What garbage Loudmouth, Do you have the $40,000 or more each, to support people for the rest of their lives? Don't forget health care & education, for basically illiterate subsistence farmers, who can never find a place here.

If you don't have, I sure don't have, so forget it.

I don't give a damn where any of these people go, just as long as it is not here. I am totally compassioned out. It is foolish unsustainable compassion that is going to destroy western civilisation.

Hi Has been,

Certainly taking refugees is a stop-gap measure, of course - until the problems are resolved at source. Until that happens everywhere, there will be refugees. Taking in refugees is - in that sense - always a second-best option. But it may be necessary, if it is pretty obvious that the situation in their home country is NOT going to be resolved.

On a slightly different topic, paying people-smugglers to turn their boats around could be a brilliant inspiration: for a few thousand dollars, perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars all-up, the government could keep turning the boats around.

So who is going to get on another boat if they suspect the captain will take the money and simply bring them back to Indonesia ?

It might even work in the Mediterranean. It's a terrible option for those refugees, but right or wrong, it might work.

Joe

One of the dali lama monks
said on TV the other night
that "he feared the Rohingya would cut his throat.

He must be basing this fear on some experiences he knows of.
It would have been imformative reporting, if the reporter had asked him why he felt like that.

The reporters need to ask ordinary people from both sides
in countries just what they perceive to be the problem.
So we can get a better idea of why the conflict is happening.
The reporting is too much on the surface with no indebt interviewing. A real fault with the Western media.

Yes, Loudmouth, it probably would work. I was reading today about Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Plassey, which basically cemented British control over India. Clive had 3,000 troops, and the Indian guy on the other side had a coalition with 12,000 troops. Clive simply paid the other guy's allies, so when the battle came, they stood neutral, and after Clive won, they shared in the spoils. Low and cunning perhaps, but it worked.

As for paying one's fair share of the refugees, it is hard to know what that would be. I also tend to doubt you would accept your quota being the sum of the total expenditure on refugees, divided by the number willing to pay for it.

On the other hand, if that was an option - i.e. sponsor pays - then no doubt the whole thing could be administered at a small fraction of the costs with government's insanely expensive refugee policies.

However there's another factor to be considered, and that is the negative externalities that the sponsor would not cover. Muslims by definition consider the supreme moral example to be a man who committed armed robbery, mass murder, slavery, rape and paedophilia.

Australia and Australians in the past have simply assumed, because we were being liberal and modern, that therefore the immigrants we bring in are too. It has now become increasingly clear that that is not the case, and the Muslims are a very problematic case in point.

Why have the Rohingyas come all this way, do you think, when Muslim Bangladesh was just across the border to their west? Saudi Arabia is a very rich country, and just on the other side of India? How come they didn't go there?

Hi JDJ,

A bit pig-ignorant, with the greatest respect. Let me know when the first Rohingya jihadist is suspected of turning up in Syria or Iraq.

Yes, They may be Muslim, but in all these years past that has merely been a way to differentiate them - as an under-class to the Buddhists, who are not necessarily as pure as the driven snow.

As for going to Bangla Desh, well, they are not Bangla, are they, they are Burmese, Rohingya, they would be looked down on very much by Bangla Deshis, which may not put them in a good position, economic or political, if they fled to Bangla Desh. And even more so, how would they fare if they tried to get into Saudi Arabia ? Idiotic suggestions, with the greatest respect.

They do seem to meet the criteria of 'refugee' in the extreme - so why not make special provision for a few thousand of them ? Would that kill us ? Yes, maybe they might have trouble fitting in, but that's in the very nature of 'refugee', after all.

Meanwhile, surely our government should do (and probably is doing) as much as it can, in concert with other SE Asian countries, to resolve the core issues that have created the problem for the Rohingya.

Joe

Muslims account for only 4.2% of the population of Thailand, but an ongoing insurgency by Muslims have claimed over 4000 lives since 2004. Buddhist priests, policeman and teachers have been targeted for assassination, and Buddhist temples attacked and burned.

The situation is becoming worse with the rise of militant Islam with foreign fighters with military and bomb making training now entering the fight. It is hardly surprising that Thailand does not want any more Muslims.

The principle that those born of a country are nationals does not always apply to ethnic or religious minorities who consider their ethnic or religious uniqueness to be their primary identity. The war in Iraq would stop today if every combatants in Iraq considered themselves "Iraqis" first and "Sunnis", Shiites, "Turkmen", "Kurds" and "Yazidis" second.

When a Muslim Insurgency in Australia is taking 400 lives a year, some of them teachers, even the Australian Teachers Federation might get inside with the Australian government and figure out that importing Muslims for any reason is insane.

The biggest laugh is the silence of Aung San Suu Kyi. This sainted moralist has kept her mouth shut because she knows she will lose the support of her own people if she ever stuck up for Muslims. Muslims are thoroughly hated by the Buddhists, and for good reason. When a primarily pacifist religion meets an expansionist and primarily military aggressive religion, the results are not pretty for the pacifists. The Burmese consider the "Rohingya" as simply the thin edge of the wedge for the ever encroaching violent Muslim hordes who will never stop expanding into Buddhist areas with catastrophic results for Buddhist society.

The Buddhists have woken up and are deterring Muslim immigration and even encouraging Muslims to leave and go back to Muslim areas. The Australians are still living in lotus land and thinking that Muslims deserve to be helped and will be gratefull if they are helped. THe fact that Muslims are three times over represented in incarceration rates than anybody else should dispel that myth.