Wouldn't genuine asylum seekers from Sri Lanka head straight for India, Myanmar, Thailand and other countries in that region? Once these countries are bypassed the group becomes asylum shoppers.

You people cannot have it both ways.

Labor has voted down laws in the Senate that would limit the avenues of appeal.

You cannot argue for quick processing of claims and support a system that allows asylum seekers to abuse the legal system and stretch out their claims for years and years in the hope that the government will eventually relent and let them in. It is absurd that asylum seekers can take their cases all the way to the High Court.

Give them one chance to appeal the decision of the refugee tribunal and if they fail, deport them, immediately.

YESS.. A depressing familiarity ..but which ? aah.. its the one where leftist, socialist 'migration industry' lawyers and advocates seem to be in fear of income loss (from Legal aid maybe ?) that they, once again trot out the poor assylum seeker mantra.

SRI LANKA

Warring parties:

1/ Tamils of Indian ancestry.
2/ Sinhalese. Control most of the country, plenty of safe areas.

So, the question arises 'which' group are the assylum seekers from ?

a) If Tamils, then they can goto INDIA which is a signatory to the UN convention on refugees. India is also closest. In fact.. a STONES THROW away.

b) If Sinhalese, then INTERNAL assylum is easily obtained.
OR
if they need to find external assylum INDIA again is ok, and they don't have to goto a Tamil area.

So, on either count, these people are, as Sage wisely stated 'Country Shoppers'

They deserve no sympathy, no assistance, except to send them back where they came from.
They do not even deserve processing in any area connected with our Assylum assessment.

Even if they are Sinhalese opposition members who feel they are targeted by the Government, they can STILL goto India. Even if they are Christians they can goto Kerala India which has huge Christian population.

Send em back ! and Greg and Howard can find other more worthy reasons to exist and obtain an income. Greg can continue his representation of the downtrodden, and it would not surprise me if we start seeing articles about 'poor misuderstood Muslims' being trotted out by Greg in the near future.

“Refugees and asylum seekers no threat to our national security”

Yes they potentially are!

At the time of the Tampa incident in 2001 there was an escalating build-up in the number of people preparing to come to Australia on precarious boats. If nothing has been done regarding the Tampa or the boats that were due to follow, we would have had a much much bigger and more difficult issue to deal with.

The scale of the onshore asylum-seeker issue could indeed be large enough to seriously damage social coherence and hence national security.

Strong border controls are absolutely necessary. Only within this framework should we be talking about the treatment of asylum seekers.

There is not a lack of humanity with current policy. There needs to be a balance between effective border protection and humanity. Unfortunately, we just can’t exercise full humanity without opening the so-called floodgates. Effective border protection requires a strong deterrence factor and no matter which way you look at it, this means a compromised level of humanity.

A considerably harder line would have been taken by governments, with support from the vast majority of Australian citizens, if the rate of influx had become ten or a hundred times bigger than it was in 2001.

Labor’s policy regarding refugees should be to;

Double the number annually to about 25 000, but only within our formal immigration system, and perhaps a very small number of onshore refugees while being very mindful not to cause that rate of people movement to increase beyond a tiny trickle. This should be done within an immigration program that is progressively reduced over a few years to net zero. Our immigration intake would then be predominantly refugee-based, with the abandonment of the current skills-based program.

Labor should also be pushing for an increase in our international aid effort to at least 0.7% GDP, aimed at the sources of refugee issues and at family planning / population growth issues.

Labor should definitely NOT be taking Greg Barnes and Howard Glenn’s suggestion that a few thousand asylum seekers (per annum) is an acceptable thing.

Immigration what a joyous subject

not to worry

The Australian Peoples Party has now posted their Immigration Policy at

www.tapp.org.au

The Howard Government has been successful in thwarting boat people. To undo this achievement will backfire on us and we will return to the days of the Tampa with every unstable misfit from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan leaving town and heading our way. Our psychiatric services will never cope as they are so souped up and crazed by religious zeal and emotional baggage they will not respond to medication!

Don’t forget the Tamil’s refined suicide bombing to the point it has reached today.