Divergence:

Sunfire is on the right track.

Australia already has a refugee cap and he doesn't need to ask for one. DIMA uses quotas for all migration schemes, including refugees and has done for years. In round figures, it’s about 12,000 places a year– including asylum seekers, people from refugee camps, and special humanitarian visas – little changed since 1996 - though since then we've become a lot wealthier and could easily take more refugees.

According to DIMA annual reports in 1996-7 the govt made available 12,000 places. In 2005-6, 12,339. These are the targets DIMA is expected to achieve – no more. DIMA gets many times these applications annually.

Second, you imply our situation’s like Britain’s, where only 20% of those seeking asylum had genuine claims. Perhaps the Australian figures might be more relevant to your argument.

here, 90% of asylum seekers have genuine claims. See Frank Brennan (“Tampering with asylum”, UQP 2003, p.113). Brennan is well known, adjunct fellow at ANU, and reliable. The quote: “With the fourth wave of boat people, mandatory detention was imposed on a group of whom 90% were proved to be refugees” Fourth wave, means 1999-present.

Robert Manne supports that in Quarterly Essay (Issue 13 2004 p.89). Manne says there were nearly 10,000 asylum seekers. By 2004, he says 9000 had been given temporary protection visas. I’m presuming these were refugee visas. DIMA is notoriously tight-fisted with its visas, as my overseas postgraduate students know. DIMA puts the onus on you to prove you deserve a visa. Even then, DIMA might not give you one, unless you appeal.

Brennan also gives numbers arriving by boat here, they're nothing like the figures you give for the UK - but I'm out of space.

BriscoRant,

I don't have a problem with 12,000 people or even 20,000, just with an open-ended commitment, "however many God sends", which seems to be what Sunfire wants. I also accept (and haven't denied) that most of the asylum seekers who come to Australia are genuine refugees, but believe that mandatory detention may be responsible for this difference between Australia and the UK. Paying thousands of dollars to a people smuggler to get to Australia isn't worth it, if your phony claim is going to be rejected and you will never get out of a dentention camp except to go home. Britain's problem would have been far more manageable if only the genuine ones came.

My real issue is with high population growth, whether it comes in the form of regular immigrants, asylum seekers, or Howard's baby bonus bribe to the underclass. We are running up against severe environmental problems on a number of fronts, including water shortages and land degradation. Every environmental indicator is getting worse, except urban air quality. This is not the view of some fringe Green group, but of the government's own State of the Environment reports from 1990. This doesn't even consider possible effects from peak oil or climate change. Most of these problems are proportional to population as well as to per capita consumption, and it is possible to show that population is the greater factor in some cases.

Sunfire's speculations about my motives are wrong. I have a comfortable house with a reasonable sized garden that was built before the boom and inflated enormously in price. I might also benefit from cheap home help and gardening services when I get older. One of my two children has a very good job. I ought to be thanking the government, but I despair about the long term future for my children and younger friends. I make no apologies for rejecting the view that only people matter, that other species can go to hell, nor for putting the welfare of my fellow countrymen ahead of the welfare of foreigners.

It is these discussions that make this forum so valuable. Be it radio, TV or the forums restriction to a limit on words... the value in learning more about these discussions and seeing them argued as viligenitly as seen helps us all.

Thank You, I believe we need more of this effort. I agree refugees have a right as ALL to health - education - food and housing. Why is this so hard for others to understand?

I believe processing anyone off-shore is a bit like what we might read in "Madness and Civilization": A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

It is so sad to see this kind of treatment still going on... vulnerable peoples everywhere.... no matter what we know of their circumstance .... treated as Lepers - something alien and foreign - as something to Fear.

I am sure we could do better than this should we ever find the Common Sense and WILL.

http://www.miacat.com/