Here we go again!

All the usual pious re-statements of how immoral it is to deny asylum seekers another chance to live again and to treat them as human beings. The new arrivals are from the midle class, those who have the means to buy their way out of their debris and come with festering resentments that are re-fuelled when they dont do as well as promised or as they hoped.Disillusionment sets in and anger. Am I exaggerating?Take a look at the UK. The answers are all there.

These social engineers will bring this country to its knees and then they'll back off and leave it to others to pick up the pieces when its too late.

You want to see hyprocisy?
Take a look at the poor dispossessed who have suffered rape,whose loved ones have been butchered before their eyes, they have no money or secret political agendas and now they live in cardboard and hessian in compounds in the real asylum zones in Africa where they are victims of hunger and sickness and disease under humiliating circumstances.Why not try getting them over in controlled numbers? Id rather have our tax dollars used where it is so much more deserving and really needed.

Wouldnt the UK,Holland, Belgium, France and Germany and Denmark have loved to have had better controlling asylum seeker policies and offshore detention centres! They have openly lauded our previous handling of the issues many,many times after its been too late for them.They too were influenced by the same tribe of "do-gooders" who all sang from the same hymn books but who really did NO GOOD as later proved when it was too late.

Come on, Australia,it is too risky to offer cartre blanche to what will or could be our undoing.What's happened in the last ten years has been bad enough.
Want to help the real desperate asylum seekers? We know where they are.Well,I agree 100% but we know where to look for them and invite them in.Why dont the do-gooders advocate their rescue and rehabilitation? Or dont they matter?
These poor people must be invisible.

Spikey,

My argument goes something like this. I am putting the human side first. In detention centres, when people are there too long they get into an agitated state and it is bad for them. Agreed - time to get them out of detention.

AND, as recent events have shown, when some immigrants come here in too quick a fashion, they can also suffer problems, albeit of a different type, because they haven't acclimatised to Australia and its culture. (BTW, in this context, when I say what Australians "think", I mean the culture and the way Australians do things.) This can gradually be picked up in their interaction with Australian authorities, doctors, guards etc. The waiting also has the effect of gradually tempering some unrealistic expectations. So, some degree of quarantining is necessary and is actually to their benefit. I'm not hung up about detention per se - if what Veronika says about a new halfway house can be achieved, for example, then this would definitely be better than the detention model.

If you are a deep-sea diver and come up too quickly, you get the bends. It's the same with culture: if the differences between cultures are too great it's no good for the people involved, particularly the weaker party. In the physical world, there's always a limit. It's a pity there is a clash between the two points of view (ie the moral arguments for helping refugees and the laws of the physical world), but there is.

The diehard Left has an article of faith that you let all asylum seekers in without any restrictions. The diehard homophobes believe just as strongly that everything is cut and dried if migrants are totally locked out. It's an easy argument to make on both sides, but the reality is rarely at either end of the spectrum. One man's meat is another's poison and all that. And there's a whole lot more complexity in the middle. Reality is much more complicated than that put in showpiece arguments.

Australian immigration policy makers should prepare for more and more refugees following Rudd government failure to address Pacific nation food resource devastation. Collapse of traditional available fish suppy is a common denominator in Pacific region barter economy failure and imapact causing civil unrest. Economic policy in Australia that removed fish from the consumer price index might well hide real inflation but will not make social consequences disappear.

News media has already referred to economic refugees from the Pacific. The Rudd government has failed to notice need for real economic assistance for Pacific islanders and has instead managed an increase in Australian visa application fees of nearly 100 percent.

Without real aid in the Pacific, significant consequences must be expected. Ignorance of resource devastation and impact that is driving our neighbours into chronic poverty is no excuse.

Aus has both mandatory detention and extremely low levels of illegal immigration. Co incidence? I can see the boats getting ready now.

I agree that detention should be stopped, this should be by putting them on a plane immediately.

The last thing we need is more leeches on our social security system.

It is a pity this mandatory detention thing worked so well. It does look like it stopped the flow of unwanted immigrants. We take in a large number of immigrants per capita, more than we should if we want to limit the environmental damage we do to our land. We presumably we took a long hard headed look at those in need of help, and did the best we could. No doubt some think we made the wrong decisions in who or how many we can help. But really, how could it be otherwise? Places are limited. We can't help everybody, yet every desperate person we knock back is some sense a wrong decision. Sympathetic as I am to the plight of there queue jumpers, they are by-passing our good governance with their anarchy.

Yet, the way we treat them really sticks in my throat. The are locked up for years. They go insane in our detention centres. I would not put a dog through that ordeal. Like I said, its a pity it works.

But since its unavoidable, let them in, or kick them out - do it whatever is necessary, but do it quickly! We use our judicial systems to make the decision now. I am proud of it as it usually ends up with the right result. But it is also very, very slow. Usually that slowness doesn't really matter - it just costs money. But with asylum seekers it comes with a real human cost. Surely we can do better?

Is this what is being proposed? I can't tell from the article. It seems most points it makes are irrelevant. The only two questions that need to be answered are:
- Will it be effective in deterring illegal immigrants, and
- Will it process them more humanely.
The only clue the article gives is the Minister may be trying "to get some idea of how quickly asylum seekers can be processed". Well, it could not get any slower. Maybe next time someone writes about it they can give us some real meat to chew over.

RobP,
The author is talking about asylum seekers and I think you are refering to legitimate immigrants from Iraq. I do not recall any asylum seekers, from Irag, arriving here unauthorised of recent times. I do recall, last year the Government saying it would allow more christian immigrants from Iraq because they were being persecuted in Iraq. There is a vast difference between asylum seekers arriving unauthorised and bona fide migrants with visas arriving in normal fashion.

Anna and spikey are looking at this through rose coloured glasses or with hope rather than lodgic. Dispite the rethoric, little has changed. Asylum seekers will still be detained untill health and security checks are made and idenity is confirmed. This is what has taken place in the past. It is the untruths and further appeals that meant some were detained for long periods. Determination of status was done in a short period if correct information was given to officials. The asylum seekers were able to get to Indonesia, then paid smugglers far more than normal passage to Aus because they knew, for one reason or another, they would not get a tourist visa to Aus.
They destroyed identity documents and were coached in what to say to officials to make checking more difficult. If they were eventually accepted they then could get social security benefits.

I don't doubt that some will try it on again and when that happens how the process can be speeded up will be interesting. If the adults are detained what happens to their kids? Are they separated or are all with kids just let into the community. OK on Christmas Island, but here they would just go underground if they thought their application would not get up.

The Minister has a difficult task ahead. How to speed the process up and still be fair and maintain standards. One must not forget it was a Labor Government that introduced mandatory detention.

We will just have to wait and see what happens.