My flame wars are far more entertaining for outsiders than yours.

Settle Petals, this is getting nasty and you guys are making some valid points, so don't stoop too low. Firstly, considering the reports that are coming out, I think we can all validly question our treatment of asylum seekers. It's interesting that the men women and children are being separated out. Rightly so? After all, the children/infants had no decisions to make. Coming from the countries that they do, most of the women would have followed their husbands into the decision the husbands made. I don't think any wife in say, Iraq, would have had the luxury of saying either to her husband or the hierarchy, "Sorry honey, you try and make it in Australia, I have a great lifestyle and career happening here, I'll sell the house and follow". Petro Georgiou is rightly arguing it is time for accountability in handling asylum seekers. Any ministerial portfolio should fundamentally be accountable to its impact on its recipients. As tax payers, we would all argue that if this bastardisation was happening in the taxation portfolio, resulting in us missing out on our rights to a proper tax return, we'd all be screaming and calling for an inquiry (and rightfully). A little bit of compassion and accountability are long overdue and have nothing to do with opening any so called floodgates.

I love you guys.

Davo, I make no comment in this thread about the white South Africans you mention, other than to express an unqualified hope that the murderers of those among them who have been killed will be found and convicted under South African law.

I think it's gormless (or more likely, diversionary) to construe my earlier post as suggesting that I am, or should be, "concerned" about any and all "minorities", which I certainly do not.

So where would YOU have aligned yourself in 1938 Germany or Poland, Davo? Who did the greatest harms at that time? The "keep them out" advocates? or the ones who provided safe harbour?

An old pragmatist saying “If it ain’t broken – why mend it?”

Simply our current detention policy works perfectly well as it is. It detains those who would choose to usurp our national sovereignty for their own purposes and impose their anarchistic expectations upon the Australian population. That they involve women and children, in no way diminishes their abusive expectations.

The success of the policy is reflected in the number of boats which are not sailing from Indonesian ports to dump illegal migrants on Australian shores. If we stuff around with introducing maximum time limits on detainees or releasing their women and children freely into society I would ask the following questions–

How many more illegal migrants would be encouraged knowing their families be given free rein when or shortly after arriving on these shores?

Noting who will subsidise those women and children’s existence?

Illegal migrants are illegal migrants – playing politics and employing faux-compassion is low strategy which ignores the damage a flood of illegal migrants does in creating a underclass of easily exploitable pseudo-slave workers driven to participate in the black and criminal economies which have no requirement for work permits, tax registration or other social credentials which we are all (supposedly) participants to.

Well the argument here is that our current detention policy *doesn't* work perfectly well as it is. We're not arguing for change for the sake of change - we're saying that the current system is faulty in that it locks up for extended periods people who don't deserve to be locked up, and thus must be changed.

And lets stop being ridiculous about the intention of asylum seekers shall we? They didn't wake up one day and say "I know, let's usurp Australia's national sovereignty and impose anarchist expectations upon the Australian population!" Call me naive, but I'm guessing their thoughts were more along the lines of "I can't go on living in this hellhole dictatorship, please help me!".

***How many more illegal migrants...?

Very possibly not at all. According to this article [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_detention_in_Australia ] Mandatory detention was introduced in 1992 with a limit of 273 days of detention. It also says the 273 day limit was scrapped in 1994. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I'm interpretting this correctly then we've had our current rules regarding time in detention in place since 1994. This means that the threat of indefinite detention did nothing to deter all those boat people arriving on our shores between 1994 and the 2001 election. And anyway, punishing people who do get here as a deterent for people who may or may not try to get here is utterly ridiculous. You do not need to lock up people to stop illegal immigration, it can be done another way (and I suspect is being done another way, given the magical ineffectiveness of mandatory detention as a deterrent pre-2001).

***who will subsidise...?

Probably the same people who subsidise their existence in detention centers right now - Australian taxpayers. They could even subsidise themselves if they were given a visa that allowed them to work.

Illegal migrants are people, just like you and me. Read that again - these people you want to lock up experience reality just the same as you do. Would you deserve to be locked up if you were in their position?