Luwig

I was surprised that you me addressed in the same basket as Marilyn. We are not usually together. However we were at that point. I just wish that Marilyn would show the same recognition for Arab failures as she does for Israel and the same concern for Israel's rights and problems. Also a bit more accuracy would be good plus the language of a debater rather than that of the schoolyard.

But being held in low-security centres is surely not such a major problem and surely far better than razor wire detention and isolation.

Again Marilyn....

a mixture of truth and error.

'This is the cheapest place to get to'

How many on the Siev X were women and children coming to re-unite with fathers already here ?

How many fathers who are in fear of family persecution would abandon their families to this fate KNOWING FULL WELL that in Tribal societies, and particularly IRAQ..."IF they caint get you, they will get ya family"

So, this underlines the outright lie of these 'poor hapless Iraqis'.

SECOND.."If this is the cheapest place to get to"...what does THAT tell you about how MANY will be flooding to Australia as a preferred destination.

What does that ALSO tell you about the real issue.. "economic prospects or assylum"

There is a difference between CHEAPEST and SAFEST. Any person not considering safety is a fool, if for the sake of a bit more money they can actually arrive ALIVE.

Human rights records of countries who are signatories to and have ratified the UN convention is not relevant to the legal position only the emotional. I don't know what you mean by 'human rights' but I'd guess it means you feel they deserve a 5 star hotel rather than being detained. No, I'm not 'quite' serious there, but I think you get the idea.

You still have not responded to the 'broad policy' aspects of my post, claiming there will come a point where accepting people becomes unsustainable on MANY levels including the cultural and social.
I contend we have way past that point. You may disagree. That is what democracy is about.

I rest my case.

DB all of your arguments are totally spurious and if you had actually bothered to do some work over the years you would know it.

Before October 22 1999 every father who arrived without his family followed a centuries old tradition of hiding the wife and kids in a "safer" place before embarking on a dangerous journey. Would you dare to condemn the brave Jewish mums who threw their children from trains to save their lives? Then they would send for them as soon as possible after being granted permanent refugee status. This changed on 23 October 1999 because the number of asylum seekers was a whopping 921 that year. Of course the following year there were 4,000+ with most of them now being the wives and kids.

After all the waste of money with TPV's, denial of family reunion for up to 11 years for some, years in detention and so on, after the travesty of the Pacific "solution" and so on, including this particular tragedy - the wives and children are arriving safely on planes every day of the week.

The cost has been over $1 billion for jail on the mainland.

Now for the being swamped bit. From 1989 - 2006 about 70,000 asylum seekers have come here, 14,000 on boats.

During those years there has been - about 85 million tourists
over 2 million migrants nd so on.

Marilyn,

The fact that numbers may have been small and manageable to date is absolutely no guarantee that they will remain so in the future. Thirty years ago the UK also only got a few thousand asylum claims a year. Between 1997 and 2004 they had 490,000 such claims, not counting the immediate family members who are also allowed to come. In the US during the 1990s numbers had build up to around 100,000 refugees (plus 20,000 Cubans counting as such) plus 75,000 asylum claimants a year. (See the Don Barnett March 2002 backgrounder at the Center for Immigration Studies site (www.cis.org)).

Timothy J. Hatton of the ANU has written about the reasons for the build-up in numbers in the UK and other developed countries. Asylum seekers and illegal immigrants know that they are likely to need a support network while they establish themselves, so avoid places where there is no community of their co-ethnics. Destinations slowly become more attractive as the numbers build up and will be serviced by people smugglers when the demand is there. There are also chain migration effects as people join relatives and friends from the same village.

You would have more credibility if you were willing to deal with the tough questions instead of just chanting that it can't happen here. Getting to Australia is hardly high tech. The most recent group of Papuans did it in a dugout canoe. If numbers do blow out how do you propose to deal with it? How much damage to the environment and how much misery among disadvantaged Australians are you prepared to tolerate before closing the door? If numbers have to be limited then how do we weed out fraudulent claimants and ensure that they are deported? What about the morality of tempting people onto leaky, unseaworthy boats? Is it possible that guilt over this question has made it attractive to blame dastardly right-wing Australians for sinking SIEV X?

I know not what the truth is concerning SIEV X. I do notice that Col Rouge And Boaz appear to be in a fierce contest over which is the biggest A#$@hole.
I am prepared to give Col a narrow win on points.
What do other posters think?

Oh, and these are the same posters who preach ad nauseum about the virtues of "Australian values". What a joke.