So tell me what justifies the millions and millions already spent on detention centres or bribing Naru to take refugees when it would have cost tax payers far less to have refugees in our communities?

Do the maths. Do some research. Think for yourself.

$72 million for the camps in Nauru,

$24 million for the detention centre in Papua New Guinea.
In addition, over $230 million has been wasted on building detention centres in the past 3 years.

Thats a hell of lot of money just to prop up some old protectionist and racist ideologies from the last century.

Alan Anderson justifies an inhumane approach to assessment of refugees by saying it has halted the influx of boat people. Inhumane treatment of many people has been justified throughout history through such spurious reasoning, eg Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews claiming that Jews held too much economic power.

The OLO poll on Mandatory Detention speaks volumes. Clearly many Australians believe that there is a fairer way to manage asylum seekers than holding them in concentration camps. This poll has been a source of solace to me, given the vehemence of many far right posters to this forum.

We have managed boat people humanely in the past without the catastrophic results people such as Anderson claim. Time to return to a fair, humane approach.

I think the only way of convincing our wonderfully compassionate Rainier and Trinity of the merits of mandatory detention would be to have boatloads of white Poms, Americans and Zimbabweans land on our northern shores. I wonder who the rascists would be then? At the very least the silence would be deafening.

Bozzie, Good point but even if this happened I don’t think you'd be lining up with every right wing lunatic in the country declaring them criminals, cue jumpers and terrorists.

My point is that too much of the debate has gone to the very extremist levels of hysteria and the call for caution is being used by these extremists to garner the support of much more compassionate people.

Rainier - whilst not necessarily being terrorists, they most certainly would be breaking our immigration laws and I'd be the first to call them cue-jumpers. Although anyone wanting to escape the opressive regime of New Labor deserves all our sympathy.

If our aim is to stop boat people illegally coming to this country then the governments strategy has worked. It's not very compassionate to encourage people to risk their lives in leaky rotten boats - The SIEV X tragedy illustrates that.

What the SIEV X taught us is that our government is capable of mounting a covert sabotage operation in Indonesia specifically to deter others thinking of coming to Australia by boat from doing so.
It mounted this operation because the policy of mandatory detention in very inhumane conditions had manifestly failed as a deterrent.
The question is: since the sinking of the SIEV X has apparently succeeded in stopping the flow of boat people, why continue with the discredited policy of mandatory detention?
Dare I suggest that the vested interest of a certain American corporation specialising in the imprisonment business would be affected by closing the detention centres, thus imperilling a source of funding for the Liberal Party? No! That would be too cynical!