Ludwig (Continued)

Turning back boats is inhumane. You still haven’t addressed this issue.

“Bronwyn, you have contradicted yourself beautifully here!”

Yes, you’re right. If you take my words literally, I did, though I’m sure you knew what I was getting at. I meant I agreed with the tenor of Marilyn’s posts but not that particular stat she quoted. I don’t think Marilyn argues for open borders but once again I haven’t checked old threads and I wouldn’t presume to speak for her on that. (My assumptions have already got me into trouble!)

“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.”

This is an exaggeration based on panic and fear mongering rather than fact. The biggest number of boat arrivals we ever received was 6 000 - over a whole year - in 2001 – which only equates to just over a hundred a week, a long way short of 1 000. Numbers may have seemed high at the time but there is no precedent anywhere to suggest they would have stayed high. We are not Europe. We are not an easy destination. The vast ocean distances to get here are a natural deterrent to most asylum seekers. Numbers ebb and flow in accordance with the degree of conflict at the source much more than they reflect the immigration policies of potential destination countries.

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

I see in this statement echoes of your position on refugees! You seem to like a foot in both camps! Why “atheistic”? It sounds like halfway house to me. Why not say with conviction ”I’m an atheist”? I find it odd that an atheist would donate money knowing it will be used to convert people as much as to assist them! I know I’m sounding picky and critical. I’m not meaning to be. I can’t help seeing a parallel though between this and your both ways stance on refugee issues.

It needs to be acknowledged that many people attempt to leave dysfunctional third world societies for economic and social reasons as well as for political reasons, and that by posing as asylum seekers the 1951 Refugee Convention provides them with a chance to gain admittance to the West and all the advantages of living in first world countries.

Many developing countries haven’t been able to provide basic freedoms, growth and decent living standards, but have developed enough for the emergence of a relatively well-educated middle class who watch the West on TV and the Internet and yearn for the opportunities they see there.

Global criminal syndicates dealing in people smuggling target the aspirational middle classes of developing countries and attempt to bypass legal immigration controls by presenting economic migrants as asylum seekers in order to exploit compassion in liberal Western democracies such as Australia. They include genuine refugees in each cargo and often include children to increase the sympathy factor. The distinction between economic migrant and refugee has now unfortunately become very much blurred.

The Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence reported the existence of coaching schools located in the Pakistan / Afghan border region where Pakistani clients of people smugglers would spend a few months preparing for DIMIA interviews. The people smugglers in Pakistan used copies of Australian interview tapes and information from people released from detention centres, and were well informed about processes used to detect Pakistanis posing as Afghanis. The Pakistanis were provided with maps and information on common food items, ceremonies, customs and famous people and events in Afghan history. People smugglers advised clients to learn about farming techniques, language, and to pretend to be illiterate to evade in-depth questioning. The Pakistanis would claim to be Afghan farmers or shepherds and recount tales of being taken to fight for the Taliban. Identity checks on suspected Pakistanis were complicated by the use of false names and disposal of identity documents prior to arrival in Australia.

Franklin, only one family of Afghans was ever deported, so guess what that means sunshine. They were not Pakistanis, they had simply been staying in Pakistan for a short time.

You are like a broken record so I will say this again. There is no such thing as a person who is a secondary mover, Ruddock simply made that up.

People have to get to a nation that has ratified the refugee convention and whether we like it or not for Afghans that was us.

Which is why 98% of those people you claim are secondary movers are still here.

Honest to god, give it up.

And Ludwig. Explain to us all why innocent people should be locked up? Did Syria lock up the 2.5 million Iraqis, Pakistan the 7 million Afghans, what about Iran with 2 million Iraqis and 1 million Afghans.

You lot are whinging about the sum total of 15,000 people on boats from 1989 to 2001.

“Are you saying that we should detain for a brief period, say three months, and then just send them back where they came from?”

No Bronwyn. We should have detained people (as we did) until their claims for refugee status were sorted out. For most people, that was a relatively short period. But it proved to be very difficult for some, leading to long periods of detention.

I can’t tell you whether or not, in the years that the detention centres were processing lots of ‘applicants’, the process was efficient, whether some asylum-seekers were detained after their claims were finalised or whether those that were detained for a long time always had very difficult cases to sort out. All I can say is that I have always desired to the see this process happen as quickly as possible, while realising that some claims were very difficult and took a long time to resolve.

I fully supported the refugee determination process for onshore asylum-seekers and have never said that we should just send them back.

But of course, I also fully supported the efforts to stop them coming here after 2001.

“I find your position confused.”

Well I’ll do my damnedest to clarify it for you. I want refugees to be treated humanely and I want strong border protection. As I have said; there are much better ways of addressing refugee issues than having them arriving on our northern shores. I’ve outlined how we should be doing this and you have agreed with me.

“In reality it has to be one or the other. You can’t have both.”

OK, now I think we are getting close to the core of our disagreement. We certainly can have both.

You are apparently critical of strong border protection, which can only mean that you are happy for our borders to be porous and for onshore asylum seekers to arrive and keep arriving indefinitely, and in numbers that are highly variable, at times quite considerable.

Is this true? Could you please clarify your position.

continued

You didn’t answer the question that I put to you in my last post;

“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?”

You wrote;

“Turning back boats is inhumane. You still haven’t addressed this issue.”

As I stated above, I have always been in favour of ‘processing’ the claims of asylum seekers and not just simply rejecting them once they have arrived, or rejecting then en route. I didn’t want to see anyone turned back. But much more importantly, I didn’t want to see the saga of people jumping on leaky boats escalate or drag on indefinitely. I think that the only boats that were turned back came a long time after Howard had made it clear to the world that the boat-arrival onshore asylum-seeker option was closed. Perhaps you can confirm this.

“This is an exaggeration based on panic and fear mongering rather than fact.”

No! Not at all. At the time of the Tampa, numbers were building to a far higher level than we had ever seen before. And they would have built up at least another ten-fold if we had let them.

This seems to be another crucial point of disagreement; the scale of arrivals. If onshore asylum-seeking was an easy process, we would have many many thousands arriving every week. There are no two ways about that. Again I’ll repeat myself; we simply couldn’t accept a small number of asylum-seekers with open arms in this way without spurring a massive influx.

Bronwyn, I’m an atheist. I’m sorry but I completely don’t understand your comments on this.
.

Marilyn, so you want to engage me in debate. Ok, good, if you keep it civil. If you answer the questions I put to you a few posts back on 8 April, I’ll address yours.

I’ll be out bush and offline now for a few days.

As Gummow J indicated in Al-Kateb at [86] ff, the current Migration Act, unlike its precursors, does not make it an offence for an unlawful non-citizen to enter or to be within Australia in contravention of, or in evasion of, the Act.

31 Further, as Hayne J observed in Al-Kateb at [207]-[208] the description of a person’s immigration status as "unlawful" serves as no more than a reference to a non-citizen not having a "valid permission to enter and remain in Australia". The use of the term "unlawful" does not as such refer to a breach of a law.

Ludwig, there simply was not a huge influx ever. The maximum was 4,000 per year and only because more and more women and children had to jump on the boats because on an arbitrary date in October 1999 Ruddock changed the rules so that family reunion was denied.

Get over yourself. Iran had 3 million refugees, Pakistan 7 million, Syria 1.5 million, Jordan 1 million.

And we whined about 4,000. It's truly, truly pathetic.