Comments on: Australia takes its pick of the refugee litter

By: james mcdonald

james mcdonald — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:13:48 +0000

Hi Bernard. It’s a very interesting an important thesis if Australia is cherry-picking its refugees for labour-force advantage. As I’ve said in comments elsewhere, it costs a lot of money to grow and educate a worker from the cradle, our education and skills system is experiencing problems, and when we import workers from other countries (especially poor countries) we are indeed skimming off an economic asset from those countries without paying for it.

The story got caught up in the question of India’s refugee intake, even though that’s not crucial to your argument.

We’ve heard often about the “brain drain” of highly productive Australians going to America or elsewhere for lack of enterprise here. Immigration is a “brain drain” in the other direction, with Australia the beneficiary.

Could you give us another story on this thesis. If Australia is indeed cherry-picking refugees for reasons other than their need for safety, that goes against the spirit of the Convention.

It would also be interesting to have an estimated dollar value on the average immigrant (refugee or otherwise) based on money the taxpayer saves on child raising and education.

By: shepherdmarilyn

shepherdmarilyn — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:10:40 +0000

And, Indonesia does not have a search and rescue zone and they do not have any capability of rescuing anyone so that is a big furphy and Smith knows it.

He also knows that under the rules after the TAMPA the master of the ship gets to decide the safest port, not the government.

In this case it is ridiculous to suggest that the refugees should be sent to a jail we built in breach of the rules of the refugees convention and the rules of refoulement when we have just seen the brutal treatment dished out to the Afghans illegally jailed at our expense.

What are we, brainless savages?

And the refugees do have rights. They have the right not to be traded like flotsam, sold to the highest bidder or bartered awsy for illegal deals.

We are not making regional partnerships, we are forcing the neighbours to allow our agents to act outside the law to stop a tiny number of refugees getting our help.

Learn some facts Bernard, instead of writing rubbish.

By: shepherdmarilyn

shepherdmarilyn — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:45:09 +0000

What bollocks. 90% of the world’s refugees are in the poorest countries whether they like it or not and we are whining on an on about the 1 in 42 of the world’s displaced who get to the west by hook or by crook.

In the meantime 1.94 Afghans are still in Pakistan, 980,000 in Iran and we “accept” 1185 as if they are tins of peas at bargain prices on the Woollies supermarket shelf. They are never the hazaras who don’t exist in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran so we import the middle class Pashtuns.

In Thailand there are 3.65 million Burmese refugees, 1 million Bangladeshis in Malaysia and so on.

We accepted 3300 Burmese refugees last year, also only the best and brightest Karens who have been in their village on the border for 25 years.

We accepted only 2200 Iraqis of the 5 million we have displaced and 540 of them were interpreters.

Our so called assistance to the UNHCR is 40 cents per person per year in Afghanistan, which is a lie anyway because the UNHCR cannot operate in a country to help displaced people because they are not refugees.

It is 51 cents per annum in Pakistan, $5 in Jordan for the 1 million Iraqis, $1 in Syria for the 2 million Iraqi refugees - we gave more to the mercenaries at IOM to force people to go home or to illegally lock them up in other countries for us than we gave the UNHCR.

We are a sick joke. And we should hang our heads in shame.