Divergence,

You are not a very careful reader. You claim I have asserted that "nothing that has happened overseas is at all relevant to Australia". I haven't done anything of the sort.

What I've said was that you haven't shown the relevance of what's allegedly happened in the specific nations you introduced - Britain, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark and implicitly the USA - to tghe issue at hand which is the treatment of asylum seekers arriving in Australia.

Then you assert - without evidence - that "it isn't possible to argue on the basis of Australian evidence, because the Hawke/Keating government introduced mandatory detention, and this has discouraged large numbers from arriving". But what is this forum arguing about? Answer: proposals to reform the Australian asylum seeker process including the mandatory detention regime which has been a humanitarian nightmare.

Now can you run it past me again: why we can't use Australian evidence?

Again you side-track into statistics from overseas. And very dated ones too, 2001. (Incidentally Germany was definitely a colonial power - think of the causes of World War 1.)

You distort my position when you claim: "You have asserted that only a small number of "racists" are concerned about the issue of immigration numbers." I have never claimed anything remotely like that. There are lots of people who oppose large-scale immigration. And for lots of different reasons.

This forum is not about immigration, however, but about the treatment of asylum seekers. What I have pointed out in a number of places is that some of the opponents of Australia accepting asylum seekers do so on racist grounds.

The primary purpose of involuntary detention is primarily as a deterrent.

Sentencing someone to 20 yrs for murder is not to rehabilitate them, it is for society to show that there consequences for taking a course of action.

Anyone in immigration detention has the ability to get out immediately if he agrees to return to whence he came.

The illegal immigrants are not nearly as destitute as those that cannot fund their journey. While it is true that where they come from is not wonderful, that applies to about 2 billion people more deserving.

The choice is do we choose who is deserving to come here, or is it thrust upon us.

Shadow Mainister,
Your points seem to be lost with those that support the actions of the boat people.

I am all for bringing a reasonabl ammount of genuine refugees here each year, but strongly object to the invaders that simply turn up and expect us to accept them. Same with overstayers.

Did we not have a number of overstayers, seeking asylum, after the Sydney olympics. Letter this morning in SMH is curious about how many overstayers will there be and if they seek asylum in China.

If they are genuine and fear for their lives back home, there should be some.

Spikey,

You might want to consider the Cornelia Rau case. Rau was a German citizen and a permanent resident of Australia. She was also badly afflicted by schizophrenia. In 1994 she ran away from a mental hospital and was picked several months later in the Northern Territory after some bizarre behaviour. She had no identification other than a stolen Norwegian passport. (She had actually recently been issued with a valid German passport, but had lost it and would not apply for a replacement, since she believed that it would let her family track her and put her back in the mental hospital.) She spoke German and claimed to be German, so ended up in Immigration Dept. detention as a probable backpacker and overstayer who had suffered a psychotic break. She gave a false name and address to the German consular officials. The Australian authorities mishandled the case in a host of ways, but the fact remains that the German consulate washed its hands of someone who may well have been a German citizen and was certainly an ethnic German in serious trouble. See

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/cornelia-rau-the-verdict/2005/07/17/11215-38868891.html

Do you seriously imagine that it will play out any differently when it comes to deporting failed asylum seekers who are perfectly sane, have destroyed their travel documents, and are determined to stay in Australia? What deterrent is there other than indefinite detention?

I have presented enough evidence to show a consistent picture. Other developed countries in Europe and North America that didn't have mandatory detention experienced many more asylum claims, a very much higher percentage of claims that could not be substantiated, great problems in removing failed asylum seekers, and social tensions in the host countries when numbers become large. Instead of admitting the problems and finding a more humane solution that will address them, you just want to quibble about details, as if Germany's few colonies before WWI made any difference to asylum claims in 2001 from entirely different places, or as if Migration Watch's viewpoint made any difference to the government statistics they painstakingly reference in their briefing papers.

Divergence,

The first time you resort to Australian evidence to support your assertions you use the Cornelia Rau case which was one of the biggest cock-ups of all time. See the Report of the Former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer who found there were serious and deep-seated problems in the Immigration Department and its handling of people in detention.

Cornelia, suffering from a mental illness, was unlawfully detained, forst by the Queensland police and then by Immigration. She is not a failed asylum seeker. (Your link to the details won't work - try http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/19/2166455.htm)

I don't see how this case lends credibility to your argument against the sorely needed reforms to the refugee process. In fact, it does the opposite. So you'll have to do better than that.

There is hardly a single respectable commentator left in Australia that doesn't acknowledge that the mandatory detention system was a disgrace.

You say <<I have presented enough evidence to show a consistent picture. Other developed countries in Europe and North America that didn't have mandatory detention experienced many more asylum claims...>> etc etc.

But you don't produce the evidence at all. You simply give opinions and beliefs that that's what happens. Let's see a systematic objective study comparing countries that have mandatory detention with those that don't.

Spikey,

You are missing my point about the Rau case. I had said earlier that there could be serious problems in deporting failed asylum seekers who lack valid travel documents. You pooh-poohed this, saying it was merely my opinion. The Rau case provides an example of exactly this sort of thing.

Cornelia Rau had every right to be in Australia, but the Australian Immigration Department didn't know that *and neither did the German Consulate*. The Germans must have had at least a strong suspicion that they were dealing with one of their own citizens, as in fact they were. Nevertheless, they used the lack of identification as an excuse to wash their hands of the situation, taking the attitude that it was up to Australia to prove that Cornelia Rau was a German citizen, not for them to prove that she wasn't. It is irrelevant here that Cornelia Rau wasn't an asylum seeker, as the principle is the same. There is no special deportation procedure for failed asylum seekers as opposed to anyone else. It is also irrelevant that she had a claim on Australia. Germany had a responsibility to her as a mentally ill citizen that was quite apart from any responsibility on the Australian side.

People who arrive in Australia through normal channels sometimes then claim asylum, but such asylum seekers have never been subjected to mandatory detention. This is because they can be "returned to sender" if their claims are not upheld. Airlines and shipping lines are held financially responsible if they bring in people without valid travel documents.

This exchange is like debating evolution with a Creationist: no amount of evidence will ever be enough. Now you want the equivalent of PhD dissertation. If anyone is still bothering to read this, judge for yourselves. Look at the graph I linked to, the well documented Migration Watch briefing papers and the backgrounders on the Center for Immigration Studies site in the US (www.cis.org).