The real medal winners would be USA, Canada, Scandinavia, with Brazil sneaking into fourth place. Australia at best a top eight finish, punching above its weight once again.

But those little boats just can’t get any further than Oz, so the poor refugees from nearby have to settle for a minor place.

No, those places are not just “not very nice places to live”. It’s due to us, that they’ve been so much worse since 2001 and 2003(Afghanistan & Iraq). We help create the horrors that these people have and still are being forced to live. Your glib comments are an insult to the degree of suffering we have helped inflict on these people. The numbers who make it here are only an extremely small sample of the tortured and psychologically traumatized people. We helped create this ‘mess’! Those who make it here by boat are not wealthy; they’re the result of extended family members pooling their money - sometimes it means, that they sell their farms etc and then end up as refugees - homeless in their own land, but they want a younger person, usually a male(he’s under more threat, and he’s probably unmarried and strong enough to cope with the hardships along the way?)

The so-called people smugglers (heroes who saved the lives of many Jews in another life) may be tuned in to Australian politics, but those from war torn countries don’t even have electricity every day or perhaps not at all - to suggest that they sit back in the evening watching their plasma or LCD TV watching channel 9 or ?? only shows your ignorance. Too many have been murdered in their beds - that’s if they’re lucky enough to have one. Many in Afghanistan are miles away from civilization, let alone a TV or newspapers? How do you think people live in a war torn country? Like or similar to you? Go and do some more reading, for god’s sake! You make yourself look like a fool! Further more, I’d hate to have to rely on Indonesia’s version of ‘protecting my human rights’ thank you very much. Just have a chat with people from East Timor. Sadly, you can’t ask the 180,000 dead people from East Timor who were savagely murdered by those wonderful upholders of human rights - Indonesian military, militia and police!

NEW CASSANDRA - (Edit)

Keep up the good work - you and your idiot buddies will shorten this Labor government significantly.

PS: The people smugglers say thanks too.

sincerely,

Sheila N

Enough. We have to forge ahead with a free media and start managing our democracy for ourselves.

Or slavery itself will soon be the okay thing.

The Howard Government and the Rudd Government used that symbol as a weapon in wedge politics and a decoy to the public attention, whilst they consecutively exploded the numbers of legal immigrants (as opposed to ‘asylum seekers’) beyond democratic and almost beyond demographic control.

The beneficiaries were the industry sectors that had demanded population growth - insatiable “Growth Lobby” consisting of the upstream and downstream beneficiaries of property development & finance, which had been opened to the world via the internet, with the cooperation of state parliaments and the NFIRB in watering down laws to protect citizens’ property rights and national equity.

The mainstream media - which has corporate investment in international property dot coms marketing Australian real-estate to the world - assisted, promoted and piloted this new-colonisation of Australia by repetitively normalising high immigration as unavoidable, irresistible and necessary for the Economy in a continuing series of propaganda pieces almost entirely composed of lies by pseudo-authorities.

State and Federal ‘leaders’ were also oft-quoted making misleading statements about how deaths outnumbered births in Australia (Steve Bracks) and how our ‘population was only increasing due to immigration’ (Peter Costello) in a media which refused to correct those statements despite complaints (including the ABC.)

ALP State governments, with their hugely remunerative party investment companies in finance and property development (Labor Holdings Propriety Limited or Labor Resources Propriety Limited) [Thank you Steve Mayne!] are arguably and alarmingly little different from commercial property development companies and have a similar vested interest in forcing high legal immigration on the Australian polity, in tandem with ever-increasing prices for vital resources, with no real safety margin.

In line with their interests, the various state ALP governments have made bad laws to suppress community resistance to costly new technologies, new roads and massive infilling demanded by public-private commercial interests in urbanisation and to support this unwanted and democratically unconsulted population growth. The collapsing of local government into state instruments has been a part of the structural assault on democracy to eliminate citizens’ power in their self-government. Meanwhile, the ideals of international human rights have not received effective new structures to compensate the loss of self-government to local and national populations.

The media production of government has left the public with almost no choice in the kind of people whose candidature receives publicity in elections. So we really seem to be stuck with the governments that Murdoch and the Fairfax board want.

As someone whose sociological research into these changes from the late 1990s caused her to attend Ruddock’s immigration consultation circus, I have observed the rise and fall of Ruddock as an immigration minister and I must admit that I cannot actually fathom where the man and the myth begin and end. That is a common problem in the study of politicians. Ruddock was an accomplished showman who appeared to prioritise public consultation until his government decided to massively ramp up the immigration numbers. After that we heard little.

What I would observe though is that Ruddock seems to have made one enormously positive contribution to Australian law, for which I am extremely grateful and which should redeem his memory. He forced massive positive changes to Australian defamation law. Because of these changes we now have something approaching free speech in this country. Before those changes political comment was severely crippled and it was almost impossible to publish anything really informative about anything.

Asylum seekers and refugees should be clearly delineated from the huge stream of legal immigration which has almost nothing to do with promoting the rights of the poor and oppressed. Commercial Immigration policy should not be allowed to hide under the cloak of humanitarian gestures and Asylum seekers should not take the blame for commercial immigration. Accurate information for the public on numbers is crucial because we are running out of water, power and land-development for housing is eroding our natural environment and local freedom.

I would be very interested to read what Ruddock might have to say about how things turned out. Has anyone asked him?

Hopefully the Australian Government can assist and work in cooperation with countries like Indonesia and Malaysia to stem the flow and get the message out that handing out money to people smugglers does not guarantee a one way ticket to Australia.

People smuggling *is* a scourge. What we need to do is look at what the current government does to the victims of people smuggling compared to previous governments.