which was initiated by Labor and continued by us, was to ensure first that people are available for processing and, more importantly, available for removal if they had no lawful basis to be here."