neilium,
The intention of your post may have been to write a worthwhile comment, but its execution is abysmal. If you wish people to read and UNDERSTAND your comments, then learn a little about punctuation and spelling. A sloppy writer husbands a sloppy mind.

So what if the public do notice? We have populists in power, not leaders. Nothing can happen unless people change their minds about these two political parties. We could spend decades gathering crumbs like pigeons rather than living like stallions/mares in open fields.

First I must apologize for my lack of grammatical expertise to one commenter.

What I'm seeing in comments, is that some seem to be confused over what a refugee is.
The fact that some people can find the means to get to australia by sea, rather than be caught up in some 'imaginary' refugee camp, does not detract from their status as a refugee, if they had twenty million dollars or nothing, it makes no difference. Do you think people "escaping" from their own country will be offered air travel.. wake up please!
the second point. The snowy river hydro scheme.. would still be being built if not for REFUGEES.. in fact I'l bet some of you came here by ship escaping your country of origin from fear for your life, the only difference is that australia at that time was cajouled into taking refugees by it's allies, and thank christ we did, our country is a far better place now that it's not all irish convicts, british soldiers and blue blood offcasts.
Refugee camps, there are many, in countries that do not have the wealth of money and compassion to deal with this problem in a humane way, and I notice no campaign mentioned by any commenters to get those people out of them.. where.. well here of course, are we not importing workers right now to do our dirty work?.
Cheers.

neillium

Surely you are not suggesting that we let rich refugees into the country and let poor refugees stay in refugee camp.

Lets say Australia has a limit of 10,000 refugee a year, if we let 10,000 refugee came here by boat, we would only be accepting refugee that has money, while the poor refugees get left in a camp.

If these refugee are well off and they want to come to Australia, let them apply from the country that accepted them

I have a strong disagreement with the premise that if you are poor, you end up in Vietnam and Indonesia, but if you are rich, you can pay someone to get you to Australia. By allowing them to come to Australia, that is exactly what we would be doing

It would also stop the market for these illegal boat operators, who risks the lives of the refugees, just to make money

Banjo, dovif2, Taswegian and socratease repeat the same tired and inaccurate distortions about who is a 'real' refugee. The facts are simple - the refugees who arrived by boat have been found to be refugees by our own laws which (mostly) reflect the Refugee Convention, the same as those refugees who are brought in through Australia's offshore humanitarian program. The notion that somehow those refugees who arrive here by boat are not 'real' or 'genuine' refugees is just a smear. There is no 'queue' and it is not 'illegal'. Repeating falsehoods does not make them any less wrong.

And as well as there being no 'queue', those offshore refugees Australia brings here are not selected solely on the grounds of most need. Humanitarian need is a factor, but far from the only one. Indeed, a significant component of our humanitarian intake have to be sponsored to come here and have to find someone who will cover the costs of their airfares.

As for "Rudd's unannounced high immigration policy", its a different issue, but it is hardly unannounced - it has been openly released and talked about by the government. Indeed the new Minister has drawn much more attention to it, the fact that it will inevitably remain at high levels for the forseeable future and the need to have wider public debate about that - he's made much more of a point of trying to get more examination of the substance and operation of the whole immigration system than previous Ministers did.

It would be good to have a serious debate in Australia about substantive migration issues, rather than inaccurate fear-mongering about a small number of boat people who even at the highest numbers comprised a tiny fraction of the numbers of people coming into the country.

Andrew,
There is at least one thing I would gree with you on and that is, " it would be a good time to have a serious debate about substantive immigration issues". In fact it is well beyond time this was done, particularly as the numbes have been ever increasing and our infastructure appears wanting. The problem here is that the two major parties have agreed not to publicly debate the issues.

I say the boat people are not 'real refugees' because they have traveled over a number of countries where their safety was not a question, with the direct object of getting to Aus. That alone disqualifies them as being refugees. I have heard the arguement that many other countries are not signatories to a UN convention as we are. However there are many countries that are signatories to that convention, which are much closer to their homeland than Aus.

The fact is these people are using their wealth to buy their way here and forcing themselves on us. We were taught to wait our turn in shops, banks and so on. Waiting our turn is part of our culture and the boat people violate that convention of ours. They are not the poor soles they are made out to be. The real poor are in the camps and we should give precedence to them.

If the boat people were fair dinkem they would present themselves to one of our offices and put up their own funds for air fares.

There really has not been much change to the policy on 'illegal immigrants' and it will be interesting to see what happens when the next boat arrives. If we are not going to detain the kids, do we seperate them, from their parents or let them all out to dissappear underground.