He looked like a child to me. Brendan O’Connor is still spinning the yarn that IOM are legit, they are a pack of mercenaries who take money from fools like Australia so we can break our own law and pretend that we aren’t.

James, we give Afghans a choice in our cowardice. Stay and be killed, persecuted or tortured. Stay in Pakistan or Iran where you get the same treatment or deportation back to Afghanistan to be killed, tortured or persecuted.

A maximum security prison in Indonesia because of our “regional co-operation” which really means an abdication of obligations to a nation that we know well doesn’t protect refugees. We are currently importing 88 who have been there pre-2003. In other words the last of the people we pushed back in Relex days.

Now we have this absurd lunacy of a war ship taking one asylum seekers 3600 km across the oceans from the Timor Sea to Christmas Island.

Anyone want to have a guess at the cost of that exercise?

Everything about our policy is illegal, we break the law with impunity, DIC’s officers still tell bare faced lies in estimates, something Andrew knows very well indeed, and no-one is sacked for it.

And Jack, all my family came across the sea in silly boats with the stars as navigation aids, little food, dangers of sinking and so on. And that was in 1844, 1880 and 1920.

They were welcomed with open arms to white up the joint.

Get a grip, I say to all those Australians who vilify boat arrivals for want of knowledge about all the UN documents and conventions Australia has endorsed, ratified and codified in our laws.

If we form a policy response based on the hazard of getting on one of those boats, we would have to weigh that hazard against the hazard of NOT getting on one of those boats. We can’t really prejudge either from this distance.

However the high approval rate of asylum applications for those who DO get on one of those boats — approval which is based on an assessment of the hazard of sending the applicant back home — tends to indicate that NOT taking steps to get out, such as getting on one of those boats, is very hazardous.

They are the same boats the fishermen use for years on end so why the hell is the boat trip all that dangerous?

Especially as we traffic them 1750 km across the ocean if they get to Ashmore Reef.

Never mind the bloody wars people are escaping from, like the two we started.

Why do we bother.

Let’s be the first country in history to pull out of the refugee convention and prove once and for all that we are racist, cheap and pathetic cowards.

Last year our magnificent program “took” 1185 Afghans out of the 4 million refugees, 1.94 million of them are in Pakistan, 980,000 in Iran and the rest scattered to the winds but we then complain if another 700 or so Hazara come here for protection. Our “aid” to UNHCR in those countries amounts to 40 cents per annum per person in Afghanistan, 51 cents per person in Pakistan and $1 per person in Iran.

WE “took” 2200 of the Iraqis who fled the war we started for no reason, and that included 540 who worked for Australia over time - there are 5 million Iraqis as refugees. There are 1.47 million in Syria, nearly 1 million Jordan and our aid consisted of $1 per person per annum in Syria and $5 per annum per person in Jordan.

Thailand has 3.65 million mostly Burmese refugees, we managed to accept 3300 and our aid was 13 cents per annum per person.

It takes extraordinary manouvering to decide that so few of so many are worthy.

Suppose you rang up the immigration department and asked them: It is a crime or isn’t it, to show up in Australia without a visa, and apply for Refugee Asylum?
And suppose the Department told you, no it isn’t a crime?
… what would you say then?

The general information number for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship is 131 881. Go ahead, if you ring them up they will tell you the truth.

Just a small matter of funding. Let’s see, the cost of the Indonesia Solution was estimated at about $50 million in yesterday’s papers, a significant saving on previous incarceration programs which reached heights normally reserved for serious infrastructure projects, but not exactly chump change either. Suppose we cancel that operation and divert the money to aid and resettlement projects in the Sri Lankan and other refugee camps instead. A few other countries join in and, hey! some of those people might not need to make a run for it any more.

What to do with the boat people no longer being incarcerated? Well we could always just take the el cheapo option, assess them for asylum claims as quickly as possible, send the dodgy ones home and let the fair dinkum ones with grounds to fear for their lives to try their luck at jobs from medicine to teaching to spin-bowling to fruit picking, while we conserve money for helping people where it counts.

But where would be the fun in that? We wouldn’t look so tough saying, “We will determine who comes into this country and the manner in which they come,” any more now would we. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Somalia has oil, and lots of it! The reason Indonesia wouldn’t allow East Timor to gain independence was the huge reserves of oil and gas - we robbed them(via Downer) instead? Why did the US help organise the coup in Venezuela in 2002? But they overplayed it, the people woke up to what was happening, and took to the streets - they won, and Hugo Chavez who’d been overwhelmingly elected by the people was restored to the Presidency. Huge reserves of oil. It’s been acknowledged, that Iraq could have reserves that haven’t been explored yet, and that’s why they’re(Coalition of the Killing) pushing to privatise the oil industry - this will make it different to any middle eastern country re their oil - they’re nationalised as Saddam did in Iraq?Paul Bremmer rewrote their ‘constitution’ before he left!

A good article is ‘From Afghanistan to Iraq - Connecting the dots with oil’? It ties in Karzai and many others in the Bush Administration, Pentagon etc - all with interests in oil over many years? Very interesting article! Most revealing!

With all the nonsense talk of the last few weeks, no journalist has suggested, that perhaps there’s more chance of would-be ‘terrorists’ arriving by plane, and yet the security is probably still pretty slack. What about the ports?

Just like how they don’t care about the REAL refugee’s sitting in famine and disease stricken camps in some god forsaken place having their positions stolen by safe cashed-up economic migrants from Indonesia, they don’t care about boatpeople unless they are in an Australian holiday camp with airconditioning, 3 chef prepared meals a day and pay TV.

Send em to a Indonesian detention camp where they get beat up by the guards though? No worries!

If I could wish for one thing for Christmas this year it would be for some of the left to start listening to their brains and start using logic, rather than constantly entering into a state of complete denial and make believe.

For a few thousand boat people, it’s much easier than we’ve been led to believe. All we have to do is draw a line for ourselves between what is morally acceptable conduct and what isn’t. And to make sure that in our eagerness to create a deterrent for people considering “queue jumpers”, by rough treatment of the “queue jumpers” already here, that we don’t cross that line. If we can do that, the rest will be far easier than it looks from the volume of media hysteria about it.

Bloody little thanks do they get for it as well.

Instead everyone bleats about how the UN is the only body that can legitimately intervene, and we can see how well that has worked, in the Sudan, where ethnic cleansing goes on while the UN dithers.

The West in general, and the US in particular, can’t win, damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Well, you see, the English colonisers of Australia were white…whereas the native inhabitants of Australia are black so I think you can see where I’m going with this…

Yes, I know the whole oil arguement is a big generalisation, but it is true that wealthy nations are very selective about which struggling countries they ‘help’ or ‘intervene’ in and which ones they do not. The welfare of our fellow human beings seems to be the lowest of priorities when making such decisions.

Comparing the conditions in detention/accommodation in Nauru and Indonesia is pointless, not least because both places have major variances depending on time or place.

The same approach of “you’ll never be accepted so we’ll help you go home” was tried on Nauru and it worked with a few hundred who agreed to go back to Afghanistan, some of who were later killed. The main difference then was it was Australian government officials who were repeatedly doing the urging and paying the resettlement costs and ‘bonus’.

The conditions on Nauru improved over time and I hope/expect they will improve on Indonesia over time as well. These places has been there for years and Australia has been funding them (at lower levels) for years. What is most problematic is that there has been little attention paid to what the conditions for asylum seekers and recognised refugees are like, as well as to how many of them they have a realistic chance for secure resettlement in the foreseeable future.

Congratulations to both Jessie Taylor and Kaye Bernard for making the effort (and wearing the expense) of shining more of a light on this. If there is one positive to come of the latest overblown frenzy about small numbers of people arriving in boats, it is that it should lead to much more attention and resources being paid to how these people are treated in (and by) Indonesia. It might even have the benefit of lifting overall standards and practices in Indonesia.

The treatment of people in Malaysia is a far bigger problem, and much more attention needs to be directed there as well.

The logistics, the legality, the criteria for admission (apart from some refinements such as Jack Smit mentioned above), the resources, the security requirements, the ethicality, the means of deporting unsuccessful applicants, and the labour market utility … of processing refugee applicants including boat people, are not difficulties for government and are not being debated in parliament.

The only aspect that has vexed the government is how best to deter more boat people from coming, by making life tough for those who have already come. That’s all. Anyone objecting to boat-people policies other than deterrence measures is weighing in to a debade that does not exist.

This process has been in place for years and no one is seriously suggesting that it be changed in principle. The issues in dispute are where the asylum seekers are held while their claims are processed ie off-shore, eg Christmas Is or Nauru or now Indonesia, or on the mainland, and if on the mainland, in detention centres or community facilities, and the length of time held in detention for processing to occur.

Of course there is the issue of Temporary Protection Visas where claimants had to reprove their claims every few years. Apart from a few extremists on the right no one wants to see TPVs again.

If the refugees are processed in Indonesia, humanely and quickly, we can save lives lost on the perilous boat trip.

All of the problems in the article could probably be fixed for a fraction of the cost of the Pacific solution, or even Christmas Island.

In Australia the Immigration Minister Chris Evans recently introduced a model of “complementary protection” to cover those asylum seekers who otherwise would fall between the cracks under the Refugee Convention’s rather narrow definition of who’s a refugee.

See for example this: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/435e198d4.pdf

Will UNHCR be able provide a guarantee of complementary protection to those who do not get protection under their assessment in Jakarta? Would in those cases UNHCR itself not become the organisation that, given they didn’t make the cut on the protection criteria, and then get sent back “into the arms of IOM” sends unsuccessful asylum applicants back to places of danger?