Briar Rose,

As shown before, the pacific solution worked, the present system isn't.

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/BoatArrivals.gif

Pacific solution introduced 2001, removed 2008.

Rhian
"I also think that people coming here by boat are usually trying to escape extremism, not import it"
Largely true Rhian, though they may just as easily be escaping war, poverty, or persecution for BEING a fundamentalist, or simply for being in the wrong clan or specific fundamentalist sect.

Which is why there must be a system to determine which of the two our arrivals are, let in those who are moderate if nothing negative can be found against them- and the non-moderates must simply be deported back to their country of origin.

Yes, Shadow Minister, I read it in another place, but we reached an impasse there as we will here, because we don't have any agreement on what critieria make a policy "work."

Briar Rose,

I am not arguing about what criteria makes a policy successful or why the pacific solution worked, I am simply saying that the figures unequivocally indicate that it did work.

Given that there were no other push/pull factors that coincided, any claim to the contrary is pure fantasy.

Shadow Minister
I am not arguing about the success or otherwise of Pacific solution in this article so you're off topic.
Jennifer.

I read the story about conditions aboard Tampa and thought that it was yet another example of how facts were kept from people back then, as with the Iraq war, conditions in detention centres and the belated recognition that 98 percent of boat people were dinkum refugees rather than blow ins, as Ruddock had suggested.
Personally, I think a good way to stop refugee flows would be to get big powers out of third world countries where they engineer coups to put military thugs in as dictators to protect their own selfish business interests against the needs of the many, when they are not bombing the daylights out of the third world masses themselves.