Individual: Please note that Marilyn Shepard is a paid professional, I believe, who earns income as a refugee advocate?
It is the job of a lawyer to advocate for the client, even where the client is guilty or undeserving, like that Criminal people smuggler exposed by four corners, living in Canberra, running a small but reasonably lucrative local business!
Yet, still organising his people smuggling operation, with complete impunity, from here!
He entered by posing as an undocumented refugee, who then further rorted the system by bringing his family here, where they received very generous financial help and housing, that many more deserving Australians are regularly denied.
How many others have slipped through our less than reliable net, and or, made the more deserving genuine refugees wait even longer for their legitimate turn?
Its just too easy to claim a refugee status, when you have destroyed documentation, which may well prove otherwise?
We need to lift our game and take the flawed human element out of the equation, by including space age lie detection, that establishes genuine bona fides beyond any reasonable doubt.
Not even a barefaced compulsive lair can deceive the latest lie detection! Which like computer assisted facial recognition, picks up the tiny micro movements, that are almost impossible for the human eye, but nonetheless, may well indicate dishonesty.
Ditto the new thermal imaging, which responds to the areas of the brain that light up, when deception is being practised.
Even practised liars and or psychopaths, who routinely beat the polygraph, cannot fool this non invasive and possibly invisible to them, space age technology!
It costs us in excess of $70,000.00 a year plus/plus, just to house a single individual.
Perhaps we should offer some of the most dubious claimants, around fifty thousand to return; now today, before their claims are tested?
Or perhaps, face a much more efficacious validation of claims, which if eventually disproved, would result in automatic disqualification/repatriation!
And it would be cheap at the price, rather than carry the entirely undeserving and their family, possibly years or a lifetime!
Cheers, Rhrosty.

Rhosty I have never been paid a single cent for writing about or helping refugees or anyone else.

I simply write and research for others because it is attitudes like yours that drive me to do so.

I know the editors here will confirm I have never been paid, the lawyers didn't pay me and I don't live the great rich life you think I do.

REally and truly, why do people make it about me every time.

why do people make it about me every time.
Marilyn Shepard,
People don't, you are doing it. You're bringing it on with your constant & total lack of concern for what people here in Australia want to protect. No-ne wants to see refugees being used like a football but if people like you want to start treating Australia & our lives like a football then you've got to expect flak for recommending so.
Rather than constantly asking us to give up everything we've worked for why don't you direct your efforts towards stopping people from becoming refugees in the first place. Go & appeal to the war lords to look after their people instead of asking us to change.
I think stopping the production of refugees is way more noble & sensible than ruining other countries by flooding them with what may or may not be genuine refugees.

Australia's problem with asylum seekers/ illegal immigrants is minor by world standards, despite the beat up from the coalition and the media.

We indeed have a problem with legal immigration which is far too high, there's no benefit to Oz from a rapidly growing population.

Ms Gambaro, like so many others, has the priorities "backwards".

You are right, Mac.

Ms. Gambaro assumes that because something was of net benefit in the past that it therefore always will be. This is far from being the case. It is good that your bones were growing when you were 8 years old, but if they are still growing in that way when you are 40, then you have a really serious problem. I am not disputing that there are educational and cultural benefits from having some immigration, or that there are talented people who would be an asset anywhere, but the numbers are completely over the top. The 2006 Productivity Commission report on immigration found that the per capita economic benefit from our mass migration was miniscule and mostly distributed to the owners of capital and the migrants themselves. The bulk of the population is actually worse off, even in narrowly economic terms, because wages increase more slowly than they otherwise would. See p. 154 and the graph on the following page

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/9438/migrationandpopulation.pdf

According to a recent paper by the economist Jane O'Sullivan in Economic Affairs. Our 1.4% population growth in 2011-2012 cost us 9.6% of GNP (total output of the economy, not government revenue) due to the costs of providing infrastructure for the additional people, who may require decades before they have contributed enough to pay for it. In the meantime, the existing residents get to pay more for housing and utilities, enjoy the extra crowding and congestion in our cities, and put up with crumbling and overstretched infrastructure and public services. Australia ranks near the bottom of the developed world in environmental management.

http://epi.yale.edu/epi2012/rankings

We are having the population growth (mostly due to immigration, which also adds substantially to natural increase) rammed down our throats because the rich people who donate to the politicians want bigger domestic markets, easy profits from ownership of real estate and other essential resources, and a cheap, compliant work force. The bigger total GNP due to more people also gives them more to skim. Nothing will change unless we vote out growthist politicians such as Ms. Gambaro.

Yes... I think the title of this piece reads badly, and can be misinterpreted; perhaps
"Australia must do more to ensure that migrants and refugees can be successful".
Certainly English language skills should be mandatory (for my teenage daughters also) and I have come to believe an "oath of allegiance to the Nation and its existing laws, taking precedence over any and all religious or superstitious laws" wouldn't be a bad thing either.
If such could be implemented, and then widely advertised in the countries from which so many come from, it might save many the trouble.