What a stupid piece this is Duncan!

You write a long preamble and then only hint at your actual point, which is I guess that somehow Australia is wrong in the way that we treat boat arrivals form Indonesia.

Clarity and simplicity should be your watch words when writing about politics and diplomacy not hints and implications as you have offered here.

< We cannot show leadership because we've abandoned that ideal. We cannot teach ethics because we've been gutted of that quality through our inability to fix the asylum seeker problem that has killed hundreds and brought anguish to thousands. >

Yes indeed Duncan. But it would have helped your argument immensely if you’d offered a solution to this mess.

Why is it that I feel you would completely condemn any suggested solution?

You’d denounce Nauru, Malaysia, TPVs and turning the boats back, am I right?

If you’d seen one or more of these things as solutions, then you would have said so in the article, surely.

Look, the solution is obvious. Give a date after which no more arrivals will be tolerated. Then turn back the boats.

Yes that would be a dangerous business for all concerned. But it would only involve a few boats, after which they’d STOP COMING! The door would be decisively closed.

Asylum seekers would then stop using Indonesia as a intermediary. Thus, this would be the best policy for upholding good relations with Indonesia.

No more deaths at sea. No more people smuggling. No more terrible anguish.

Our government should then start to very strongly promote our offshore refugee programs and international aid programs that address refugeeism, telling the people exactly what we do, in order to demonstrate that Australia is and always has been a very humanitarian country on the world stage.

Well said Ludwig

Turn the boats around use Naru and this would reduce the amounts of boats that are trying to come here and reduce the risk to any lives.

THe people smugglers see Australia as a soft touch at the moment, and that is because we are. There is nothing wrong with a country being firm and in control of who gets into their country and how they get there, that shows loyalty and respect to those who are tax paying citizens, and where their money is being spent and on what.
We can still be and always will be known as the country with a soul, because we do look after the under dog and we do care about other human beings, but it should not be at the expense of our intelligence and or to people who are already living here and who are doing it tough.
What annoys hard working Australians is, when money is being spent housing feeding clothing these people, and we have 3rd 4th generation Australians living in tents, or caravans because they cant get work, or cant afford to pay high rent, our older generation cant afford to turn on their lights, their is miss guided loyalty in this country.
We have to get this balance right, and charity begins at home people.

Duncan
Your piece starts with a virtually unknown and unpublicised hookup between two educational institutions which you spin into Australia lecturing Indonesia about ethics.. in fact we are doing nothing of the sort. That would apply if a government minister was making statements. The individual academics can say what they like without being accused of double standards, as they are not involved in public policy.

You also don't say what Australia is doing wrong on the boat people, although it seems to have escaped your attention that the government's policy on that issue has collapsed recently.

The only solution is to wait out the 18 months, after which we will have ethical leadership again.

Your call for "Shame" is nonsense. How would the electorate have foreseen the absolute abandonment of principle by our present PM, and her ability, through corruption, to thwart the will of the people.

Like Whitlam, this woman is a temporary besmirching of our otherwise wholesome image.

The real shame belongs to morons who plan on getting richer in making their fellow Australians poorer by calling for immigration including more boat people INTO poor communities away from THEIR elite homes.

These people tend to be upper class business people or social undergraduate climbers who depend on big low class markets underwritten by extremely aspirational and aggressive immigrants.

The Rich persons refugee Bottom line: Let in boat people after 30 days in detention so they can make OUR small very vocal minority of Australians rich. BUT not in OUR backyards and make sure that all the social and infrastructure cost blowouts MUST be passed onto poorer communities. These costs must include higher electricity, road, education and health costs while we the rich get big discouints from stupid entrepreneurial State Governments.

Only in Australia can morons rule social mores and beggar their fellow citizens while getting filthy rich. The last nation to espouse such fraudulent NATIONALISM and BLEEDING HEART commercialism was NAZI Germany.

When business people PAY the added infrastucture that THEIR boat refugees demand and when they build large refugee communities in Carss Park and the North Shore for refugee communities to enjoy, WE the majority will show them and their phony humanitarianism some respect.

Until then ---these Q&A frequenting morons had best find some other way to make money!
The MAJORITY of Australians are putting these cowards and their AAA sucking Political backers on NOTICE.

The only leadership lacking is Gillard's and her dysfunctional Government. The Australian people do have a morality unsurpassed by anyone in our region. We once had leaders who reflected that. Now we don't.

As for the boats, it needs to be emphasied to the Indonesians that it is in their interest to help 'turn back the boats', as it was last time.

Australias current policies are acting as a magnet. They have not only drawn 20,000 people to Australia but have also drawn many times that number into Indonesian. Where they are a blight for the Indonesians and because of their Muslim undercurrents they cannot throw them out. They need a deterrent. That is a major problem for the Indonesians and they blame our government's policies for that predicament.

Turning boats back will be effective with Indonesian help. With a firm and persuasive Australian leadership it would be an all to persuasive argument for the Indonesians not to accept. It solves our problem andf theirs.

Shipping a few hundred to Malaysia won't change anything for the Indonesians.

I often wonder where our expert's and our journalist's brains are? IO know labor and their spruikers don't have any.

We do not get to send away asylum seekers, full stop. And we are certainly in no position to lecture anyone about ethics considering our love of wars that produce those refugees.

Duncan forgot one teensy little thing about East Timor though - our 24 years of utter silence while Indonesia slaughtered 180,000 people or starved them to death while Fraser and Peacock recognised the illegal occupation and our defence of East Timor in 1999 was no such thing, we didn't want them to have independence at all, just some form of autonomy.

Rewriting history does not help.

And with a constitution that is still frankly racist against all but white people we can't claim any high moral ground anywhere.

Former leaders might have invested heavily in human rights laws and conventions but we just threw them all straight in the bin.

Marilyn Shepherd,
What do you suggest should done to stem the flow of refugees to Indonesia ?

Marilyn Shepherd
<We do not get to send away asylum seekers, full stop. And we are certainly in no position to lecture anyone about ethics considering our love of wars that produce those refugees.

Millions of refugees are running from wars that aren’t caused by the West.

The Sri Lankan refugees (the Tamils) were running from 20years of fighting the Sri Lankan government and the Sri Lankan people for a Separatist Tamil State in Sri Lanka, which is a bit rich since they were accepted as migrants into Sri Lanka 200years or more ago. They wanted to carve off a piece of Sri Lanka for themselves to rule once they had enough numbers. This is Tribal Territorial Warfare and that is what the biggest percentage of refugees are running from as well as famine in overpopulated countries.

Timor is another example of Tribal Territorial Warfare.

Afghanistan is another example of TTW with the Pakistani Taliban coming over the border into Afghanistan and trying to take control of Afghanistan and the Afghanistan people.

Palestine is another example of 100’s of thousands of refugees, this time the Jewish tribe flooding into a country peopled by the Palestian Tribe. We can all see the result of this mass inflow of one tribe onto another tribes territory can’t we? A bloody
territorial dog fight that could yet plunge the world into World War three.

If I had more space I could point out how World War1 and World War2 started out with acts of aggression and violence between 2tribes over territory and how various countries because of alliances were pulled in to those disputes, causing two major world wars, but that would take another post.

Why do you want to set up those same tribal situations here when it is clear that this is causing ethnic cleansing and civil wars across the world resulting in many of the refugees who have been driven from their homes and land

You don't have the right to dictate that millions of Australians should jeopardize the future of their children by accepting all refugees.

"And with a constitution that is still frankly racist against all but white people we can't claim any high moral ground anywhere."

Complete and utter drivel.

The constitution is NOT racist:

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3796992.html

The proposed amendment to the Constitution will, however, make the Constitution racist:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/constitutional-fiddling-brings-inherent-danger/story-e6frgd0x-1226217634091

cohenite,

To be fair, here is the article to which Windschuttle was replying:

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3792080.html

Have to agree with cohenite.

How on Earth can you have provisions that give special “recognition” (status) to one racial group and it not be racist?
It never ceases to amaze how those on the left can in one breath rant about racism and in the next seek to further it.

And it’s no mere coincidence that those pushing such provisions are in league with those who are seeking to open our borders to all comers.There’ a method in their madness.

As there is no law in the world that says we can dictate who enters or leaves any country what do people suggest we do about the tiny number of asylum seekers who transit Indonesia?

We already pay tens of millions to jail them, have them forcibly deported or tortured to death in Indonesia - it's not our country though so what do people suggest?

We start a war maybe so they stop letting the victims of our two dirty wars escape?

@Marilyn,

<<so what do people suggest?>>

Well here’s a few for starters.

Let’s get SERIOUS about border control.

1) Stop, giving blanket approval to illegals.
2) Stop, releasing smugglers under all sorts of loopy excuses.
3) Start, finding something for all our underemployed activists to more usefully occupy their time (one possibility: a national TAFE scheme that allows them to learn tiddlywinks)

Poirot; the Windschuttle link is to his response to the Brull article you have linked to.

The Constitution is currently racially neutral; it does not mention any race and unlike Marcia Langton and Megan Davis's interpretation of Section 51 (xxvi) as allowing detrimental as well as positive government action under this section, the proper and historical intepretation is that only positive action is allowed.

Activists like Ms Langton and Davis and Brull would claim that this lack of explicit positive bias towards aboriginals is racist.

Legally this is a nonsense. You do not correct a disadvantage which does not exist by creating the very thing you are objecting to, in this case racism by specifically referring to a race.

Marilyn Shepherd
I wish you’d take a more in depth look at who is actually coming to this country and why. For a start all the Tamils who were coming here recently were not fleeing from any war involving America or Australia. The Afghanistan people aren’t coming here fleeing our army (unless they are Taliban with fake papers, which wouldn’t surprise me)they are actually fleeing their own crazy muslim leaders and the Taliban, looking for life in a country known for it’s freedom and lack of tolerance for crazy fundamentalist religious ideas be they Christian,Muslim, Hindu or The Orange People. This is what they are running from.
If they are so scared of our Army people then why are they running to the place where those same Army people are based. Not too frightened of us are they? Can’t run to us fast enough. I wouldn’t run to the country of an army I was frightened of. Your statements don’t stand up to any in-depth scrutiny.
All these terrified- of- us -refugees are running straight to us, voting with their feet.

Well said CHERFUL

And WOW what a place to run to,,,, what a bunch of suckers we all are.
The accommodation in the detention centres that we place these people in would be considered 5star compared to where a lot of them have been living in their own countries, the do gooders out there in our society have got to stop this bleeding heart BS and accusations of Australia being racist, what a load of rot. I would like to get housing, food, money, clothing and medical treatment for free, who wouldnt,, So what a great place to run to.
What about Indonesia, a boat in distress a few kilometres of their coast and they dont go to assist,, nooooo good old Australia does all the dirty work,, what I want to know is, what does Indonesia have over Australia, why is our government so scared of upsetting Indonesia for gods sake, we have become a joke,,,,, IF YOU DONT GO ABOUT GETTING INTO THIS COUNTRY THE RIGHT WAY YOU GO BACK TO YOUR OWN OR FROM WHERE YOU ORIGINATED FROM AND DO IT THE RIGHT WAY,,, NO IF'S OR BUT'S.
WHAT are we trying to prove to the rest of the world, that we are a bunch of martres, the image we are portrayin at the moment is that we are a soft touch and bit soft in the head.

I have been saying for sometime that the Indonesians cannot refuse
entry of turned around boats or people rescued at sea in the Indonesian
Rescue area. Others say the the Indonesians will refuse them re-entry.
Well it seems the opposition has finally woken up and read the SOLAS
legislation and have discovered that it really is as I say.

The SOLAS legislation says that people rescued must be taken to the
nearest convenient port.
It is about time the government obeyed the law and returned the boat
people to Indonesia. Any other action is illegal.