Australia's consular conundrum

Andrew Farran writes:

A comment on the item Australia's Consular Conundrum in Dubai, in particular the concluding observation: 'There is no doubt that the Australian Government, and its diplomats, will do their best to assist Mr Joyce and his family. But there is a doubt that their efforts will be successful, and that is a message that must be made clear to Australian citizens overseas.'

It is by no means the case that representations, government to government, should be the end of the matter where there has been a flagrant abuse of process in the target state. Dubai, like Australia, is bound by international law, a rule-based system on which Australia, and presumably Dubai, relies for its security and wellbeing in many respects, more so now that Qantas is so closely tied up with Dubai in their airline operations.

While in general governments should defer to the legal processes of the country where a citizen is detained, this principle is not absolute, especially where there are indications of a failure of natural justice or other factors that would taint a legal process.

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Exceptions are well known and date back at least to early last century, and upheld by international courts and tribunals since, as stated in the 5th Edition of Oppenheim's International Law:

'It is a well established principle that a State cannot invoke its municipal legislation as a reason for avoiding its international obligations. For essentially the same reason a State, when charged with a breach of its international obligations with regard to the treatment of aliens, cannot validly plead that according to its Municipal Law and practice the act complained of does not involve discrimination against aliens as compared to nationals. This applies in particular to the question of the treatment of the person of aliens. It has been repeatedly laid down that there exists in this matter a minimum standard of civilisation, and that a State which fails to measure up to that standard incurs international liability.' 

As noted, international law in this respect has not retreated since that statement, though too commonly it is honoured more in the breach than in its observance. Given the increasing level of trade and investment between Australia and the UAE, most evidently recently in the field of aviation, it is vital that there be confidence in our respective legal processes.

We believe that the Australian community should be assured that its citizens, when faced with situations of this nature, will be assisted with the full diplomatic resources of their government, and if that fails the defaulting state should be made aware of its responsibilities and incur full international liability for its failures, a consequence that should have repercussions for its international standing more widely.

Nikola writes:

The current debate on a consular levy has seen some good points with both sides of the argument highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of introducing a consular levy. I will try to contribute to this debate by proposing a middle ground solution.

As pointed out by readers and contributors, it would not be fair to 'penalise' Australia's whole traveling population based on poor decision-making by a minority few, nor can the ever increasing strain on consular resources be ignored. While increasing the passport fee by let's say $25, as pointed out by Gar Pardy, may raise sufficient revenue to subsidise the rising cost of providing consular service, it would be an unpopular move for any government (with a growing travelling population) to make. In fact, any solution requiring introduction of a levy, increase in taxes, or introduction of fees targeting the mass or a specific demographic group is bound to be met with fierce opposition.

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Instead, there should be a middle ground where Australians who end up requiring consular assistance get charged a specific amount based on type of assistance obtained (eg. welfare cases tend to be more resource consuming than passport cases) or whether the case is self-inflicted vs bad luck (eg. those who are arrested for a specific or group of crimes could be charged a higher fee than those who are hospitalised due to events outside of their control).

Prior to receiving consular assistance, where possible and practicable, the client could sign an undertaking to repay the consular fee. In order to incite the traveler to repay the fee owned as soon as possible, a 'freeze' could be placed on the client's passport preventing further travel until the amount owed is repaid to the government. This type of policy is best reflected in the current policy governing the issue of Traveller's Emergency Loans (TELs) where recipients of TELs cannot receive a new passport until the loan is repaid to the government.

The above would ensure that those Australians who are responsible travelers are not penalised for the actions of few, it will make potential consular clients think twice before engage in risky behaviour, it will make consular clients think twice before approaching the government as first point of contact, and lastly it does not penalise those clients who require consular assistance due to events outside of their control.

At the end of the day, while the taxes collected from the taxpayer are sufficient to make consular assistance available to those who need it, they are not sufficient to cover the provision of such service to Australia’s rising traveling population...and this is where both sides of the debate agree.

Kien Choong responds to our Consular Conundrum thread, in particular Alex Oliver's proposal for a levy to pay for DFAT's consular services:

I don't think a levy in travel is an efficient way to finance consular assistance. A true user-pays levy would be to send the bill to the individuals receiving consular assistance. If the bill is not paid, get the Australian Tax Office to collect payment based on the individual's taxable income much like the loan for higher education.

Payment is only collected if the individual's taxable income exceeds say $40,000 per annum. DFAT's colleagues in Treasury should be able to design something suitable. The money collected should I think still go to general revenues. Consular assistance should still be funded from the general budget allocated to DFAT. Just a suggestion. Treasury should be able to come up with something better I am sure. But a levy won't be an optimal way of raising revenues I think.

Alex Oliver deserves congratulations for her continuing focus on the problems that confront DFAT, both as a result of the excessive demands made for consular assistance and the continuing reduction of its financing.

As she is very much aware, consular demands are a long-standing issue and I readily remember the Jehovah's Witness who roundly abused me in Phnom Penh over fifty years ago when, as a junior foreign service officer, I told him the Australian embassy could not intervene to prevent the Cambodian authorities expelling him for proselytising while in the country on a tourist visa.

More generally, and as raised by Hugh White in March, it is important to ask what it is we expect from DFAT. In relation to both Alex's and Hugh's contributions, I wonder if we are not dealing, at least in part, with a systemic problem of DFAT's place within the Australian Public Service. In making the following comments I recognise that my own public service experience, initially with DFAT and later with ONA, ended a long time ago.

At the risk of offending a great many people, I wonder if it is not in fact the case that DFAT is a relatively poor player in the Canberra milieu and regarded as such by the real movers and shakers within the public service — the heavyweight departments such as PM&C, Treasury, Defence and other assorted domestic departments. [fold]

To some extent DFAT brings this down upon itself, both avoidably and unavoidably: avoidably since it seems to me that too many of its ministers and secretaries have not wanted to engage in the infighting that other departments see as their meat and drink. Unavoidably since both DFAT's ministers and its personnel spend so much of their time abroad, which automatically sets them apart from their fellow ministers and from the rest of the public service. There are exceptions to this generalisation, but to start justifying my comments in detail would probably be actionable.

Too often ministers have either had no heart for pushing the Department's barrow or have become so consumed with particular projects that fighting the Department's corner was something they neglected to do. When I joined what was then External Affairs in the pre-Cambrian age (1958), RG Casey was the minister and there were so few of us trainees (five) that we all spent a week in the minister's office in the first year of our training. It was during my week that Casey said to me (and my memory is clear on this quote) after complaining about the budget that 'I'm not going to argue with (Treasurer) Fadden; the man's not a gentleman.'

Of course there have been exceptions, but there has always been a tendency on the part of DFAT officers to feel that they are different — as indeed they are, in many ways. But particularly at lower levels, this sometimes exacerbates dislike and disdain among other public servants.

Photo by Flickr user R/DV/RS.

Dr Daniel Woker is the former Swiss Ambassador to Australia and now a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Gallen.

Gar Pardy, formerly with the Canadian MFA, has just added Canadian solutions to the exchange of best national practices on the growing consular affairs problem. The Lowy Institute's Alex Oliver calls it the Consular Conundrum, an apt name for the tension between the declining funds available for consular help to get citizens abroad out of trouble and the rising number of citizens getting into such trouble.

Let me add a Swiss perspective. The Swiss public, in absolute numbers quite a bit fewer (8 million) than either Australians or Canadians, make up for it by being among the world champions of long distance travel per capita. Over the last couple of years a few quite incredible cases of traveling foolishness by Swiss citizens stand out:

• A couple visiting a Tuareg festival in northern Mali were kidnapped, with the lady released first and then raising hell back home to get her husband released. Cost to the taxpayer: an estimated SFR 5.5 million (about the same in A$).
• A pair of campers, on bicycles, pitched a tent overnight in a forest in central India. The girl was raped and the boyfriend beaten.
• A young couple, both members of the Zurich Police Force (!), set out in a camper bus for Afghanistan through the tribal areas of Pakistan, despite express warnings. They were kidnapped and held for ransom for eight months. As all concerned with such cases know, governments do not pay ransom, yet money does flow through third parties quite often.

The last of these cases finally prompted action from the Swiss parliament. The proposed new Consular Law aims to regulate the process of having victims of mishaps abroad pay at least part of the cost of their rescue. It also deals with the more frequent case of nationals applying to their embassy because they are destitute abroad and need to be repatriated. [fold]

The degree of participation by the victim in the reparation cost is determined by their responsibility for causing the mishap in the first place, though the Consular Law acknowledges that in almost all cases, the victims cannot reimburse the state for 100% of expenses because such cost is often impossible to compute exactly and is normally too high for most victims.

What does this mean in practice? Even though the new law is not on the books yet, the aforementioned case of the young Zurich Police Force couple was used as an application. The authorities first determined the level of financial compensation in this particular case, taking into account the degree of carelessness (high) and a realistic look at the actual and future financial situation of the couple (rather low). They were given the choice of either paying SFR 10,000 each or else doing voluntary work in the form of public seminars about avoiding unnecessary risks when traveling.

Many saw this as getting off very lightly. But in the words of a former colleague from the Swiss MFA who accompanied the couple in their swing through Swiss civic forums, it did force them to face their painful memories of falling prey to local hijackers and then being sold to a Taliban group which terrorised them repeatedly with mock executions during the complicated negotiations leading to their release.

Hopes by more affluent but reckless travelers that private insurance coverage will take care of whatever is imposed on them by the new law will be disappointed. The whole question of compensation only comes up in cases where victims carry an elevated degree of responsibility, meaning that insurers in all likelihood will refuse to pay in the first place.

Of course victims who get into their predicament abroad entirely without fault of their own will be rescued by the state without any recourse to them, just as the police doesn't charge victims of crime for any expense incurred.

Finally, the new law will also enshrine an electronic device which, similar to the Australian app Alex refers to in her paper, is already functioning. Any Swiss citizen traveling abroad can record their travel and personal data with Itineris, a hotline of the Swiss MFA.

In some cases (eg. the Japan tsunami) Itineris has already functioned, with results. However, Fukushima is an example of how desirable it is for a country to impose consular registration duties on its citizens when they depart for a longer period. Japan is normally not a high risk country for travelers, so there was relatively little data on Itineris. The large majority of potential Swiss victims of the tsunami were registered longer-term Japan residents, which helped with their tracking in the aftermath of the tsunami.

Yet there are no penalties meted out to those who don't register. In Australia, for example, the number of Swiss citizens registered is some 22,000, even though the real figure of longer term Swiss residents in Australia is probably well above 30,000.

Photo by Flickr user MJ&LM Ryan.

Gar Pardy was the Director General of the Consular Affairs Bureau in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs for more than a decade until he retired in 2003.

The Lowy Institute's Alex Oliver is one of only two or three researchers and commentators in the world of foreign policy who broadens foreign policy matters to include consular issues. 

For the most part, consular affairs is the ugly duckling of foreign policy matters and rarely receives the intellectual attention it deserves, except when citizens are in difficulty in a foreign country and there is national clamour for governments to mount up and ride to the rescue. The understanding of what is to be done or can be done is as scarce as water in the Sahara. And there are few signs that understanding is becoming deeper or that there is even an urge for greater depth.

Ms Oliver has followed the consular policy scene in Australia for some years and has done comparative research in other countries in the hope that there are examples, programs and policies that might be of value to those who make the decisions in Canberra. 

For eleven years I was head of consular services for the Canadian Government and since retirement I have continued to follow the matter in considerable detail. The problems highlighted by Ms Oliver in her latest paper, Consular Conundrum, are similar in Ottawa: more citizens traveling at both ends of the age spectrum; a government reluctant to provide additional resources and a blind adherence to the idea that more can be done with less; citizens and politicians who believe that mere waving of the national wand will produce miracles in a foreign land.

As part of the solution to these challenges, Ms Oliver recommends large, widespread publicity efforts to condition travelers to prepare for the problems they may encounter in foreign countries. I have serious reservations on the value of such efforts, as they are rarely successful, extremely expensive and seldom sustained to the point that they influence behaviour. Canadian consular history is littered with a variety of such efforts and it is not unfair to say that they have bordered on the useless except that it gives ministers the illusion that they are doing something. One exception is the very targeted campaigns aimed at a select audience in a narrow time frame.

Another of Ms Oliver's recommendations is a consular fee or levy. [fold]

In 1996 Canada instituted the $25 Consular Service Fee that is collected at the time a passport is sold. Over the intervening years this has generated over C$1 billion in revenue and in recent years, with close to five million passports being sold annually, annual revenue of close to C$125 million. The Consular Service Fee is paid by those likely to need consular services and is cast at a level sufficient to meet the costs. Interestingly, there was very little adverse public comment when the fee was implemented and even today it is non-controversial.

Ms Oliver mentions technological innovation in her paper but there is a much bigger story here. Australia probably trails most countries in its efforts to use technology to lessen the costs and burdens of providing consular services. Canada was the first to deploy the Consular Services Case Management System (COSMOS) to manage consular services, a system I designed and implemented. It has allowed a range of services to be more effectively delivered and managed and at the same time, provided management with information on which services could be improved and costed. 

Early on, I thought other countries could benefit from such software, and it has since been purchased by New Zealand, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK, with several other countries poised to purchase. Australia, since the late 1990s, has looked at the system but has preferred to try and develop its own system, with little success. In the process it has spent many millions and today it is about to try again. It is a common failure in the IT world for those in the back room to believe they can do better even when 'off-the-shelf' technology is available. They rarely do.

Finally, the international consular policy environment is sadly deficient and has not had coherent attention since the signing of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in 1963. It is fifty years old this year and even at the time of its negotiation it was such a compromised document that it offered little (except Article 36) by way of governmental commitments to assist those in consular difficulty. It was the sad result of lowest common denominator treaty-making based largely on historical norms that a diplomat at the Congress of Vienna would recognise.

I have suggested for a number of years that it is time for the UN to establish a review conference for the Convention to see if additional supporting mechanism and principles can be included. The argument against doing so is the danger that we could lose what little protection there is in the existing document; I would argue that little would be lost in trying to do better.

Great attention is given today to the globalisation of most areas of human activity. Last year 1 billion people traveled to a foreign country. There is hope that the movement of peoples to the far corners of the world for education, tourism, business and family connections will bring about a long lasting desire for peace, tranquility, fraternity and economic progress.

The signs are there, but happenstance is a poor guarantee that the casualties along the way are not only minimised but helped. Of course, national governments retain responsibility for this, but there must be an acknowledgment that all governments need to work together. As we wander into the heart of the 21st century, no better monument can be created than a concerted effort by all governments to take the 1963 treaty and give it the norms that are necessary in today's world.

Photo by Flickr user US Army Africa.

Stephen Bartos is Executive Director of ACIL Tasman and a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Finance.

Alex Oliver's Policy Brief on the Consular Conundrum points to the problem of rising expectations: 'successive Australian governments have progressively "bid up" the servicing of consular cases over the last two decades'.

Loss of self-reliance is not confined to Australians traveling abroad. Laura Tingle paints a picture in her Quarterly Essay Great Expectations of an Australia with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. We not only want our governments to do more, we then hate them no matter what they do. She says 'as a nation, a polity, we have not sat down and worked out what exactly we expect "the government"...to be and to do'.

The mob is all too ready to vent anger against whoever is in government whenever a radio announcer turns an Australian in trouble abroad into a cause celebre. Consular officials face a real problem. Tempting as it is to say they should be more hands-off, the political reality is that they have to intervene when called on. The question thus becomes how to pay for it.

Alex Oliver proposes a charge on all travelers, via a levy on either tickets or passports. While the motivation is commendable, I worry about the risks.

Others in the debate have said that they like the proposal because it offers the prospect of a revenue boost for DFAT. Maybe it's pessimism, but I think it equally likely that DFAT could have its budget reduced by the estimated revenue. That would introduce greater volatility, with the foreign affairs budget rising and falling with international travel volumes. [fold]

It could also have the unintended consequence that others have already noted: that a hypothecated charge will lead to an increase in the number of Australians demanding consular help. Travelers may well say to consular staff: 'give me the assistance that I have paid for', no matter how trivial the request. 

A further problem is that such a charge is likely to be classified as a tax. That will be a difficult sell in an election year where neither major party wants to be seen to be raising taxes. It is a tax, not a user charge, because it would apply to everyone taking out a passport or buying an airline ticket (the two options for where a charge could be levied). The IMF says a levy is classed as a tax 'where government is not providing a specific service in return for the levy'. 

A user charge, on the other hand (that is, asking those who use consular services to pay for the costs incurred by government) would have several benefits:

• It would not increase taxes, an attraction for government.
• It would not penalise travelers who take sensible precautions when overseas or who insure.
• It would discourage frivolous requests for assistance.
• Most importantly, the knowledge that they might have to pay for assistance would be a disincentive for Australian travelers to engage in stupid or illegal behaviour. At present, the safety net of consular assistance is more likely than not inclining Australian travelers to take more risks than they should (what is known in insurance as the 'moral hazard' problem). 

There could still be room in such an arrangement for charges to be waived where a circumstance was genuinely unforeseeable and the person involved could do nothing to reduce the risk. For those who could not afford such a charge, there is a good policy solution. They could be issued with an income contingent debt (rather like a HECS debt), repayable only once they could afford it. 

There would also be a strong case, as with any such policy change, for government to put some funds into a publicity campaign and into encouraging the insurance industry to respond. 

An arrangement like this might in time produce a spinoff benefit: revision of what is currently a very, very cautious smartraveller site. Many relatively quiet countries where dangers to any sensible traveler are low are rated with 'exercise a high degree of caution'. Some others where there are risks that sensible travelers can and do manage are rated 'reconsider your need to travel' (although there are others such as North Korea where the rating seems well justified by current events). 

The reason for the caution is apparent from Alex's report. It can no longer be assumed that Australians traveling abroad will read about a country before visiting and avoid conflict zones, street demonstrations or other dangers. The concept of sensible preparation has gone out the door. 

DFAT has to assume the worst because often that is what happens. A user charge on those who find themselves in trouble through their own stupidity would help change those incentives.

Photo by Flickr user iwona_kellie.

Katherine Ellena is a Research Associate with the US Naval Postgraduate School and a former New Zealand diplomat. The views expressed here are hers alone.

One of the key (but less remarked-upon) recommendations in Alex Oliver's policy brief The Consular Conundrum  relates to the managing of public expectations for consular services, something New Zealand's MFAT – like DFAT and its political masters – has struggled to do.

The establishment of government programs such as www.smartraveller.gov.au and www.safetravel.govt.nz have been useful in publicising travel advisories, providing information on consular assistance and encouraging traveler registration so that governments may track citizens in an emergency. There is a sense, however, that these services also raise expectations.

As a 20-year old first-time solo traveler to Thailand I had the vague feeling that by registering my travel, a government official would be tracking my every move in the event that I needed any assistance along the way. Ten years later as a diplomat responding to a terrorist attack in Jakarta, the list of registered travelers was invaluable — but it was the first time I had accessed it. [fold]

Foreign services are bad at both highlighting their successes (such as responding to natural disasters) and publicising the limits of their assistance (no get-out-of-jail-free cards). This of course all sits within the wider issue of branding, at which DFAT and MFAT are notoriously weak.

Part of the general public's expectations of consular service stem from a lack of knowledge about what else the foreign service actually does. If my embassy doesn't provide the kind of consular assistance I was expecting, what exactly does it do to justify my tax payments?

This might seem obvious to the professional traveling public, but without access to hard figures I would hazard a guess that the average business traveler is not the largest consumer of consular services. As Oliver notes, it is the under-25 and over-55 traveling crowd that is burgeoning, and for these audiences a little creative public education might go a long way.

If that sounds patronising, it probably is. It's easy to list tales of what seem like outrageous consular requests, but until we get better at telling our own story — and sticking to our proscribed consular limits — then DFAT and MFAT are part of the problem. Consular assistance is the storefront of diplomacy, and while the customer may not always be right, it is a good idea to avoid false advertising — or, even worse, no advertising at all.

Roslyn Wells is a Sydney-based public affairs and international relations professional. She was formerly Director of Public Affairs at the Australian Consulate General, Hong Kong.

As Alex Oliver shows in her thought-provoking new Policy Brief, Consular Conundrum, the public pressure on DFAT and the Foreign Minister to act in high profile consular cases can be intense, propelling them up the priority list ahead of other more important work.

Some consular cases clearly do warrant intervention by DFAT and the Minister, as was the case with Australian ICC lawyer Melinda Taylor, who was detained in Libya. During my time as Director of Public Affairs at the Australian Consulate General in Hong Kong, the major consular case was the kidnapping of Australian-Chinese businessman James Peng, who was seized in Macau and imprisoned in China after falling out with a business associate who was also, saliently, the niece of Deng Xiaoping.

This was a long-running case, closely followed by the contingent of Australian correspondents in and around Hong Kong. It was also politically sensitive and complex, involving multiple jurisdictions and governments in Macau (then a Portuguese colony), Hong Kong, China and Australia. James Peng was released six years later after continuous efforts by DFAT. In retrospect, the James Peng case was a forerunner to that of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu, currently imprisoned in China.

In his recent Interpreter post, Professor Hugh White asks: What do we want from DFAT? It's an important question, because at current funding and personnel levels DFAT must make some hard decisions about where to direct its efforts. Throw in the wild card of needing to respond to large-scale unforeseen events and situations, and the strain this puts on people and budgets is obvious. [fold]

Our overseas missions are already operating on tight budgets and have to be resourceful across the board, including in their public diplomacy programs. I know this from personal experience, having started my job in Hong Kong just as the One Nation controversy exploded, with damaging fallout to perceptions of Australia across Asia, daily negative media coverage and a real threat to our economic interests in the region, particularly the education and tourism sectors. It felt like being downwind of a nuclear reactor accident, dealing with the toxic fallout but being unable to stem the flow at its source.

In response Consul General Geoff Walsh, my team and I devised and mounted an ambitious public diplomacy campaign called The Many Faces of Australia to communicate the diversity of modern Australia to key audiences in the Hong Kong community. The campaign included commissioning Australian photojournalist Lorrie Graham to photograph the 'many faces' of Australians, which were then exhibited in Hong Kong and later toured southern China, with a reciprocal exhibition by a Hong Kong photographer.

We also produced books of the Many Faces exhibitions and they became effective tools in disseminating the diversity message more widely. A two-week visit to Australia taking leading Hong Kong journalists to meet politicians and officials and see the reality for themselves was also helpful.

Of course, none of this can be done without adequate funding. To carry out the Many Faces of Australia campaign, which ran for two years, we needed to augment our modest public affairs budget, so we secured corporate sponsorship and set up a cultural exchange collaboration with the Hong Kong Government. Then-Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer was supportive and came to Hong Kong to launch the exhibition.

The work DFAT does is real and important, and it's crucial to adequately fund our diplomatic missions so they can respond to issues and events properly, and promote Australia's interests effectively. With more Australians traveling and living overseas than ever before, the pressure on DFAT's consular officers to help Australians who find themselves in predicaments (whether of their own making or through being caught up in natural disasters, uprisings or other political events) has escalated. Yet DFAT's budgets and resources have diminished.

To help address this shortfall, Alex Oliver proposes a $5 consular levy on overseas airfares. According to her research, Australians take 8 million overseas trips a year, so that would mean a cool $40 million that could be directed towards consular assistance. That's a simple, fair way of helping to resolve DFAT's consular conundrum and diplomatic dilemma.

Photo by Flickr user johnmcga.

Ann Harrap worked for DFAT for 20 years and was most recently Australia's High Commissioner to South Africa. She is now an independent consultant.

I couldn't agree more with Alex Oliver's policy brief on the consular conundrum facing DFAT, in particular her comments about rising media, ministerial and public expectations. For years, there was a joke around Canberra that DFAT was really the Department For Australians Travelling, an acknowledgment of the sometimes skewed emphasis of the Department on service rather than policy delivery.

As High Commissioner to South Africa I was well aware of the expectation that I should become personally involved in consular cases, especially if an incident hit the media. 

In some circumstances that is entirely appropriate, and the role of the Head of Mission in contingency planning and preparedness is vital. I spent weeks working with mission and Canberra staff on plans to prepare the more than 10,000 Australians who traveled to South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup for the potential security and health risks. 

We contacted fan group organisers, provided briefings for large touring groups, used Twitter and Facebook to distribute consular messages and hired mobile homes to serve as 'moveable consular offices'. In the end, the number of consular incidents was very low and the awareness and prevention strategies clearly helped in that. But the staff time and effort was obviously at the expense of other foreign and trade policy priorities. [fold]

I like the idea of some sort of fee for consular service but see some problems with an across-the-board levy on passports or airline tickets, the main one being that it simply serves to perpetuate the high expectations of the traveling public. DFAT staff are already told by consular clients that they pay their taxes so 'deserve' assistance. Such a cry would become even louder if Australians effectively 'pay in advance' for the consular service. 

I also wonder about penalising the vast majority of Australians who take sensible precautions to avoid getting into difficulty in the first place and who do not see the government as the first point of call if they do. After all, according to the figures in Alex Oliver's paper, there were 20,000 consular cases out of 8 million trips taken per year – that is only 0.04% of travelers requiring some form of assistance.

An alternative would be a fixed, compulsory, 'after-the-event' payment from those who use consular services, graded according to the scale of service provided. After the Lebanon evacuation, it was suggested that those who had made use of consular services make a voluntary contribution to help offset the very high evacuation costs. Only a small percentage ever did. An arrangement could be made with the tax office to deduct the funds from consular service recipients or at a minimum the Department could make the future issuing of a passport conditional on the payment of the consular contribution (as is currently the case with repayment of consular loans).

Personally, I would like to see Australians complete a 'fit for travel' test or checklist before they receive a passport – a bit like the citizenship test for new arrivals. At the very least it would be an opportunity to put the key consular messages front of mind and remind travelers that with the privilege of a passport comes the responsibility to ensure their own safety and welfare in the first instance, including through actions such as taking out insurance.

Photo by Flickr user Codilicious.