Continued.

Leigh

"Yet, Barns still talks about “The ugliness of Australia…” when even Australians who were and still are totally opposed to allowing ‘boat people’ into our country would always look for a humane solution to prevent them from trying their tricks."

'Humane' solution? No wonder you have such trouble with compassion, if your idea of 'humanely' treating refugees is to lock them up indefinitely in detention, or to deport individuals and turn back boatloads, condemning them at best to prolonged suffering and in many cases certain death.

No, Leigh, there’s not much ‘humaneness’ in Australia’s ‘solution’ to refugee issues. It’s been driven purely by a calculating and parochial sense of self-preservation.

colinsett

"And if such passion is to remain focused there – would it not be appropriate to apportion some of it towards the women forcibly enslaved to a high rate of fertility with all its horrific downsides, including health, education, nutrition, and societal aspects; all of which give rise to the asylum-seeker syndrome? That, rather than pour it all out on some blame-game sprayed entirely onto his home turf."

So the refugees fleeing Iraq, for example, have their own prolific breeding to blame for the desperate situation they find themselves in? The fact that their country has been invaded illegally by an oil-hungry superpower is irrelevant of course!

Here again, we see selective compassion at its most base.

franklin

Bang on cue! Mention refugees, and out comes franklin’s much-used cut-and-paste on so-called ‘secondary movement asylum seekers’, with his same old erroneous assumptions and the same old clunky attempt at segue into the discussion at hand. No matter how many times it’s been pointed out to him that he’s completely wrong, he still persists with this predictable and pointless little charade.

While franklin has made some worthwhile and interesting comments - although not without casting aspersions on asylum seekers - I find his effort to argue that Australians have a 'collective compassion' for the supposedly 'genuine' refugees in camps in Kenya and most other poor countries to be rather thin. The word 'perhaps' possibly is a recognition of the optimism of this belief. My experience has been, after listening to many people - including some of my own friends and a former Prime Minister - utter words to this effect or these words literally: 'we don't want these people', that it doesn't matter what their status as refugees or asylum seekers is, only their race, culture or religion. Our compassion, general or selective or whatever, seems limited mainly to those who are somewhere else rather than here.

Franklin seems to be denying those with 'many thousands of dollars' a genuine right to asylum; the 'compassion' we are showing towards the bushfire victims takes wealth into account not at all. The compassion franklin expresses for those millions (and yes, I believe it is millions) in abject poverty in camps should not obviate any compassion for those genuine asylum seekers who can afford to travel here.

Bronwyn says:
[colinsett
"And if such passion is to remain focused there – would it not be appropriate to apportion some of it towards the women forcibly enslaved to a high rate of fertility with all its horrific downsides, including health, education, nutrition, and societal aspects; all of which give rise to the asylum-seeker syndrome? That, rather than pour it all out on some blame-game sprayed entirely onto his home turf."

So the refugees fleeing Iraq, for example, have their own prolific breeding to blame for the desperate situation they find themselves in? The fact that their country has been invaded illegally by an oil-hungry superpower is irrelevant of course!

Here again, we see selective compassion at its most base.]

An interesting interpretation of yours, Bronwyn - and one far removed from that which came out of The United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, which resolved to facilitate rights for women. Perhaps its declarations were offensive to you also (as they were to the Pope).

Well, I may as well stick my neck out good and proper and bring up that little selective-compassion issue of Gaza.

The commercial channels couldn't even be bothered devoting even a minute or so to the callous, hopelessly asymmetrical bombing campaign that left 1350 dead, 4000 injured, tens of thousands homeless and much of what was an already a broken, demoralised nation's infrastructure in ruins. What's more, that minute or so was often placed somewhere down towards the middle order of the nightly news bulletins, just before '... and now to Finance'.

Even then, much of that precious time was taken up by those nice young Israeli IDF spokespersons in their pin-striped suits (spokespersons in uniform are now a no-no, by orders of the IDF propaganda wing) stating that, yes, little Jewish kids are terrified to go to the toilet in case a Hamas rocket hits them with their pa..., um, guard down ... and no, Israel is not illegally using missiles containing flesh-peeling phosphorus when they bomb the Gazans.

The ABC was not much better, so it was left only to SBS to meet Australia's tiny little compassion quota set aside for ungrateful Arab populations who have the stupidity to use the democratic process to elect a militant nationalist organisation that we don't like.

Several friends of mine wrote letters to various newspapers suggesting that maybe we could partly use the horrific civilian toll from the Victorian bushfire tragedy to empathise more with civilian populations devastated by aerial bombings and groundforce invasions, supposedly in the name of combatting terror.

Needless to say they weren't published.

Another musician friend has been trying for weeks to organise a fundraising benefit to help the people of Gaza. His quest for sponsorship is meeting a wall of indifference the size of a West Bank checkpoint tower.

Greg, where is your compassion for us nasty, vengeful, ugly, ignorant and racist Anglo-European Australians who are clearly less evolved than you?
We’re victims too.

colinsett

"An interesting interpretation of yours, Bronwyn - and one far removed from that which came out of The United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, which resolved to facilitate rights for women. Perhaps its declarations were offensive to you also (as they were to the Pope)."

Of course its recommendations wouldn't have been offensive to me. I totally support all efforts to facilitate fertility control in developing countries, both from the point of view of the individual women involved and more broadly for the future of the planet.

I would never suggest, as crassly as you did in your first post here, the existence of a causal relationship between high fertility rates and the tragic plight of asylum seekers as crassly as you did in your first post. Yes, high fertility rates and high numbers of refugees can often overlap, but it's war and persecution which causes people to flee their homelands, not over population.