"So the future of our children and the planet is a concern outside the scope of this election for the old parties ?"

The future of our children -- and the planet -- is best served by making sure they live in a nation with a functioning economy, where their parents and grandparents can accumulate enough wealth to give them a decent education and a good start in life. Attempting to impoverish one generation is never a good way to enrich the next one. Even if 'anthropogenic global warming' were real -- and it isn't -- children's welfare is still a damn sight more secure in the hands of their parents than in those of the government.

An interesting article in today's Fairfax News can be found here:
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/revealed-80cm-sea-rise-warning-20130819-2s7dt.html
I like the quip about deep fried eggplant. Reminds me of a Senator who recently claimed that he had run over better rabbits than some fellow members in his chamber.
How much of our reaction to undocumented refugees stems from our now nation wide Islamophobia? We seem to have some insecure cannons rolling around on our ship of state. On-shore processing with an understandable insistence on showing a valid ID to facilitate security checks and a health check - after that, what's the big problem?
Refugees have been shown to boost the nation, and these new undocumented arrivals would too. Demonizing them becomes a self-fulfilling exercise, not unlike an own goal. Pretty stupid, when you really think about it.

The author raises the moral issue surrounding Australia' treatment of refugees. But there is a much more fundamental moral issue that is not being raised. It concerns the reasons why there are so many refugees in the world, including those trying to enter Australia to stay.
The fact is that the present world order, comprised of so called sovereign nation states, each claiming the right to do whatever it likes behind national borders, often in flagrant breach of fundamental universal human rights, is the real cause of the refugee crisis. Trying to deal with the end result of the chaos and abuses of a divided world, resulting in the dislocation of masses of people from their homes, is just too little too late and constitutes an avoidance of the real moral issues. We need a world order that prevents the mass flow of refugees in the first place. We need a peaceful world order that respects all people's human rights and which has the mechanisms to achieve this.

Utopian? I don't think so. It requires urgent action at the global level to achieve a more unified global institutional architecture, combined with an acknowledgment that the sovereign nation state has had its day and that we need a new, much more unified global order in which states are merely the component parts. This is now a global imperative. The world is increasingly one global village inhabited by one human race. The time is right to bring the present world order into line with the emerging realities of the modern age, otherwise we are all going to suffer the consequences.

Lyn would do well to visit the refugee camps where people have been waiting for years to come here legally. Their are billions of desperate people out their. Not to be seletive is plain dumb.

There really should be a law that prevents silly little girls going to university, studding make believe disciplines & having their heads filled with all this rubbish about the poor underprivileged/misunderstood/illegals & what have you.

Todays refugee is yesterdays oppressor, who lost the last fight. A tent city, run & paid for by the UN, our money anyway, is OK. The losers can stay there called refugees, until their side win a fight. Then they can go home, to be replaced by their previous oppressors, now called refugees. It is the way the world works, haven't they read any English history?

You only have to look at the goings on in Egypt to see how it works. Muslim brotherhood, anti Muslim brotherhood, the seesaw goes up & down, first one on top, then the other. The only sure thing about it is, no matter what the result, there will be some pretty nasty militant people calling themselves oppressed refugees at the end of it.

The only other surety is people like Lyn will be crying for them, & trying to impose them on us. Yep these Lyns will say we can integrate those people who can't even integrate with their own kind here in an entirely different form of civilisation.

We have to keep these bleeding hearts to be, out of universities, they are mixed up enough as it is. The only safe place for them is in the kitchen barefoot & pregnant. Give them something to occupy their mind & time, & the world will be a better place for everyone.

Dear Hasbeen,

Talking about women and having their heads filled
with "nonsense" as you claim.

Do you know why women in Burma after centuries of following
their men, now walk ahead of them?

I found this question on the web.

The answer was given that:

"There are many unexploded land mines since the war."

Education, does help.