“Of course we decide who comes to this country and the means by which they come.”

YES Kim Hyunh. You’ve got it. This is the bottom line. It’s not just the sovereign right of any country to uphold this, it is the ONLY way to prevent or minimise the trauma, conflict, social unrest, political turmoil, etc, involved with the whole business of onshore asylum-seeking.

To this end, Rudd made the gravest mistake in diluting Australia’s policy on this whole issue. I can’t help but view it as just about the single stupidest policy decision in the history of this country.

How on earth could he have done this, given the history of this issue in Australia?

Even with Howard’s strong efforts to clamp down on onshore asylum-seeking, we still saw awful things happen. Without his efforts and with a much more open-door policy, this would have been one or two orders of magnitude worse. I don’t think anyone can doubt that.

So just at the time that the whole ugly saga was drawing to a close, and there was practically no one left in detention centres to be affected by Howard’s policy, Rudd goes and blows the whole can of worms wide open again.

Yes the blame needs to be allocated partly to the people-smugglers and partly to some asylum seekers. But by far the biggest fault lies with our unillustrious PM and his wonky colleagues that allowed such a mindless backward step in border-protection / people-smuggling / refugee policy to get up.

Hear here.

A succinct little article, which of course immediately elicits predictable (if inaccurate) responses from the usual suspects.

Ludwig has obviously swallowed the Opposition's shameful agenda hook, line and sinker, while KMB seems to jump on every far right bastard bandwagon that OLO has to offer.

The only salient change that the Rudd government has made to policy regarding onshore asylum seekers is to abandon the inhumane and ridiculously expensive 'Pacific Solution'. Mandatory detention still exists, huge chunks of Australia's territory remain bureaucratically excised from our so-called 'migration zone' and the overwhelming majority of onshoe asylum seekers arrive by air.

There is very little evidence to support the opportunistic contention that the abandonment of the shameful 'Pacific Solution' has had any effect at all on whether the poor buggers in limbo in Indonesia and Malaysia decide to risk the dangers of coming to Australia by boat.

No doubt numerous other OLOers will join Ludwig and KMB in the 'blame game' - I suggest that they re-read Kim Huynh's excellent article before submitting ignorant comments like the first two above.

Boy oh boy CJ, who got out of the wrong side of bed this morning then ?!?

Some ‘salient’ questions for you:

What do you think would have happened if Howard hadn’t implemented a decisive policy change on onshore asylum-seeking at the time of the Tampa incident in August 2001, given that our intelligence sources told us that there was a rapidly escalating build-up of people heading our way on rickety boats?

What do you think Howard should have done at the time?

Do you really support Rudd’s watering down of this policy which despite what you say appears to be highly significant in the escalation of boat-people numbers, especially at a time when the driving forces for this movement are increasing, as is being repeatedly expressed by Rudd and his ministers?

Surely it was vital that a strong policy be left in place if not boosted at this point in time, yes?

If there was no one for the policy to apply to, ie; no one in detention and no one on the way, then it wouldn’t matter how ‘hard’ the policy was, just as long as it acted as a very strong deterrent.

The blame lies entirely with the Rudd Government and its refusal to protect our borders. Border protection should consist of turning back boats before they get into our waters, and/or driving them out of our waters. As it is, the navy kindly escorts them to Christmas Island so that the can come into Australia in a shorter time that they could with the Howard Government.

“Border protection should consist of turning back boats before they get into our waters, and/or driving them out of our waters.”

The problem is, those values of border protection are inconsistent with the values Australia has undertaken in the 1951 UN Convention on refugees. This says that if a person claiming to be a refugee gets inside a signatory state’s territory, the state then has to make a determination whether he satisfies the criteria of refugee status. This means that he has ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion’ – on a case by case basis.

It is this fact that makes for the divide in Australian law between onshore and offshore refugee applications. An application made offshore can be rejected out of hand, even if it satisfies the criteria for refugee status. An application made onshore has the advantage that it attracts the due process, such as it is, of a determination of refugee status, which can then be reviewed on the merits by the Refugee Review Tribinal, which can be reviewed for error of law by the Federal Court, all the way up to the High Court.

It's not the refugees' fault that we have undertaken to protect them.

It’s a question of not bullshhitting. If border protection values are to have priority, then the least Australia needs to do is withdraw from the Convention, and stop falsely pretending to the world to humanitarian credentials we have no claim to.

But if Australia doesn’t withdraw, then we should bloody well do what we have undertaken to do, and not add our own name to the list of lying persecuting states.

*Obviously* someone should not be returned to persecution, and I would rather we err on the humanitarian side, than err on the anti-human state-worshipping side.