Ludwig

“So please don’t mistake my desire to see strong border control and an absence of asylum seekers heading our way for a lack of empathy over refugee or humanitarian issues.”

I know you wrestle with this, but to me the position you’ve taken has to indicate either a lack of knowledge or a lack of empathy. I don’t think you lack knowledge, so what am I left to conclude?

You’re supporting mandatory and indefinite detention of refugees, which means you’re condemning innocent and vulnerable people to harsh and lengthy imprisonment and a resultant loss of hope and sanity. You’re also supporting our navy turning back boats; here you’re condemning those on board to drowning, refoulement, detention or life on the run.

Where is your empathy here, Ludwig? Don’t tell me you’re putting yourself in these people’s shoes. You can’t be.

“So it begs the question; how can you agree entirely with the content of Marilyn’s posts?”

Marilyn knows her stuff on refugee issues. I don’t recall ever seeing anything in her posts that I’ve disagreed with. I do think her migration figure of 350 000 might be a bit high. Last time I did the exercise I got a figure of 160 000, so I’m not sure what criteria she used there, but I’ve read enough of her posts to know that the stats she quotes are usually reliable. I’m much more in alignment with Marilyn’s position on refugee issues than I am with yours.

Divergence

“Secondary movement was forbidden by article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, with refugees obliged to ask for asylum in the first safe country (not necessarily a signatory to the Convention) that they came to.”

This interpretation of Article 31 is not correct. It hinges entirely on the word “direct” and completely ignores the clause at the end stating “and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence “. The fact that Indonesia is not a signatory to the Convention and will not protect refugees is in itself part of the “good cause” for the presence of these refugees on Australian shores.

Ludwig

“That whole terrible desperate momentum had to be stopped, and quickly and profoundly, for the sake of all involved.”

“ALL involved”? You mean for us. The ones already living a safe and comfortable life. The ones whose accident of birth makes us the lucky ones and puts us on the right side of hostile borders. “ALL involved”? How did our border protection controls help the refugees involved?

The momentum you speak of would have ebbed and flowed naturally anyway. The numbers when at their peak, and we’re still only talking a few thousand, were occurring as a result of extreme periods of political persecution in Iraq and Afghanistan. Australia is actually part of the reason for the refugees currently leaving these countries. Don’t you think this gives us some sort of responsibility? Don’t we have an obligation to assist the victims we’ve helped create?

“I remain a financial contributor to the Christian Children’s Fund, now for sixteen years.”

I’m assuming from this that you're at least a nominal Christian. How do you reconcile turning your back on needy refugees with the teachings of Jesus Christ?

Franklin

“Perhaps the following indicates the inadvisability of allowing Australia’s humanitarian efforts to be undermined by secondary movers and people smugglers.”

One example proves nothing. Your constant banging on about secondary movement and people smuggling is a deliberate attempt to paint all asylum seekers as people with the means to shop around for the easiest and wealthiest country to target. It’s so far wide of the mark and a total denial of the very real and desperate struggle the majority of refugees endure.

Most of them don’t even know of Australia when they flee their homeland. Whole families sell everything to put one member on a boat. The majority aren’t wealthy at all. People smugglers exist to fill a need. Some are ruthless but some are risking their own lives to save others. Millions of refugees as we speak are perishing in deserts, drowning at sea, getting shot on the run, starving in refugee camps and generally facing unimaginable horrors. You have no idea.

Bronwyn, you and I have discussed this whole issue at length before on this forum. At the end of it, there didn’t seem to be much disagreement between us. But now you are upholding big differences.

If you go back over our earlier discussions, you will see that I do not support the mandatory and indefinite detention of refugees.

I support the mandatory detention of asylum-seekers until their refugee status or lack thereof has been determined. I do not support indefinite detention. I wish to see the processing of claims and the length of detention be as short as possible, including for those who destroy their documentation and/or otherwise deliberately obfuscate the processing of their claims.

I am surprised at the things that you assert that I am supporting. You haven’t taken this sort of approach before. Please don’t assert what my views are unless you are absolutely sure. If you aren’t sure then just ask.

“I don’t recall ever seeing anything in her [Marilyn’s] posts that I’ve disagreed with. I do think her migration figure of 350 000 might be a bit high. Last time I did the exercise I got a figure of 160 000”.

Bronwyn, you have contradicted yourself beautifully here!

I don’t mean to be a smart-arse, but her figure of 350 000 is very different to yours (with which I agree), and amounts to a very significant point of disagreement, I would have thought.

“I’m much more in alignment with Marilyn’s position on refugee issues than I am with yours.”

Well, given that you have stated agreement with me on four key points in your post above of 8 April and that you are incorrectly attributing bad things to me, I reckon you will find (as has been the case before) that you don’t actually have too much disagreement with me. We’ll see eh.

One of the key tenets of Marilyn’s argument seems to be that refugees should be able to cross borders completely freely, no matter what the numbers or the effect they may have on host countries. Do you really agree with this?

“ ‘ALL involved’? You mean for us.”

No Bronwyn. ‘All involved’ means all involved, especially those in the most vulnerable positions – asylum-seekers.

It is surely obvious that if Howard had allowed an easy passage for asylum-seekers to come here by boat, the rate of arrivals would have increased to thousands per week. If that had happened, then many thousands more people would have been caught in limbo, as the Australian public and government would not have tolerated it and would have demanded a crackdown.

This is a crucial point; as bad as you think Howard’s actions were, if he hadn’t acted at the time of the Tampa and had let it go for a year or two, the situation would have been a hundred times worse.

Come on, there is just no way that there could be an ongoing large influx of asylum-seekers / refugees moving into Australia in this manner. A trickle could perhaps be tolerated, but how on earth could you accept a small number of asylum-seekers with open arms without spurring a very large rate of influx? You couldn’t. The moment the government lightened up on the strict treatment of onshore asylum seekers, there would be an escalation in arrivals.

So, to prevent poor and desperate people from getting caught up in the horrible saga of people-smugglers, unseaworthy boats, unsanitary crowded conditions, and then periods of detention and uncertainty about their future, I would assert that it was much better for Howard to quickly put an end to the whole ugly business than to allow it to drag on.

“Don’t we have an obligation to assist the victims we’ve helped create?”

Absolutely. I advocate a doubling of our refugee intake within our immigration program. You have agreed with this. I advocate a big increase in our international aid effort, directed largely at refugee issues. You’ve agreed with this.

“I’m assuming from this that you're at least a nominal Christian”.

No. I’m atheistic. But that doesn’t mean I can’t support a good humanitarian Christian organisation.

Bronwyn,

The natural interpretation of Article 31 is as I said. If "direct" is meant to have no meaning, why include it? That said, there was a later reinterpretation in your favour in 2001, according to Wobbles

Divergence,
According to the Expert Roundtable organized by the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees and the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva,
Switzerland, 8–9 November 2001..

"10. In relation to Article 31(1):
(a) Article 31(1) requires that refugees shall not be penalized solely by reason of unlawful entry or because, being in need of refuge and protection, they remain illegally in a country.
(b) Refugees are not required to have come directly from territories where their life or freedom was threatened.
(c) Article 31(1) was intended to apply, and has been interpreted to apply, to persons who have briefly transited other countries or who are unable to find effective protection in the first country or ountries to which they flee. The drafters only intended that immunity from penalty should not apply to refugees who found asylum, or who were settled, temporarily or permanently, in another country."

Before the Industrial Revolution, the entire global population was only about one billion people at most. Now we have 6.7 going on 9 billion or 12 billion, with the growth largely fueled by cheap fossil fuels. Peak Oil has either already arrived or is coming soon, and we are faced with a number of other serious environmental problems, such as shortages of fresh water and (very likely) climate change. The price of rice has increased by 50% recently, with rice stocks at their lowest levels in 30 years. According to the UN World Food Program 33 countries in Asia and Africa face political instability as the urban poor struggle to feed their families. (See p. 8 of the 11/4/08 Guardian Weekly and the article by David Adam in the 10/4/08 Sydney Morning Herald detailing food riots in Egypt, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Camerron, Mauretania, Yemen, Bolivia, Indonesia...) It is very naive to think this won't mean more refugees.

Ludwig

“If you go back over our earlier discussions, you will see that I do not support the mandatory and indefinite detention of refugees….I am surprised at the things that you assert that I am supporting. You haven’t taken this sort of approach before. Please don’t assert what my views are unless you are absolutely sure. If you aren’t sure then just ask.”

I’m sorry if I’ve made incorrect assumptions. I didn’t check old threads. I know you and I share a lot of common ground but I still think we differ on some major points.

“Rudd should most definitely uphold the Howard policy of strong border protection. A slackening of this policy, leading to an escalation in the arrival of leaky boats and hundreds of desperate people, would simply not be acceptable.”

and

“I don’t know how anyone can for one moment argue that an asylum-seeker movement or a refugee movement outside of our official immigration channels can be condoned.”

These are the statements that lead me to conclude that you supported mandatory and indefinite detention and the turning back of boats and I still don’t think it was an unreasonable assumption. These two policies were the basis of the “strong border protection” of Howard’s that you argue Rudd should maintain.

You say you don’t believe in indefinite detention but the tough border policies you favour always lead to people being detained for long periods of time. You know that. Are you saying (and I’ll check this time!) that we should detain for a brief period, say three months, and then just send them back where they came from? You must be, because you don’t want them to stay. Sending genuine refugees back to danger like this is no better than detaining them indefinitely.

I find your position confused. You say you want refugees treated humanely (and I’d like to believe you) and yet you argue for strong border protection. In reality it has to be one or the other. You can’t have both. You might like to believe you can but experience shows it doesn’t work that way