>>Australia, behind as usual, has at least recognised the need for a regional solution.<<

Here in Germany, during the discussion after the recent Lampedusa tragedies, Australia, US and Canada are being offered as models on which to craft a legislation or regulation - going somehow beyond Dublin III - concerning immigration to Europe.

>>Kellie's impassioned call for a solution doesn't actually propose any solution<<

Exactly, the problem is not how to best voice one’s indignation - at boat people, at people-smugglers, at complacent Australians or Europeans, at this or that nation, political party or government. The real problem is how to find a workable solution. That will be easy neither in Australia nor Europe, where the problem is aggravated by internal inequalities (and envies) given by Europe's division into still souvereign nations.

>>The real problem is how to find a workable solution

I'd suggest the real problem George is too few understand that the solution was actually proposed a long time ago by Martin Luther King:
"There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.

What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims."

But what we also know is that the overwhelming majority actually prefer smaller families when armed with the information and means to control their fertility and further, that lower fertility levels are a pre-requisite to economic prospoerity. Tunsia and Botswana are two amazing success stories in this respect.

The solution however, needs to be win-win and end to end as proposed by the Stable Population Party: http://www.populationparty.org.au/

Cohenite: The great bulk of refugees in the world and to Australia are Muslims. Islam is inimical to Western secular societies. The experience in Europe is conclusive that Islam represents a threat to the social, legal and political structure of Western nations.

Going on what has happened in the United States and the European Union, we could expect the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries, to spearhead The Istanbul Process : its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law . See

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2734/criminalize-free-speech

There is one, and only one, reason for "asylum seekers", Kellie Tranter. There are 100 million new people being added to the world population every year and all of that increase is coming from Third world countries where they breed like flies and don't care.

You must have lived in your ivory tower suburb for too long if you can't figure out hat Australia will turn into a third world country ourselves if we took in only 1% of these people every year.

The Australian government has a mandate, nay, an INSTRUCTION form its electorate to stop the boats, and no amount of moral posturing is going to change that. As our experience with Vietnamese and Lebanese has shown, refugees make poor citizens but great drug pushers and drive by shooters. As an Australian, your first priority should be towards your own people and the society you live in.

>>smaller families when armed with the information and means to control their fertility and further, that lower fertility levels are a pre-requisite to economic prospoerity.<<

I am sure, Matt Moran, that this suggestion of a WORKABLE solution to their problem will delight e.g. the Somali refugees in Lampedusa who just survived a capsized boat, and before that escaped Islamist thugs in their home country. Similarly the European (and Australian) legislators looking for a workable solution that would allow for a humane treatment of these people without at the same time be seen in Africa and Middle East as an invitation to come and improve their living conditions in numbers that Europe (and Australia) could not handle.

>>I am sure, Matt Moran, that this suggestion of a WORKABLE solution to their problem will delight e.g. the Somali refugees in Lampedusa who just survived a capsized boat, and before that escaped Islamist thugs in their home country...

George, the issue here is that it's precisely because the warnings on overpopulation have been ignored that these situations are getting progressively worse. Bear in mind that boat arrivals have been going on for decades so this is not a new issue and aren't going to go away anytime soon.

Further, boat arrivals are escalating dramatically. Population pressures invariably splinter along cultural lines as very few see things from a population perspective - after all, the major institutionalized religions have been engaging in population control for millennia by poisoning the water on family planning efforts - this of course hasn't been helped by earlier governments engaging in draconian policies on one hand, and other governments using boat arrivals as a political football.

The problem now is that the issue has been left unchecked for so long, that the numbers are becoming unmanageable and the vulnerable people in the wealthier countries increasingly neglected. Subsequently, you end up in a situation that we have - between a rock and a hard place.

But there is no solution that doesn't start with addressing population pressures. To give some relative costing, for what it costs to process a single person in a developed country, thousands can immediately be helped in situ (and subsequently orders of magnitude more).

Working in this way firstly gives hope in these countries where for the most part none is available, secondly, it has been shown how quickly purchasing power increases with declining fertility rates (and we are talking from 6 children down to 2). This coupled with current programs in place would start to make a difference very quickly. Of course it would have been better if world leaders had acted decades ago but far too many think it's development that lifts people out of poverty when we now know that it's the lowering of fertility rates.