rache, your characterisation of refugees as date eating, desert dwelling "foreign terrorist devils" was somewhat amusing but in the current climate, the irony of your attempt at satire may have missed the mark.

Bozzie, no, the Nauru experience can be isolated as a cause. When equally situated refugees are compared - the only difference being that one group entered Australia via Nauru - and the Nauru group has significantly worse outcomes in terms of their physical and mental health such that a SEPARATE program is needed to address those additional needs (a partially govt funded program, not lefty bleeding heart blahblahblah...) I'd say it is fairly reasonable to conclude that Nauru has been a significant causal factor.

All this talk of tropical paradises is absolute tosh. Nauru is basically a calcified hunk of coral in the middle of the Pacific where all fresh food needs to be flown in and temperatures are extreme. It's Woomera with water, only more isolated. Some paradise. Why do you think Nauru is so in need of the aid dollars that have been promised in return for copping it sweet when we lob boatloads of refugees their way?

None of this answers some key questions:

Why should developing states such as Nauru and PNG (Manus Island) bear the burden of processing Australia's refugees (especially where, in PNG's case, they are coping with up to 10000 Papuan refugees on their border)?
Why should any other state be expected to resettle any of the refugees recognised by this process of Australia's design?
There have been some intense emotions raised here and the 'Pacific Solution' is an enormously costly exercise, seemingly disproportionate to the tiny numbers of asylum seekers Australia receives. I'm genuinely interested - what, specifically, are people afraid of?

If the same Papuans flew into Australia they would not spend one day locked up, they would not be vilified as demons and they would be granted protection.

It is illegal to punish a tiny few people because they can't go to the Indonesian authorities and ask for visas to leave. We have seen last night that the Indonesian navy is going out and sinking the damn boats. Maybe these are the same cops that Australia trained to sink boats for us.

Why don't you folk tell us what causes this barbaric knee jerk reaction to what is a humanitarian cause?

We don't get to say to the world "OK if you fly here from China, Russia, Israel, Peru, Brazil, Lebanon and other places, even if you are war criminals (as the Sydney Morning Herald found) we will let you work and live in the community without penalty."

But if you are fleeing the brutes who slaughtered 183,000 East Timorese you will be turned away.

It is madness, nothing to do with border protection and certainly inhuman treatment of human beings. Some of you don't seem to understand that basic premise - we are talking about human beings in trouble.

I wonder though if you really believe your own vile cruelty or if you are school kids telling yourselves ghost stories to titillate yourselves.

Will the real Boaz David please stand up - the one who posted here a while ago seems a million miles away form the one we have come to know and love.
First he "cussed" - I have never seen him do that before - and second he refrained from any, I repeat any references to the Bible - My gob is well and truly smacked - I can only assume that the real Christian BD has been kidnapped and this other person has assumed his identity.

Another feature of his last post was that it was bereft of any concern about his fellow man and his wacky assumption that the experience of those incarcerated bears any resemblance to what I assume was his self imposed exile some where in the middle of no where. I guess he lived in some doubt as to how long he might be able to stay where he was but I figure he was also free to leave if he chose to

I also find it incomprehensible that people can be so sanctimonious about mental illness and the circumstances that might bring it about.
I dont for a minute think every single person incarcerated decompensates into a depressive illness or a psychosis - but I am damn sure a good number do just that.

It still befuddels me that people gete so upset about this issue - the real problem is not the fact that people want to come here but how we mismanage them once they arrive.

The process has so little to recommend it even as a means to control those who come to our shores - it is grossly inefficient, horrendously expensive, and for those who dont like our newcomers it fosters a climate of sympathy for them based on the fact they are treated so stupidly, it clearly has not discouraged people from flaooting over when the mood takes them and it represents cruel and unusual punishment.

Marilyn,
I think the reaction to most issues (including this one) is based on the historical political and economic strategy of using fear as part of everyday life.

Every day the media tells us what to be afraid of and reasons why we should dislike people – from the shonky builder to the welfare cheat to the potential terrorist.

Stories oscillate between heroes and villains and use our own emotions to control what we think and ultimately, what we believe.
(I bet that Today Tonight or ACA will include at least one of these stories tonight.)

Just like Crassus used the manufactured fear of Spartacus to take away the freedom of Romans, and Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to pass his Enabling Act, and Bush used 911 to implement his Patriot Act, we are all too keen to surrender our rights to politicians who purport to protect us from what we are made to fear – even if it’s just women and children in leaky boats.

If the immigration issue was based on a pure moral judgement alone, the outcome could be much different and if more people spoke out about the Reichstag Fire, then WW2 probably would never have started.

"Right is always right, even if no-one’s doing it and wrong is always wrong, even if everybody’s doing it."

Wobbles:

This isn't simply about irrational hysteria. You need to take a look at what is happening in Europe and North America where they have policies much along the lines that the refugee advocates want. Numbers did not explode immediately because people prefer to go to places where their co-ethnics have already settled. This is so that they have a support network. However, some always do come, mostly genuine refugees who are probably pretty desperate. Once that ethnic community exists then chain migration occurs, and the destination becomes more and more attractive. The people smugglers add it to their routes. Timothy J. Hatton of the ANU has written on this.

As the numbers build up it becomes less and less about refugees and more and more about illegal immigrants. The Migration Watch UK website gave some figures for the 1997-2004 period: 490,000 asylum claims (not counting dependants; these include spouses, children and in some cases parents and grandparents). From 1997-2002 21% of claimants were granted asylum, including after appeal, 16% were granted special leave to remain, sometimes for humanitarian reasons, but usually because it was not practical to remove them, 13% were deported, and nearly all the rest stayed on illegally. Deporting illegal immigrants who arrive without papers is often impossible. They tie up the system for years with appeals; they hide with the connivance of corrupt businessmen and politicians; it is frequently impossible to prove where they came from, and home countries often refuse to cooperate with deportation.

The illegal immigrants depress wages and working conditions and compete with poor locals for housing and public services. In the end your country becomes just another Third World hellhole, instead of them fixing up their own countries as they did in South Korea and Taiwan. I reserve my compassion for disadvantaged Australians, including the mentally ill Australians who are living on the streets. Once our own poor are looked after we can worry about also helping people outside.

Georgie, should Australia even have a policy on refugees? Apart from one of accepting them? It seems that we haven't even agreed on this most basic of questions. I say that of course we should, and this policy should have strict controls that only allow in legitimate people fleeing the real possibility of extreme persecution or death. After a fair & impartial hearing of the matter these people who are deemed illegal should have no further access to taxpayer funded lawyers and our legal system that they then proceed to play like a fiddle for years.

I'm not sure whether you and Marilyn just want them released into the community while their applications are processed, or automatically grant them asylum upon arrival. Here's my fear Georgie; that if we follow your option we would have people floating (or flying) up on our doorstep in huge numbers. We would allow a huge influx of unskilled people into this country with no prospects of employment or assimilation. I fear a real growth of a large underclass which is already well under way in this country. Just look at Europe's problems which are only going to get much worse.

I would be interested to hear your reasons why you think this wouldn't happen, or indeed why it wouldn't be a bad thing if it did, or why the damage to our country is worth the saving of allegedly persecuted people.