Spindoc
Apart from the questionable claim that indigenous Australians are far worse off than boat people, you set up a false dichotomy. We are not faced with a choice between either treating citizens or refugees compassionately. We can and should do both.

Mickijo
Refugees get no priority for State housing and usually go into private accommodation.

SPQR
Your accusations are mainly unsubstantiated racist slurs – refugees are welfare seeking fundamentalists. Where you do quote evidence, it hardly substantiates your claims. The article you quote casts severe doubt over the “golden age” claim, while the article on the Rohingya seems to confirm they’re subject to racial abuse in Burma

Rhian, My << questionable claim that indigenous Australian are far worse off than boatpeople>>

That might well be what you felt I said but what I actually said was <<we need to show some compassion for our indigenous Australians who are often far worse off than the boatpeople with a spare $10,000 per person >>.

If you can find anyone in our Indigenous communities who can raise $10,000 per family member for anything, you might have a case. But you don’t.

I did not set up a false dichotomy because I made no case for “choice”; I made a case for “proportionality”. If you have difficulty understanding this let me expand.

We have hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples living in appalling social, educational, employment and health circumstances. Your focus upon the rights of perhaps 4,000 tragic boatpeople is utterly disproportionate and demonstrates an unhealthy and might I say un-Australian distortion.

We also have 26,000 homeless Australians sleeping rough every single night. When you can apply a similar passion and compassion “proportionately” to the needs of our own disadvantaged, you will have successfully made the transition from activist to humanitarian

Rhian,

///The article you quote casts severe doubt over the “golden age” claim///
NGO executives criticising government decisions that impact on their field of endeavour, have about as much credibility as tobacco company executives criticising government decisions that impact on their field of endeavour.

///while the article on the Rohingya seems to confirm they’re subject to racial abuse in Burma///
There are two angles to consider:
The first, there may well be a group called the Rohingya , who may well be persecuted. I can count on one hand the number of groups in Asia who could not legitimately claim a well-founded fear of persecution.
The second aspect is,Whether those boating across the seas to sunnier climes are actually Rohingya.Burmese authorities say they are actually Bengalis.And,I can hear you respond “but they would say that wouldn’t they”, however, the boaties have equally good cause to claim they are something they are not.With Bengalis not being on the UN flavour of the month list at the moment. So, I provided a picture that the reader could make their own assessment. But you only saw one thing, comments about Rohingya’s being badly treated.
Postscript: please bear in mind that Australia has some history of certifying people “genuine refugees” from group A, only to find out later they actually belonged to group B


///Your accusations are mainly unsubstantiated racist slurs – refugees are welfare seeking fundamentalists///
Test it for yourself :
Why would a Tamil who decides to flee Sri Lanka (most actually stayed put) bypass India, and instead risk the long arduous journey to Australia?
---India is too alien a culture – no, Tamil Nadu , the nearest Indian state means land of the Tamils.
---India is not a signatory to the convention –nevertheless, India accommodated virtually any Tamil that landed.

Now apply the same template to Africa.
Most countries in Africa are signatories to the convention. Yet, many bypass them to get to Europe.

Even to someone as big hearted as you that must be damning.

SPQR

Many Asians may live in fear of persecution, but only a tiny proportion is eligible for refugee status.

Which do you think is the greater evil – some people gaining refugee status who are not in fact eligible, or some people at genuine risk of violence and persecution being returned to their homelands?

A friend of mine was a refugee from Sudan in Africa. When her village was attacked and her husband killed she fled first over the border to Ethiopia. The refugee camp there had little food and water and locals regularly raped the women. Militias raided the camps and took teenagers and children to be child soldiers. Fearing for herself and her 8-year old son, she left that camp and eventually made her way to a somewhat safer one in Kenya. Do you think she should have stayed in Ethiopia?

If I had fled a civil war and was festering in a refugee camp in an impoverished country with no hope of returning home in the foreseeable future, I’d do anything I could to get myself and my family to a place where we could be safe and build a future. I don’t blame others for feeling the way I would feel, and acting the way I would probably act, in their situations.

@Rhian While your ideas are not that bad at first sight, the question remains - at whose expense? Look what happened in South Africa when their government decided to open the 'flood gates' to all other Sub Saharan refugees at the expense of the local population ! Why do you think countries have borders? There will always be better of and worse of people. There is a reason why certain places are less safe then others. And that reason is almost always man made. The reason is 'within man'. Do you seriously think if 50millions Indians, Pakistani, Subsaharan Africans will relocate to Australia, will Australia still be the paradise it is now? You know, my Grandfather said once: if you take two bottles, one full of wine while the other full of sewage. Take a drop from the sewage bottle and add it to the wine bottle, alternatively take a drop from the wine bottle and put it in the sewage bottle. Finally, take a step back, look at the 2 bottles and ask yourself what are you having in the end :-) There is a reason for EVERYTHING in life. The sooner you understand that the better our species will be. Friendly greetings from Bombay and happy new year to you all.

Personal safety is a valid issue, but it should not be confused with a policy which encourages people to endanger their lives as a means of increasing the chance of gaining asylum.

Is there anything decent about getting people to risk their lives to increase the chance of gaining asylum? What would happen if a TV network hosted a show which offered refugees Australian citizenship for drinking a bottle of water which might contain a lethal dose of cyanide? My guess is that the producers would spend a long prison sentence in protective custody and face a large amount of public hatred for the rest of their lives. Yet the current policy has resulted in the deaths of ~200 people in 2010, all in the attempt to increase their chance of gaining asylum.

Compassion in this instance is not about saying, "Look at what these poor buggers have been through. How can we refuse them asylum?". Instead, we should be asking, "Why are we encouraging people to risk their lives because of an idiotic policy?".