Tx Karnal,
from 2002 onwards we had about 4 boats per year.
A highly successful policy. Imagine ALL the illegals who were NOT drowned.

rudd comes in, 23 boats in first year and an asterix for the drowned ones.

Sprintcyclist wrote on Nov 12^th, 2009 at 1:29pm:


Thats a very simplistic way to look at it sprint. What you really need to look at is -
1-The later years of the Howard gov saw ALL countries have a reduced amount of boats to their shores, and those other countries never came up with sneaky ways to fudge the figures like the rodent did.
2- This last year MOST western if not all western countries have had a large increase in boats arrivals, in fact Australia is way down the list on both arrivals AND those even wanting to come here. Most people from third world countries have got the message Australians are racist and most boat people would prefer Canada as their prefered choice.

karnel - good posting tx.
the intent of not letting illegal boat people into aussie was 'cause we did not want them here.
A side benefit was less of them came and less drowned at sea.

so under plan skippy, the whole world can come here?
I can see why you are not PM.


Quote:


http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/uk-needs-a-christmas-island-exm...

Soren wrote on Nov 12^th, 2009 at 7:31pm:


Sounds simple, doesn't it? It's what most western countries with shared borders do. It's what America does with its refugees (and they get a ton).

But there's the issue of the "queue". It isn't that the government doesn't want refugees (they are signatories to the UN treaty, after all). It's that they only want appropriately "processed" refugees from UN refugee camps: the queue.

The refugees who arrived on boats during the Howard years were labelled "queue jumpers" and put in detention. So it's not that they have the right to come here and we have the right to reject them: they come here and, if they claim asylum, we put them in jail.

And once we let them go, DIMIA gave them a bill for a few hundred thousand. A nice goodbye. I don't know if anyone actually paid this off - that wasn't the point.

The point was to subjugate and humiliate asylum seekers to deter future arrivals. The "tough" part of the policy that, thankfully, Labor did away with (but that the Libs voted to keep).

The REAL illegal immigrants are the people who overstay their visas. These figures are quite easy to work out, but I've never seen them published. Why? Because it makes a mockery of the whole debate. There must be ten to twenty times the number of real "illegals" that came in on planes to people who come in on boats.

I remember when the Hawke Government gave an amnesty to Chinese students, many living on expired visas in Australia at the time of Tienanmien Square. Tens, if not, hundreds of thousands of people were given asylum overnight. This could never happen today - it was tough back then, too. Hawke almost backflipped, but he rode out the flack.

What seems to be true from reading the above posts is that Australians deeply fear being swamped by boat people - Asian and middle eastern boat people. But if you look at the actual figures (and yes, I know they're prone to manipulation) you'll see that the number is miniscule.

There is really nothing to worry about.

Every new boat that the media find out about gets reported as if it's a major national crisis, but it's just a few desperate families on a leaky boat - why not just assess them on the mainland and accept them into our refugee intake?

This, of course, was the solution the Rudd government came up with in pulling back the whole "Pacific solution". Now look what's happened. The one thing the Labor government didn't count on, I'm guessing, was the reaction of the media and the irrational fear of the Australian people - many of whom, like my father, were boat people themselves.

The politics of Howard, Ruddock, Reith, and the top-down lies of refugee parents throwing their children into the sea are now history. But the nerve they tapped is still - clearly - a part of our political culture.

Therefore, the point isn't about drawing a line - we already have one of these. It's about managing the politics of the debate. So I'll throw the question to you: how do you do this?

Quote:


Yes, Skippy, it changes the debate somewhat. Boat people claim asylum as refugees - legally. Visa overstayers live and work illegally - and they must stay underground to go undetected.

The anti-boat people argument (and the whole aparatus of territorial excisions and detention centres) is an anti-refugee argument. My guess is its racially motivated because many of the visa overstayers are Europeans.

The whole "we decide who comes to our country" argument is misguided. We might decide who we give visas to, but we have no say over who will illegally stay.

With asylum seekers, you know.

Tell me sprint, you seem to think Howard "had it all under control" so why did the Howard gov build an 800 bed detention centre on xmas island?