Since 2012, Australia has sent hundreds of asylum seekers trying to come to Australia by boat without a visa to Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, and to Nauru, an impoverished island country with only 21 square kilometers of land for its 10,000 or so inhabitants.

Even when those asylum seekers are found to be genuine refugees, the Australian government refuses to resettle them in Australia, opting instead to strike resettlement deals with third countries like the United States, which so far has resettled only 430 refugees. But even then not all refugees end up being resettled, as up to 500 refugees continue to live there.

The Coalition will maintain the intake of other refugees at 18,750 refugees per year, which is more than 30 percent less than the Labor Party offered as a campaign promise. This does not bode well even for genuine refugees from Indonesia.

Back in November 2014, Morrison, who was then then the immigration minister, announced that Australia would only resettle 450 refugees annually from Indonesia and even then no one who had registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on or after July 1, 2014.

What’s more, the Coalition will also cap community-sponsored intake to 1,000 places (Labor had promised to increase it fivefold to 5,000 if the won). Community sponsorship means that civil society organizations can bring in refugees for a fee, which for a family over five is a cool A$93,000 (US$64,783). Cheaper and larger scale community sponsorship for refugees stuck in Indonesia would surely decrease the risk for refugees to use their own money to pay people smugglers to take them to Australia.

Further complicating the lives of refugees transiting in Indonesia, Morrison’s government has pledged to continue turning back asylum seeker boats to Indonesia if any should attempt to make the perilous sea journey to Australia. Since September 2013, Australia has turned back at least 33 boats and 820 asylum seekers, with some boats hailing from further away origins, including Vietnam or Sri Lanka.

Prime Minister Morrison is proud of the achievement. For much of the time he served as Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and so was instrumental in designing harsh border protection policies. He is known to even known to decorate his office desk with a trophy resembling an asylum-seeker boat that bares the inscription: “I stopped these”.

The pride sits at odds with his strong Christian belief in charity and mercy, and continues to be utterly unapologetic for the misery he and his governments have inflicted on thousands of refugees who attempted to seek international protection in Australia.

So news about the Coalition win in Australia was not greeted with cheer by refugees in Indonesia. By late January 2019, 14,067 refugees and asylum seekers were registered with UNHCR in Indonesia. Amongst them are almost 4,000 children. Most of them are from Afghanistan, Somalia and Myanmar.

Since 2018, the Indonesian government has allowed all refugees to live in community shelters rather than languish in immigration detention centers.

Thanks to Australian funding, there are 8,400 refugees living in 81 community housing facilities in Indonesia. Australian cuts to the budget allocation mean that 5,000 refugees do not receive financial support.

But the Indonesian government continues not to allow all them to work and earn an income to sustain themselves, so even this refugee-friendly policy change is not meant to be a durable solution. There continues to be strong resistance of government and society more generally in Indonesia to integrate the refugees.

This raises the thorny question: If Australia refuses to resettle them, shouldn’t Indonesia take action to integrate them? This may not be a perfect solution, but it would put an end to the refugees’ never-ending “transit”, and it would be a great opportunity for the Indonesian government to take the moral high ground, especially now that it is currently a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Aside from the material and financial difficulties refugees suffer in Indonesia, the overall mental health situation is not looking good. Suicide attempts are reported more often than in the past. Due to the decrease of resettlement options, many refugees wait for up to 10 years in Indonesia, and during that time they are not allowed to work or contribute to the society that hosts them.

Indeed, the Indonesian government now allows refugees children to attend school, which is another very positive development, but more needs to be done to accommodate the other more complex needs of refugees.

This can really only be done if the Indonesian government allows refugees to enjoy all of their human rights, including giving them the right to work so they can at least sustain themselves while they wait.

Much to the Australian government’s pleasure, no asylum-seeker boats have attempted to reach Australia.

However, should Australia again turn back asylum-seeker boats to Indonesia without consulting the Indonesian government first, the bilateral relationship between Canberra and Jakarta will could again potentially become very tense.

Maintaining the resettlement intake at its current low level and the budgetary cuts to pay for the care of refugees in Indonesia do not bode well. In fact, it is the opposite of burden-sharing, and threatens to further destabilize the relationship.

In light of the growing numbers of forcibly displaced people in need of proper protection, including the Rohingya who continue flee by boat toward the Indo-Pacific region, Australia’s unneighborly asylum and border protection policies will not help bring a regional solution any closer.

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Antje Missbach is senior lecturer in anthropology/School of Social Sciences at Monash University, Australia. Wayne Palmer works at the department of international relations, Binus University, Jakarta and does research on migrant rights, labor migration and human trafficking in the Southeast Asian region.

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