Donald Trumps Australia
By WALEED ALYFEB. 21, 2017
Benham Satah, who fled persecution in Iran, has been detained on Australia’s Manus Island since 2013. His shirt bears the name of a fellow detainee who was killed in 2014. Credit Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
MELBOURNE, Australia — In the days after President Trump’s ban on immigrants from several Muslim countries, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia spent a lot of time saying nothing. He said nothing about the ban itself, enduring days of headlines about his failure to express even the mildest disagreement with the policy.
“It is not my job,” he said, “to run a commentary on the domestic policies of other countries.” That’s about as adventurous as he got.
He then said as little as possible about his now infamous phone call with Mr. Trump, volunteering only that the president had agreed to honor the refugee deal Mr. Turnbull had struck with the Obama administration. As more details of the call emerged — and as the status of the refugee deal fluctuated seemingly by the hour (or at least by the tweet) — Mr. Turnbull would state only the barest of facts: The deal was still on, and “the call ended courteously.”
This was a studied silence. It is almost impossible to overstate the political importance of the refugee deal to the Turnbull government. Its detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru is a festering sore. Australia refuses to allow them on Australian soil out of a belief that doing so would restart a flood of boats toward our shores, and rejected the offer of New Zealand, which has open borders with Australia, to resettle them for the same reason. The government has tried paying other nations, like Cambodia, to take the refugees, but those attempts have failed. By promising to take some refugees, President Barack Obama came to the rescue. America is Australia’s Plan A. There is no Plan B.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/donald-trumps-australia.html?_r=0