Under international law there is a requirement for would be refugees to seek asylum in the first country they reach which can offer them safe haven.
The vast majority of those seeking asylum in Australia do not qualify as refugees as they have already passed through one or more other countries.
As someone who actually works with refugees and those offering them assistance I have little time for those who set out on 'leaky boats' to 'seek asylum'. The reality of the situation is very different from that portrayed in the media. Yes, these people are desperate to reach Australia but it is rarely because of fear of persecution. Many of them are well coached in what to say and do in order to get here.
They are often people who are, quite simply, seeking a better way of life in Australia who would not qualify under other programmes. They are endeavouring to buy their way in.
There are many refugees with no hope of going anywhere who would be far more worthy of a place here.
I expect that this will provoke outrage but I am making these remarks from long experience and a profound concern for the many people still waiting patiently and with a belief that they are doing the right thing by going through the proper legal channels. Boat people quite simply break the law and do so knowingly, so do those who transport them.

Knopfler

"The UNHCR has acknowledged that by the early 1990s the VAST MAJORITY of asylum seekers in Western countries were economic migrants."

It’s difficult to comment definitively on this statement without seeing it in context, but my feeling is that it's not particularly relevant to the current debate.

We’re not talking about the early 1990’s and we’re not talking about western countries in general. We’re talking specifically about Australia and the period from the late 1990’s when boatloads of asylum seekers, predominantly from Afghanistan and Iraq, began arriving on our shores. They have made up the bulk of Australia's recent asylum seekers and are most definitely political refugees.

“Yet I feel your comments are again misleading. According to the UNHCR 2006 Global Trends dated july 2007, the following figures are quoted for the top few refugee resettlement (developed countries) countries USA 41,300, Australia 13,400, Canada 10,700, Sweden, 2,400, Norway 1000. I think this justifies the above statement that you have critisized. This places Australia right up there 2nd only to the USA in absolute numbers of refugees.”

Please re-read my statement again. The countries you have quoted here are the countries I referred to that have specific quotas. There are lots of other countries who don’t have quotas but who are far more generous than Australia. As I stated before, of the 70 countries who take in refugees, Australia is ranked 38th on a per capita basis. Australia is not at all generous in either the number of refugees it accepts or in the way in which it treats them.

Boundary security is another way of saying that the Australian way of life is non-negotiable. George Bush senior said this once about his own country. There is something immoral about that statement.

Would it be possible that we cease to be excessive consumers and reduce our impact on the land so that we can afford to have more peoople here?

Healthwatcher,

The only problem with your suggestion that we increase our population by immigration is that there isn't enough water. People look at Australia and think that it is so big that it could accommodate millions more people. The fact is that Australia is a boomerang-shaped curve of fertile land around the south east, next to an enormous expanse of desert.

Australia cannot make any meaningful contribution to the problem of world overpopulation. For example, if we took 80 million immigrants (and don't worry, they would fall over themselves to get here), we would totally overload our environment, destroy our standard of living, be required to depend on imported food, and have to put up with massive stinking slums such as are seen in asia and africa, and all we would have done is absorb one year's population increase.

Well known environmentalists such as Tim Flannery have calculated that the maximum human population that Australia can sustain is around 8 million, so we are already well beyond that figure.

The population of the first world has stabilised. If the third world countries permit their current population of 4 billion to double over the next 25 years they will inflict a major catastrophe on the whole world, and the only way that the problem will be corrected is by the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Unfortunately, the only subject on which the US, the Vatican and the third world are united is that nothing must be done to limit population growth. In fact most third world countries equate population limitation with genocide.

There are a few things of which there seems to be a need to remind, and perhaps in some cases to inform for the first time, people intent on peddling guilt to Australians over refugee issues.

The first is that the causes impelling people to seek to flee their native lands are not of Australia's making. Australia is not in any way obliged to attempt to alleviate the tragic consequences for the truly persecuted, let alone 'country shoppers'. The more we do so the more we will be asked to do by the proxy spokesmen for other nations that do not want to embrace a legal and constitutional system that does not produce refugees in the first place.

Something James Purser, an aspirant to the political class, needs to understand with respect to "using the refugee issue to get elected" is that the Howard government did not lead on the boat people issue, it followed, and quite a long way behind the Australian public at that. A major reason it is now so on-the-nose is that it is seen to have massively expanded immigration and the issue of temporary work visas, which in the eyes of many amounts to the same thing as having let illegal entry run on unchecked.

The last thing Australia can afford is to let the 'refugee industry' get back into action. Coveys of lawyers, paralegals, and assorted hangers on, all very well paid for the sanctimonious concern they express for those who have been the human stock-in-trade of people smugglers.

The present government didn't go nearly as far as the community was demanding. The community was asking for a policy whereby any person having to be rescued on the high seas with the apparent intent of illegally entering Australia would be forever banned from entry to Australia, and unilaterally extradited to from whence they had come. The word would have got around, "don't risk getting caught at illegal entry, you'll never be allowed into Australia at any time again" and the people smuggling business been made pointless.

Good post, Plerdsus

Lack of numeracy is a real problem here. Bronwyn is correct that most claims in Australia have been found to be genuine, but needs to ask herself where she would prefer to make a fraudulent asylum claim. In Australia, where there is mandatory detention until refugee status can be established? Or in the UK, where she would be entitled to live in the community, to bring in her immediate family, and (on the basis of the 1997-2004 figures)

http:\\www.migrationwatchuk.org

would have only about a 20% chance of being actually deported even if her asylum claim were rejected and also rejected on appeal? It is dishonest to pretend that the more liberal policies the refugee advocates want would not lead to a significant proportion of fraudulent claims.

It is also dishonest to pretend that numbers would necessarily remain small. From the Migration Watch figures: not counting dependents, there were 499,000 asylum claims in the UK in the 1997- 2004 period. 52,000 were accepted at the initial hearing and a further 61,000 on appeal. 72,000 were granted exceptional leave to remain, sometimes for humanitarian reasons, but primarily because of the practical impossibility of deportation. 314,000 claims were rejected, but only 75,000 resulted in deportation.
The refugee advocates tacitly accept this, because otherwise they could defuse a lot of opposition by pressing for a quota on total numbers.