A major part of the aggressors’ strategy is to infect the image of all Muslims globally as being dangerous. Once you wise up to this, you can hear the subtext in every bit of Al Qaeda propaganda you ever hear: fear all of us, it’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch, etc. It’s hard work recruiting Muslims to do things which go flatly against some of the most basic Islamic laws, so the Jihadists recruit western reactionaries to do their recruiting for them.

This strategy was pioneered by Yassir Arafat who made an art form of keeping his followers from ever getting a leg up into a normal life. For example Hashemite Jordan which was part of the original “Palestinian Charter” and whose attempts to integrate Palestinians as full citizens in the 1970s led to the Commandos making war on King Hussein and then moving the camps to less welcoming Lebanon - a country where Palestinians were subject to something approaching apartheid and therefore much more suitable for Arafat’s purposes.

Al Qaeda has taken this several steps further and has succeeded in turning much of the western media into a chorus of “Why don’t Muslims denounce jihadism every time they speak in public?” A question possibly seeded in the first place by Jihadists themselves (i.e. black propaganda) and then taken up with the most blithe, naive reactionism by non-Muslims who claim to be sophisticated and really should know better.

To hear those who proclaim moderatism and cosmopolitanism falling patsy to this Jihadist trick - this hatchet job which Jihadists do on the very people they claim to represent - sends me into a rage. Not on behalf of the world’s Muslims, who I believe can in the end take care of themselves, but on behalf of my own country which I didn’t think would be so gullible.

Even if I’m wrong and a person being Muslim really does correlate with a higher likelihood of being a danger to society, I would still argue that the danger of further marginalizing a group is more severe. If the government actively discriminates against Muslim immigration, then how can the law stop employers, landlords, and other community sectors from following its example? This idea of profiling people’s danger factor by country or any other ethnic criteria is apartheid by stealth. It’s social engineering and subject to the sort of mission creep that can stray far from its original purposes.

It’s nothing like the American quotas, which simply use the Green Card Lottery system to compensate for overrepresentation by some countries in the unstructured component of immigration. The purpose of the quotas is actually to better reflect the world’s diversity in the composition of US immigrants. For example, British migration to the US is always high, so Brits are always ineligible to take part in the Green Card Lottery (except historically those from Northern Ireland).

Your ‘name calling’ by way of ‘white power’ is simply wrong. Nothing I have said even suggests a belief in white supremacy, which I renounce. And your attempting to label me with ‘One Nation’ or ‘National Socialism’ are equally wrong, as I am pro-immigration. I propose a high rate of immigration - but only that the mix takes into account the costs of admitting various sub-groups. The ‘name calling’ denigrates your other comments. Surely people can challenge the Israeli government’s recent actions, without being labelled ‘anti-semitic’?

You keep suggesting you need to know where I’ve travelled, in order to assess the validity of my argument. My argument (about taking the costs into account) ought stand on its own merits. But by way of background, I am Australian born, but have lived on three continents, with years in other cultures.

As to correlations between homogeneity and violence, I’d have thought that this would have been relatively obvious (in general - ie excluding some exceptions/outliers) from the table of intentional homicides by country that I cited earlier. South Africa, with up to 80 times the homicide rate of some advanced homogeneous countries is STILL a clash of cultures - rich whites and poor blacks, in the main. Most of the other countries with high homicide rates also have cultural clashes in progress. Majority Muslim countries do not have high homicide rates. It does appear that it is only when Islamic groups are waging a war against non-Islamists or other Islamist groups that Islam is associated with high levels of violence. Just look at ‘Islamic violence’ countries in the Australian government travel warning list. I don’t believe anyone has done any precise calculations of correlation coefficients, as it would be incredibly hard to ascertain of all the deaths in any given country, to what extent race, religious or cultural differences led to the deaths.

As to the question of Australia vs Switzerland, asking if we were not a non-homogeneous country, I think Australians come from many countries, but we don’t have any major clash between monotheistic faiths in this country yet, so I don’t think one could consider Australia to have any of the Middle East attributes at this stage. Only Southern Europe (primarily France) has yet imported a sufficient Muslim population (5%) to see the types of inherent cultural clash that derives from ONLY the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths being able to get on with each other (ie Hindus, Buddhists etc will get on with most other groups).

In short, the question of whether violence is co-associated with Islam (in the present age), one needs to understand ONLY that two facts:
(a) only a very tiny fraction of Muslims are violent; yet
(b) the vast majority of terrorists worldwide are Muslim.

From the point of view of getting on with your neighbours, you should keep in mind only (a). From a public policy ‘risk assessment’ perspective, the authorities always concentrate on only (b). And notwithstanding our desire to keep (a) in mind at all times, for the question of who you let in, and which countries you issue travel warnings regarding, countries (and spy agencies) always focus on ONLY (b). So almost every government in the world will claim they do no profiling, but then they rely upon (b) for allocating all of their internal and external terrorism monitoring costs.

From Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Philippines, to the bombings in NYC, London, Madrid, Yemen, Egypt, Bali and the Ugandan World Cup bombing of just days ago (now attributed to a Somali Islamist movement), the underlying issue is Islamic violent jihad, against ‘others’ - primarily non-Muslims, or Sunni/Shiite Islam-faction warfare. The current clashes within same-faith non-Muslim monotheist populations include only very infrequent deaths in the independence disputes in Northern Spain and Northern Ireland (recently re-ignited after 15 years of peace). Israel/Palestine and Russia/Chechnya are ‘Muslim vs other’, but I think it best to consider these separately from the general war in the major Muslim countries to rid their countries of Western influences and/or infidels. As I said earlier, the other monotheistic faiths have had very violent periods in their past, but are currently not closely correlated with violence against other faiths (especially the bombings of innocents). I am excluding government decisions (state of Israel actions; and Bush/Cheney declaration of wars).

And to be perfectly clear, I am not siding with any faith. I don’t care for any of the “imaginary friend” stories or holy texts which praise acts of genocide etc. I see all of the monotheist religions as ‘tribal’ (a ‘chosen’ group versus others) in nature, and unhelpful for tolerance in living together. But I don’t care what personal beliefs others happen to hold, PROVIDED there are not public risks or costs associated with those beliefs. And as I noted earlier, my approach is not about religion, as any sub-group of potential migrants (such as the non-religious ones I cited earlier) might have (from time to time) an association with violence or other costs that ought be taken into account in deciding Australia’s mix of migrant sources.

One of the things socialists will never understand is that the crudest and most direct response to a given issue is usually the wrong one, causing more harm than good. Statistics for predicting crime are useful for things like city planning and police patrol deployment, but when you use background profiling to make life-changing decisions about the fates of individuals, you end up causing the very strife you hoped to avoid, and take a step towards becoming one of those countries that refugees flee from.

My father took part in what you could call a fairly vigorous discussion on this, in 1942-45. Go back to your dogfights and your white power churches and forget about trying to sneak this stuff into respectable conversation by dressing it up as cosmopolitanism. I can use a gun just as well as my father did.

Every public decision has some social engineering involved. The decision to let in a lot of North Africans had a significant social engineering impact on France. So assessing the issues/costs beforehand is not crazy talk.

And we do these things in related public spheres. We allow people with all manner of mental health issues to wander freely within the wider society UNTIL the point at which they pose a risk to others. Now, you could claim that this is discriminating against just certain types of mental illness… but it is not. It is simply applying a ‘uniform risk assessment’ to all, and it just so happens that certain classes of mental health problems are more prevalent within the higher-risk groups.

My uniform risk+costs assessment was simply suggesting we welcome with warm outstretched arms all those of any colour, race, creed or religion, right up to the point where Australian values are renounced. But condoning the killing of someone for a ‘wrong’ religious belief (apostasy or adultery), or refusing Australian values (being vehemently opposed to their sons and daughters marrying an Australian) are the two triggers that make potential immigrants simply too costly to our society. And on the issue of ‘death for apostasy’ or ‘stoning for adultery’, the Prophet wrote that not one iota of Islamic law can be changed from what he dictated, so I fail to see how Islam can be updated to include a modern humanist approach. Arguably Christians should also be locked in a two-millennium old time-warp as well, but they have evolved to allow the Pope of the day to make all sorts of updates (though the meagre scriptural basis is an ‘upon this rock’ comment by Christ).

Powerisnotstrength said “The Al Qaeda movement went out of its way to brand Islamic people as dangerous.” Well, under my analysis it doesn’t really matter who/why certain groups becames more correlated with violence and other values antithetical to Australian ones. All that needs be assessed is ‘Is there risk, and are there costs associated with such risks?’ It is the Federal government (under both Coalition and ALP management) that is spending $200m+ on monitoring 0.2m Muslims in Australia. I’m not suggesting that we should spend such amounts, but that is the assessment of the professionals in charge of such programs, so all I am saying is that we should take such high costs of settling Muslims here into account in deciding whether to take more Africans+Tamils and fewer Muslims. The risk assessments and costs have been determined by the professional spooks, not me. All I was pointing out that is that the $200m could be saved if more of the Muslim refugees were settled (at Australia’s cost) in predominantly Muslim countries, at least while the risk assessments were high. Then, if in a decade, Islam moves to renounce violence worldwide, then any new assessment ought remove the hurdle. And it is not about any particular religion, the same assessment would apply to settling IRA types in Australia, during the Irish problems… yet no impediment exists today, as the risk has passed. Conceptually it is no different to the government issuing travel warnings.

And some will say “We can’t impact upon ALL of a sub-group, just because a very small minority commit evil acts.” Well, in fact on a public policy basis, we do that every day. Almost all 18yo drivers behave very sensibly. Yet every state has laws with truly ‘draconian’ provisions against P-platers. Despite only a tiny fraction drinking to excess and driving, we have rules which prohibit any P-plater drinking any alcohol in the 12 hours before driving. That is just one example of our current ‘social engineering’, punishing the many for the behaviour of just a few bad apples, due to a weighing-up of the public risk. Refusing all sorts of people who apply for visas to Australia on the balance of probabilities regarding violence (or terrorism risk) is also a daily event. Very good people with a very old conviction for some minor crime are routinely refused entry to Australia. But the government and its authorities must look at such correlations, and weigh-up the risks to the Australian pubic.

With the London, Madrid and Bali bombings, there was not a loud renouncement of such violence by the Muslim populations around the world. Instead many moderates said that they did not personally condone such actions, but they understood the factors that drove young Muslim men to take up the call to violent jihad. This echoed the ambivalent views of many Irish Catholics to the IRA approach… they wouldn’t do it, but they understood why some did. I think if Islam is to not be correlated with violence, then it needs to more resoundingly renounce all violence, and name-and-shame those within Islam who preach violence. We aren’t yet at that point. Most clerics around the world who promote violence are tracked by foreign spy organisations, but they are not rejected by their own domestic Muslim community, because they rely upon the passages in the Koran which promote violence as an acceptable tool.

And many Islamic countries provide proof that Muslims frequently turn to violence when faiths are mixed. The major Islamic theocracies (Iran etc) outlaw proselytisers from other faiths settling in their countries, because they know of the intolerance. And Islam does not sit well with democracy, because the Prophet was the primary administrator for a large portion of the original Islamic world, so much of his writings were about how a religious leader ought administer society (on the basis of what we would call a theocracy today). And this linkage between Muslim faith and Sharia Law is a ‘core belief’, because in the Philippines, with only a 0.2% Muslim population, the Muslim minority is still waging a low-grade guerrilla war to establish an Islamic state under Sharia Law. In other words, the Muslim minority does not accept a secular democracy. Many secular democracies in majority Muslim countries are constantly fighting calls for a theocracy to displace the democracy.

And as for comparing Australia’s decision on how large a Muslim intake to allow, to how the former Soviet Union was run, I don’t believe any useful parallels can be drawn. The USSR persecuted many minorities, some of whom were Muslim, and many of whom were not.

One Nation was xenophobic. Conversely, I am welcoming our refugee intake, and a generally high rate of immigration. And I welcome the full plethora of views… right up to (but excluding) values which are antithetical to Australian values. Gans wanted some financial “impost” on the illegal route, and I have not suggested using any cost greater than the one already allocated to our own spooks to monitor our violence-correlated immigrant sub-groups, to calculate the real cost of further immigration of such sub-groups, only whilst such positive correlations exist. My proposal is only an evidence-based outcome approach, just as we use in public health decisions. And if certain groups should happen to become non-correlated with violence worldwide (eg as the IRA has), then such ‘risk/cost assessments’ should be immediately revised downwards. Mohammed rose to power by waging war against opposing groups… which is fine in an historical sense, in much the same way as most religions have ‘blood on their hands’ throughout their history. And the Koran preaches theocratic rule, not that any of the religion texts have a pro-democracy stance. So I congratulate Australia’s millions of first and subsequent generation migrants who have done a fantastic job of fitting in… but I worry whether certain fundamentalist groups of numerous religions will be as flexible in setting aside their holy texts to embrace Australian values. Prospective migrants need to understand that cartoons of the type that appeared in Denmark could appear in print in Australia, and ‘make fun’ of anyone’s religion…. and that Australians will not tolerate a different law for any sub-group, with the sole exception being to cut some slack for indigenous Australians.

And the final bit of my argument regarding ‘violence correlations’ is that at the extreme, we would ALL favour barring certain people. In other words, if someone said they wanted to migrate to Australia to carry out violent jihad, or to stone someone, we would probably all recommend they not be settled here. So there is SOME threshold where values antithetical to Australian values cause us to refuse migration. Now, we are only discussing at what level that threshold ought be set. So that puts us all agreeing on the same basis of refusal, and all that we have separating us is what constitutes an ‘undue risk’ or ‘cost to monitor’. I say that we should use the government’s existing ‘costs to monitor’ as the best available data to distinguish sub-groups, while others say we should ignore correlation data, or current monitoring costs, and simply assume the best of everyone, as if no sub-group has a history. Of course if all religious types set aside their millennia-old holy texts, I’d join in the call to ‘take people at their word’… but with the evidence that some sub-groups are absolutely wed to the literal reading of their historical texts, we need to take into account what is prescribed in those texts. We’ll all make slightly different calls, some assuming that theocratic preachings are not in conflict with democracy. IMHO, the $200m spend by the Feds is presumably the ‘right’ level of costs (risk assessment) at the current time, given the cultural and religious clash, as monitored by the spooks from year to year. So let’s just factor that in, and thereby feel free to offer $50k resettlement packages (to settle in another country), to keep the future cost of all that monitoring manageable.

The Yugoslavian civil war resulted from too fast a rush to democracy and decentralization. The collapse of a nearby superpower, communist economies in a tailspin, the iron-grip federation crumbling, unemployment, food shortages, riots, breakaway states … Democracy is not the cure for a sudden collapse in stability. When employment and state structure fall apart, educated voices calling for careful and gradual reforms - and there were many - are easily drowned out by populist politicians shouting “Here is your enemy, these are the ones trying to destroy your country!”

In other words, a kind of wedging similar to what you are trying to do to Muslims, except that you dress it up in a patina of sophistication and reasonableness, or as you call it, “the type of non-PC dialogue the PM encouraged us to have”. I’ve heard this all before, I’ve gone to some of these meetings just to see how they operate. Nationalism has got a lot cleverer since the 60’s, I’ll give it that. You don’t know the first thing about Muslim society or how it responds to violence. The Al Qaeda movement went out of its way to brand Islamic people as dangerous, you are its target audience, and you fell for it like a schmuck.

In the end, all your arguments about preferring one ethnic group or another come down to aesthetic preferences. When you give a government license to start engineering society on aesthetic preferences, in the end it won’t be your aesthetic preferences that are imposed, it will be someone else’s. That’s the thing about too much power, it always ends up being inherited by someone other than the ones who put it there, with their own vision of utopia and their own personal ideas of how you and I should live.

To analyse the effect of clashes on quality of life, we need to reference the list of intentional homicide rates by country which is maintained on wiki at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

You’ll see that South Africa (with lots of cultural clash) has a homicide rate about 30-80 times higher than some advanced homogeneous countries like Switzerland, Denmark and Greece. Jamaica, Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates even higher than South Africa.

Even ‘tribal’ PNG is only ten times higher in homicides than those advanced homogeneous countries. Indeed, you can see that the USA is ‘half-tribal’
in that the US homicide rate is exactly halfway between that of Western Europe and PNG’s.

Japan (which I cited as taking its migrants from migrant groups which might not clash too harshly with their cultural norms) has a homicide rate only one-tenth that of the freedom-loving USA.

Even the UK has a homicide rate about 50% higher than the rest of Western Europe and Scandinavian countries.

The US might top lists on GDP (for economic history reasons) but on overall quality of life, the safe homogeneous countries (eg Scandinavian ones) rate incredibly high as places people like to live in.

So, it is not “hillbilly nonsense” to suggest that there are social costs and a lessened quality of life to intentionally introduce true cultural conflict to a country. I posited that any level of differences LESS than (a) wanting to kill for religious reasons, or (b) barring inter-marriage was valid multi-culturalism; but that those groups who believed death was a suitable punishment for ‘wrong’ religious beliefs (eg apostasy) , or barred inter-marriage led to irreconcilable conflict. As I noted earlier, that covers a number of religious groups, and is not targeted at any one group…. only at values which are antithetical to Australian values.

I note your ad hominem attack, rather than putting forward any alternative rationale for the roots of the Balkan war. I only cited the Balkan situation because, having lived in adjoining villages for so many centuries, it is only the barring of inter-marriage that allows an ‘other’ group to still be identified after 500+ years.

Your claim “Homogenizing… historically leads to more centralization of power” is countered by the fact that the Swiss Cantons are arguably one of the most powerful local government arrangements anywhere.

And your rant “Homogenizing… leads to… the stagnation of socialism” is a non-sequiter. The highest levels of social payments in the world are in Scandinavian countries, which are particularly homogeneous and peaceful (with low levels of conflict within society and very low homicide rates). Of course socialism isn’t a goal in itself. Much of Europe is now winding back its extravagant retirement pensions, on the grounds that their economies cannot afford such high levels of payments to non-workers… but that is a different debate.

I’ve actually suggested an increase in our refugee intake - just with a preference for selecting from groups which will not then cost us a fortune in on-going monitoring.

The countries that have done the most to develop the idea of free society in the modern age are the UK and America. There are others, but liberal theory is chiefly an anglosphere development.

Far from any romantic notion of “cultural compatibility”, these countries were ethnically very mixed. England because it has always been the end of the line for tribes pushing westward across Eurasia, and America because it offered a fresh start to immigrants suffering persecution in their home countries, and enterprising individuals who could not achieve their ambitions in the backward, conservative countries from which they came.

The theory and practice of liberal society did not originate from philosophical discussion, it came from the clashing and friction of groups who found it hard to live together but had to somehow learn to do so.

In other words Mr Harrison, for a decentralist like myself, some of these groups with different cultural practices are actually my best defence against the homogenizing that you promote. Homogenizing which historically leads to more centralization of power and the stagnation of socialism.

And by the way, your fanciful notions about Islam and the causes of the Balkan war are laughable. Do some travelling some time soon, before your brain completely turns to mush.

Just a simple yes or no will suffice. I won’t be reading your next bo0k-length treatise on how to engineer the ethnic composition of society and how to select groups for their rules on inter-marriage.

I agree that having societies become wealthy, increasing life expectancy, increasing pensions and increasing education all contribute to lower birth rates. But free condoms are arguably the cheapest/quickest way to have an impact, though condoms will never reduce number of children per couple below their desired number.

@ Marilyn: You claimed “We don’t even have any say over …. who enters the country and how” which is wrong if you look at arrivals varying according to government policies. Australians ARE prepared to help, by taking a reasonable share of refugees. But similarly, the idea of some ‘jumping in ahead’ of other valid applications (by paying middlemen) does clash with the Australian sense of ‘fair play’. Gans proposed one way (payments by charities) of lessening this effect, and I proposed another (high rewards in SE Asia). On my rough calculations, you could increase those rewards from $50k to $50m and still be way ahead of a billion dollars spend on offshore detention processing centres. Now I don’t suggest such a high reward, as I think $50k is a significant payment to anyone in an Indonesian fishing town.

And because any government money spent on anything is money not available for other things, I suggested we should also save the $200-300m spent on internal terrorism monitoring, by simply selecting those refugees and other migrants we will take from subsets not holding values antithetical to our own… and not from countries who might perceive that we are at war with them or their brothers. Those people are better housed in countries with similar values to their own. Given the government spends so much monitoring them for terrorism if they are housed here, we may as well give them $25k resettlement packages to settle in a suitable muslim country, and that might set them up for life, for less than we spend monitoring them if they live here…. and as I proposed, to prove our bona fides to the international community, we could take a proportionately higher intake from other oppressed groups who do not have antithetical values to our own (eg who don’t believe in death for apostacy, honour killings or barring inter-marriage).

We can keep believing that everyone is equal - but the truth is that all organised religions have periods when they are associated with higher levels of violence. If the Inquisition was still running, I’d be against any Iberian Catholics coming to Australia, on the same grounds, that anyone believing in ‘death for religious opinions’ holds values antithetical to Australian values. One of the great things about Australia is the freedom we have to be safe in public. Everyone knows this is a great aspect to life in Australia… but public policy doesn’t properly protect this freedom. We have no problems with refusing visas to people associated with LA gangs (via a history of convictions), but ignore other factors that are correlated with violence, on the basis of political correctness. And analysing what led to the Balkan war (eg failure of groups living in close proximity to inter-marry, due to religious differences) has NOTHING to do with “I’ll be right, Jack”. Let’s increase our refugee settlement quota, but pick those who will fit in eventually.

Have any of you read it lately?

Article 30 states that no state or person can take away the other 29 human rights articulated.

It should at the very least set the standard for helping anyone and treating anyone equally to the next man.

Article 1 says all persons are born free and equal.

Good grief our whining about migration and refugees is just selfish “I’m OK Jack” bullshit anyway.

Let’s get real. We don’t even have any say over who lives in the house next door let alone who enters the country and how.

You state that child health initiatives work against population decreases.

This is entirely wrong.

If you were to live in a society where parents rely on the support of their surviving children for support in their old age, you would ask yourself how many kids you need to sire to be sure of at least a couple making it through to adulthood, in order for them to support you and your wife.

If half of the live births result in deaths before 5 years old and another quarter die before 30, you may well decide that 6 or 10 kids are a blessing for your own, self-interested, old age.

If, however, Western child mortality expectations were the norm in your village, you would rationally decide that 2 or 3 kids are enough to ensure that 1 or 2 survive and prosper. Any more would tend to reduce the standard of liv ing, while also providing no significant increase in security in your old age.

Hence, the desirable number of offspring may in fact reduce from 6 to 10 down to simple replacement levels - a stable population.

Child health initiatives and health initiatives from cradle to grave result in much reduced fecundity, as can be seen from a simple comparison of Japanese and Western European societies with third world countries.

This effect can be further improved by providing age and invalid pensions. Would-be parents are not forced to procreate at all in order to have a secure old age. Their kids do not have to provide for them. The society, through the government, does this. There are then a couple of reasons less for even having the first child. Greed is a wonderfully effective motivator. Keep your money for yourself and your spouse, maximise your standard of living during your middle years and rely on the social safety net and personal savings (superannuation?) for your old age.

This is indeed the best and most potent way to reduce the rate of population growth. It is capable, as in Japan, of achieving a negative population growth. Voluntarily.

It is a bit scary to the ecomomists, because GDP might track downwards and the fraction of aged people in the population will increase. We all know that recession is X months of negative GDP growth. This is nonsense, because it does not measure the actual standard of living, which may be slowly rising as the GDP falls. This is precisely why the Federal Government has increased the standard retirement age above 60. I statistically will live to about 85. I am approaching retirement at slightly above 60. I have super to see me through, but who will feed, shelter and clothe the less fortunate 60-year old Australians who still have their health? The answer in Australia is - the government. In most of the world, it is up to the kids or the charity of strangers, which is probably not forthcoming.

So, it is clear that diseases such as polio and malaria must be beaten. Starvation, poverty, clean water, education, shelter, security, peace, age pensions and invalid pensions all affect, one way or the other, the objective of having every child grow to become an adult and for every family to choose to reproduce at no more than the replacement rate.

The goal of foreign aid should be to help people to be happy where they live. This is the only way to really deal with the refugee issue. No war, however well-intentioned, will help to achieve that aim. Foreign aid is thus more important than defence.

But if you read my first post, I was actually suggesting that a $50,000 reward for information leading to any conviction in Indonesia for people-smuggling was IMHO preferable to Gans’ ‘charity fee’. Australia should pay for, and manage the call-centre set-up to accept such tip-offs, per the posters promoting the reward. That way Australia could also track the intelligence so gathered, and then ensure local police took such data seriously. I don’t think it would take too much promotion of a large reward before Indonesians would revert to using their fishing boats for fishing. And interviewing those on every boat that got through should lead to another people-smuggling ring being broken.

And let’s remember that ‘Temporary Protection Visas’ aren’t inherently a bad device. They got a bad name in Australia. But if your cousin ends up on the street, you might invite them into your home, but explain that when their circumstances improve, you expect them to move out. Well, in situations like Sri Lanka, where a war has ended and safety is being re-established (even for the defeated minority), it may well make sense to offer them a year-by-year assessed protection visa, while the international community pressures the Sri Lankan government to make the Northern areas safer generally.

However, I don’t think a temporary arrangement suits refugees from situations unlikely to improve.

And I recognise that we don’t have “environmental refugees” at this stage, but I believe that by mid-century the world will be facing these issues. I believe Australia should negotiate a solution now, offering the various low-lying island nations of the Western Pacific Ocean and Eastern Indian Ocean full citizenship, able to be implemented upon some trigger scenarios (eg natural or sea-level rise disasters), and in return (ie if implemented) then the territory becomes part of Australia. So we outreach and offer the long-term resettlement assurances the small independent nations from the Maldives to Micronesia need, and in return, Australia would in the longer-term get to manage (on a sustainable basis) the fishing rights in these largish areas of the ocean. As over-fishing continues, this will be critical in decades to come.

There’s no resolving this one in the current legal landscape. Too much scope for political pressure and posturing to deter intrusion no matter how trivial the number. Too many billions of taxpayer dollars to be wasted trying to slip around the simple fact — so difficult to get politicians to acknowledge or voters to accept — that intrusion is not a crime provided the intruder requests asylum.

Between these mutually exclusive tenets there’s a gulf into which we pour ridiculous amounts of money along with our credibility when a hack like Julia Gillard tries out her megaphone diplomacy. A gulf into which the luckless boat refugees fall, to be incarcerated for quarantine purposes according to the High Court but everybody knows it’s for deterrence purposes — but without any of the accountability or rights of a criminal defendant.

Because to give them those rights would, paradoxically, breach the Convention.

Leave the Convention and boat people become a relatively straightforward criminal justice problem. UN criticism could be mollified by a dramatic increase in the offshore intake, offset by a reduction in some of the more dodgy migration schemes we discussed elsewhere (eg permanent residency as an enticement to buy our education products). How many’s that, tens of thousands? A hundred thousand? And we could have elections about real issues for a change.

Unless of course we withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention and repeal the ratifying laws. Which seems to be what most voters want (or would want, if they were aware of its existence).

This may not be as barbaric as it sounds. The recurring political pressure to deter unauthorized entry leads to detention at the discretion of the Executive government, for purposes other than administrative practicality. In other words, punishment for intruding, but without any of the rights that would normally apply in a criminal charge were laid. The right to a lawyer, trial by jury, and so on.

It leads to a situation where former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd can - without legal challenge - arbitrarily order six months’ minimum detention for being an irregular asylum seeker from Sri Lanka or Afghanistan, regardless of whether DIAC processing needs that long to assess a claim and make arrangements. That’s not only racist, it’s despotic.

By withdrawing from the Convention, Australia could go back to the old laws making intrusion a crime — but with some legal defences. Defences such as being a bona fide refugee, which, like any other criminal defence, the defendant would have an opportunity to prove in a court of law on the balance of probabilities — and with a right to legal representation and judicial appeal. This would put an end to the accusations of capriciousness on the part of DIAC officials who say yea or nay.

On some of your other points, you are mixing up the immigration program with the refugee program. We can tinker as much as we like with the immigration program, play with the numbers, do cost-benefit analyses, etc. We do not, however, have the same flexibility with the refugee program since we are bound by our signature to the UN Convention and Protocols. So while we might be able to give lower priority to immigrants we feel won’t integrate, we cannot do the same with asylum seekers. If they arrive and are found to be refugees, everything else is moot. We must grant them protection.

One other thing, the definition of refugee is quite specific. It doesn’t cover “environmental refugees.” And I seriously doubt anyone is going to extend the Convention to include them any time in the future.

2. Arguably better use of $20,000-50,000 per refugee might be to post a A$50,000 reward, with posters up in all Indonesian port towns, for information leading to the conviction of any person involved in people smuggling. That might dramatically lessen the likelihood of people promoting such unlawful boat trips…. at a far lower cost than housing them once they get here. Such rewards would certainly make it very hard to get the required number of passengers ‘signed-up’ to justify loss of boat and incarceration of skipper. And if the sign-ups end up being done in Malaysia, simply extend the reward to that country. The Australian government could pay private law-enforcement related companies (private security type firms) to actively pursue local law enforcement, making sure that reported offenders were interviewed and convicted where possible.

3. I think we need to keep a lot of potential immigration “places” available (in reserve) in Australia for mid-century, when large numbers of genuine environmental refugees will start arriving, with no hope of returning to their homes. Europe’s population is no lower today for the fact that hundreds of millions emmigrated to the USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, South Africa, etc . Populations tend to return to “carrying capacity”. Until mid-century, the best charities to support may be family planning ones in the fastest-growing poor or low-lying countries (though the current fashion is to support child health initiatives, which have the opposite effect on population size).

4. Australia might also like to review Japan’s policies, as Japan decides sources of migrants based on their ‘capacity to fit in culturally”. The logic is that there are many times more ‘eligible’ refugees than places, so one may as well select those who will be successfully integrated. Using this logic, Australia ought have lower intakes from countries/cultures which believe in death for apostacy, honour killings, and which bar inter-marriage, as these beliefs run contrary to Australian law and/or basic rights. The barring of inter-marriage means the cultural clash will simply build till one faces the types of issues now faced in France. The groups who allow inter-marriage integrate within decades, whereas those who bar inter-marriage remain estranged for centuries. It was a root cause of the Balkan war, as different groups had lived absolutely side-by-side for many centuries, but never allowed inter-marriage. This is to be contrasted with Australia’s very successful migration following WW2, where almost all groups inter-married significantly within two generations. And let’s remember that there are lots of groups who don’t allow inter-marriage, notably Jews, Brethren, Amish etc - indeed most of the more fundamentalist groups of the Abrahamic ‘big-three monotheistic faiths’. So the issue is certainly not just about Muslims, but rather deals only with the statistics/likelihood of eventual integration. So, it is not about dog-whistling, but solely about outcomes-based decisions, as we use in most public health decisions and most other public policy decisions.

Similarly, if it is found that Tongan youth (to cite one group whose youth has hit the media) show heightened levels of anti-social crimes, then the Tongan community in Australia would have it explained to them that Tonga would be lowered to the “lower immigration quota” group, until they can get on top of the ‘not fitting in’ problem. This feedback loop is currently missing.

All of these good/poor fit ‘points’ ought be simply considered in the mix of issues, along with skills, English-language knowledge etc to contribute to overall immigration decisions. We are a vibrant society as a result of our high levels of immigration, and while we have celebrated multi-culturalism, there has in fact been a rapid rate of integration. And not one problem of note from the huge Vietnamese immigration of the 1980s! But the Cronulla riots did show that we are close to the maximum rate of absorption (at least for disparate groups).

Unfortunately the logical outcome of using evidence-based decisions is that we need to take into account the $200-300m annual costs to monitor for London-bombing-style ‘home-grown terrorists’, which is a hugely disproportionate cost to monitor just 0.2m Muslims in Australia. And it is not that the other monotheistic faiths haven’t done their share of killing, but the Jews did more of their genocide as well documented in the Old Testament; and the Christians did lots of killing of others and their own from the Crusades to the Inquisition… but both groups have finally moderated their views to denounce killing over issues of faith. But the Shiite/Sunni war still rages, and violent jihad is very popular around the world at present. Moreover, until this past decade no-one would have suspected the risk of young Muslim men brought up entirely in the West becoming dedicated to mass-destruction of their own countrymen (a Cheney ‘unknown unknown’). So if you asked the spooks, they would say that every bit of Muslim immigration one can avoid saves us a fortune in own-soil monitoring costs. Such cost-benefit would say we could bring in ten Tamils for every Iraqi/Afghan migrant we skip. If you took up a collection in Australia for funds to monitor for home-grown terrorists, you might be lucky to collect just 1% of the amount the Australian government actually spends on this activity - meaning that Australians generally see little value in such work… Arguably Australians would prefer the money be spent on green energy, public transport or health. Yet the intelligence experts would say we HAVE to spend that fortune on home-based security, and the population is simply deluded by the fact that Australia’s intelligence agencies have foiled all home-grown terrorism.

None of the above fails to recognise that 99.99x of the Muslim population is peace-loving (though not inter-breeding)… but the covert habits of jihadists and secretive nature of the Islamic community make it incredibly expensive to monitor that small fraction that the Muslims of Australia will not properly denounce.

I hope the above is the type of non-PC dialogue the PM encouraged us to have. The above comments have nothing to do with race, and nothing to do with private religious beliefs… but it does deal with the cost/benefit to society as a whole to consider from where immigration ought be sourced. While Bush’s crazy wars in Arab countries continue, for reasons of security costs alone, we ought take more Tamils and refugees from sub-Saharan Africa (there are heaps of ‘em) and leave the Middle East refugees to be absorbed by other like cultures (and who are not at war with the countries they’ve come from)…. or just swap the citizenship question about who was Australia’s first Prime Minister to one asking “Are you genuinely relaxed in a country where anyone’s religious figures/beliefs might appear in comics and jokes?” - It is not a biased question, but properly positing the Western-level of religious tolerance!

(ii) the binary nature of refugee assessment - you either in or out. AFAIK, there appears to be no formal gradiation of refugee status - certainly a Bosnian Muslim from Srebrenica in 1995 or a someone from Darfur will be a higher priority than someone who may be economically disadvantaged because of their ethnicity, either as a fn of geography or reverse discrimination policies or by virtue of their own extreme political beliefs.

The international convention on refugees was born from the experience of Jewish refugees that failed to get asylum from Nazi Germany. Of the modern day examples that would approximate the experience of these refugees - Bosnian Muslims, Rwandan Tutsis or Darfur refugees, not many seem to make it too Australia, nor do they come in boats - it occured to me that apart from seeking refuge in closer Europe, not many had the money to pay people smugglers. I guess that it is this pay for priority assessment that irks many Australians and goes against our culture of meritocracy. Should you get priority because you were able to pay people smugglers, especially when there are people at greater risk than many Afghans or Sri Lankan Tamils.

Furthermore, do we really want people that game the system, whatever their circumstance, to be given priority? Or is this merely indicative of an entrepreneurial spirit - why don’t we feel the same about people that game the tax and welfare system who get labelled as cheats?

Also does building yet another processing centre really help if they still get priority assessment - all that means is that those can afford to pay people smugglers and leaky boats will be heading to East Timor or PNG etc

The only solution I see is fourfold:

(i) increase the proportion of refugees within the allotted migration intake - double the current amount set aside for refugees.

(ii) develop and apply a gradiation of risk level to the asylum application - risk of genocide as most serious, economic disadvantage at the other end. Those that are higher risk get priority - effectively create a queing system.

(iii) only process refugees from UNHCR centres from around the world, including Africa i.e. have an equal number come from different parts of the world. Those that come by boat have to be forceably sent to one of these UNHCR refugee camps, and their applications get no priority over others that have not come by boat/plane etc, nor an increased chance to get to Australia as opposed to another modern liberal democratic nation.

(iv) increased diplomatic/military activity in countries that are a source of much refugee flow, to stabilise those states and remove the need to seek refuge.

The key point is # (iii) - the govt has to have the ticker to send refugees back to a transit country or refugee centre and not reward the gaming, no matter the circumstance of their case. Integrity in the system is important in ensuring the highest priority refugees get asylum, and in ensuring the system is not subsumed by organised crime.