So Johnny Rotten, you are not going to take me up on this debate.

I take it then that you’ve seen the error of your ways regarding the comments made in your last post.

Miss Ludwig

Unlike you I have a life and am not constantly monitoring these pages.

Treating asylum seekers as criminals does not stop people seeking asylum as you well know. The numbers arriving in boats reflect the current conditions from where people are fleeing.

As you admit you have been over this topic time and time again - during which time we still receive the majority of asylum seekers by plane the percentage of arrivals by boat remains low, therefore assessing claims onshore would be a cheaper and more humane option - something that repeatedly escapes you.

That 90% of boat people are assessed as genuine refugees also flies over your head.

Confirmation of the above is easily sourced from a variety of reliable news services - that don't include nutters like Andrew Bolt.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/boat-arrivals-are-a-drop-in-the-ocean-20100606-xn3u.html?comments=80

"The first assumption is that Australia is about to be flooded with boat arrivals. This anxiety is not supported by the numbers. About 4500 asylum seekers have arrived by boat in the past year. Compare this to 200,000 new permanent residents each year and about 50,000 visa overstayers from such places as New Zealand, Britain and the US.

Last year, Australia received only 1.6 per cent of the asylum applications made across 44 industrialised nations. This is no surprise, as the vast majority of refugees remain in their region of origin. There is no reason to suspect that significant numbers of refugees will make their way here.

There is also an assumption that asylum seekers pose some ill-defined risk independent of their numbers. They do not constitute a threat to Australia's health or security. Humane refugee policies adopted by both parties throughout the 1970s and early '80s facilitated, without crisis or fanfare, the successful integration of refugees, many of whom have come to make a valuable contribution to Australian life."

I am not interested in pursuing your argument further - you are incapable of learning anything new and are simply trolling.

Thanks for the response Johnny.

<< Unlike you I have a life and am not constantly monitoring these pages. >>

Oh please! You’ve been going hell for leather on other threads! Come on, you ran away with your tail between your legs on this one.

So now, reluctantly, you’ve offered a bit more insight into your views on this subject. Thanks. But why, if you are not interested in debating the subject?

Given that you do appear to have some knowledge of this issue and a reasonable depth of feeling about it, it begs the question: why don’t you want to debate it?

Why did you respond to me in the first place? Why are you on OLO if not for this sort of thing?

While you have proffered a few good comments, you have failed to respond to a large and enormously important part of my argument, which I’ll repeat here:

< Why you would want this haphazard business to continue rather than to promote a much better input into refugee issues through our formal aid programs, through the UN or bilaterally with various countries, is just beyond me.

THIS is what all humanitarian people who are concerned about refugees should be pushing for. And yet, despite the outcry about stopping onshore asylum seeking from some people, there is nothing like the equivalent demand from them for Australia to increase its input into offshore refugee issues. >

I’m keen to hear your views on this. But I guess I’ll be hearing only silence!