If this legislation were to be truly fair, it should cut both ways – the government should be held by the courts to be liable to pay when found to be unduly challenging an applicant.

Perhaps the legislation could also include a damages element in favour of the immigrants detained, if the government was found to have had no good cause to delay or deny the application.

I would suggest that the bill referred to in the original piece is a rather extreme response to a rather extreme problem.

There has been for the last several years a sort of righteous hysteria evident in the debate surrounding onshore asylum claims. One element of this has been, at least to a layman, an insistence on the part of applicant persons’ representatives to pursue matters to the highest court possible as a matter of course.

Whether this is a real or simply a perceived trend, it is obvious that the proponents of the bill intend to address it. I see no particular problem with this. For far too long, desperate unauthorised arrivals have been kicked around the political footy field.

Aside from the costs to the courts and the state, and more importantly, there is the effect that legal challenges may have in prolonging the incarceration of immigration detainees. One cannot have it both ways: if detention is so horrible, how can the advocate of an asylum applicant allow their detention to continue through long, perhaps futile, legal challenges?

I agree with Marianne Dickie that the proposed new legislation is draconian and seems to be aimed at trying to reduce the sorts of embarrassment that the Government and the bureaucracy has faced in so many cases over recent years.

Having been involved in refugee issues - human rigts, resettlement, integration into communities for some 40 years as a voluntary worker in the community and having had a short stint working in refugee camps some 20 years ago I have been appalled by the deliberate politicisation of refugees for political gain over recent years.

I am also saddened to see the ill-informed prejudices of some of the posters to this forum, names who seem to have ill-informed and often illiterate and ignorant opinions on many forum subjects.

Please may we have a bit more tolerance and sensible debate on a very serious subject dealing with humnan lives

To respond to BotanyWhig’s comment that “One cannot have it both ways: if detention is so horrible, how can the advocate of an asylum applicant allow their detention to continue through long, perhaps futile, legal challenges?”

Some detainees are stateless, no country will accept them, so they are stuck in the system and the only option is to keep fighting through the courts.

For others, it’s a stark choice. If they return to country of origin they’ll likely be tortured and/or killed. That’s why they persevere with their asylum claims; some have been found to be refugees after more than 5 years in detention.

Also, there’ve been cases where the court has found in favour of the refugee but DIMIA/Commonwealth has appealed, during which time the person stays in detention. This is what happened in the case of a child locked up (with siblings and parents) for 5¼ years.

The 230 plus submissions to the senate inquiry into the Migration Act can be found at
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/legcon_ctte/migration/submissions/sublist.htm Have a look at numbers 51 and 151 for starters

Shoshana (on another forum discussion) and Sneekeepete have made the point that most asylum seekers here are genuine and that numbers of claims have not been large. This is true, but the inference cannot be drawn that this situation would continue in the future. In the first place, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants prefer to go to places where there is already a community of their fellow countrymen. (Timothy J. Hatton of the ANU has written on the correlation between asylum claims in Europe and the size of the existing asylum seeker community.) What this means is that arrivals can trickle in at a low level for a number of years and then take off when a critical mass is reached. Once the demand is there it will pay people smugglers to service a route. In the second place, there is no point in making a blatantly false claim when you are subject to mandatory detention.

Britain provides a good test case, as it is also surrounded by water and a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Arrivals were low in the the early 1970s, but in the 1997-2004 period there were 490,000 asylum claims. Actual numbers were much greater because asylum seekers and refugees are allowed to bring in spouses, fiances, children and in some cases parents and grandparents. Of the 1997-2002 asylum seekers 21% were granted asylum, including after appeal, 16% were given extraordinary leave to remain, some for humanitarian reasons, but most because it proved impossible to remove them. 13% were deported, and the other 50% nearly all stayed on illegally. Clogging up the Home Office and courts with endless appeals is an important delaying tactic, and the cost to the community is enormous. Britain spent 2 billion pounds on the asylum system in 2002 alone. These are Home Office figures reported by Migration Watch UK (www.migrationwatchuk.org).

One only has to look at the SWARMS of Africans who attacked the Spanish enclaves in North Africa, desperate to find 'assylum' ?
The simple fact is,

Accessability + Opportunity = swarms of people claiming assylum.

The suggestion that making it easier to enter Australia would NOT result in 'swarms' of people from other countries finding some 'fear of persecution' excuse to come here is ludicrous. It is not backed up by reality occurring in other places.

So, one is attracted to the conclusion that the efforts by all those who seek to make it easier to enter Australia by those who have bypassed the system is not based on compassion, but more of a political nature.

If the facts fly in the face of the claims by assylum advocacy groups (the author being a migration agent), then something is seriously wrong, with either the claims made by the advocates (and their motives) or perhaps we just are not seeing with our own eyes the things people will do when a country drops it's guard for a moment.
Perhaps we are all hallucinating ? or.. "Its a right wing conspiracy to make assylum seekers look bad" ?