The Abbott government’s hardline anti-immigration policy — which involves towing back boats that threaten to enter Australian waters — has always been about “destroying the people smugglers’ business model”.
“We are in a fierce contest with these people smugglers,” the PM said last year, before accusing Labor of wanting to “give the people smugglers their business back” for their opposition to turnbacks.
But a report in the Fairfax papers today exposes the utter hypocrisy of that justification.
According to an Indonesian police chief, crew members on a people-smuggling boat headed for Australia were paid US$5000 each by Australian officials to take the boat back to Indonesia. Asylum seekers on board — from Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh — backed up these claims.
If the reports are true, far from smashing the business model, the Abbott government has expanded it, and people smugglers have a new and lucrative customer: our own federal government.
$5000 for a few weeks at sea? That’s the kind of wage Joe Hockey would approve of. Plenty of people smugglers will be eager to “have a go” for that.
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At that rate of pay, the people smugglers will soon be able to afford a house inLeventy’s Bubble Shitty…errr..sorry, city.
Say it ain’t so, Joe!
This is utter nonsense.
This is the business model you describe.
You collect $4,000 – $8,000 per passenger to get them to Australia. Say you get 50 passengers. That’s say $6,000 x 50 or $300,000.
You send the boat to sea and the Australian border protection unit intercepts you , turns you round with a payment of $5,000 per crew member, say 3 crew, $15,000.
You arrive back in Indonesia.
You are lynched by a bunch of angry customers demanding $300,000.
You are no longer alive to organise another boat.
It fails to qualify as a ‘good’ job but it certainly offers long term security. There are millions of refugees on this planet & they will continue coming.