Dear Yabby,

I wasn't able to respond to you earlier because
I'd used up all of my posts.

I fully get the points you're making.

I just don't happen to agree with them.
Because:-

1) You ask us not to "blame people smugglers - they're only
business people. Actually I agree with the PM. "They're
the vilest form of life - because they trade in the
tragedy of others."

2) You made the statement that the PM "welcomes
asylum seekers and is either confused or being
political." Wrong again. The Rudd Government has
scrapped "The Pacific Solution," 'the widely
criticised policy of his predessor (Howard) under
which asylum seekers and their children were detained
for years (and years, and years) in special centres...'

The facts today are:-

3)Currently - asylum seekers are held on Christmas
Island - but their claims are expeditated within
6 MONTHS - which is now Government Policy. The current
Government has dedicated more resources to combat
people smuggling, than any other Government in Australian
history.

4) Its you and the Opposition that is politicising this
fatal boat incident. Both of you are blaming this
latest flood of asylum seekers (and people smuggling)
on the Government.

5) It of course wouldn't occur to either of you that the
ongoing events in Afghanistan and Sri-Lanka, along with
the global economic downturn has anything to do with
what's happening. Nah, of course not. It's easier
to blame the current Government.

That's so yesterday!

An article in The Age of April 19th claims that the group of illegals who blew their boat and themselves up had been driven out of Australian waters on a previous occasion. They had been living on Lombok since they were turned around in 2001.

The article also states that Indonesia has had an influx of Middle Easterners arriving since last September, “with numbers building as each month passes”. Some of them have even set up businesses on the island.

No immediate danger for them! Or the current lot from 2001. People smugglers appear not to have been involved, either.

Yet, the Rudd Labor Government still claims that their stupidly soft and irresponsible attitude to border protection has nothing to do with the influx!

I did not "compare" drug dealers to people traffickers.
I pointed out that Yabbi's original post about people smugglers "just being business men" and "fulfilling a demand" could also be applied as a justification for other criminal acts and is therefore illogical and nonsensical. Do we really dismiss criminal activity as "just honest businesspeople fulfilling a demand"?

Personally I think people smugglers AND drug dealers are the scum of the earth. I dont think the "illegals", as some of you erroneously continue to call them, are scum and they should be humanely and quickly assessed as to whether they are genuine refugees and either deported or accepted as citizens without all the politicisation and rednecked fear mongering.

There is nothing 'erroneous' about describing as 'illegals' people who try to enter a country illegally, mikk; particularly those illegals who have landed in, then left, a 'country of first asylum' to AGAIN seek asylum. More particularly, those illegals who have spent 8 years (see previous post)in a country of first asylum, then try for Australia.

You are entitled to think what ever you wish about the problem of illegal entry, but get your facts straight and don't try to dress illegal entry up as something that suits you and makes illegal it something that it is not.

Even Rudd 'vowed' to turn back illegals last November; he just hasn't got around to it yet, thanks to his incompetence and naivety concerning border protection and his much weakened stance on anyonce trying to access Australia illegally.

Sheesh, logic and reason seem to be in short supply on OLO at times.

Now either asylum seekers are welcome or not welcome in Australia.
If they are welcome, because they have been suffering, then clearly
those helping them to end their suffering, like doctors, cannot
be deemed evil. Now we might have bad doctors and good doctors.
We might also have caring people smugglers and non caring ones.

I don't buy this legal/illegal stuff. Slavery was legal once,
so was Hitler, that does not make them right.

Now either you can think logically or you can't. Either you
can reason, or you can float on emotional clouds. Sorry, then
you won't get it and nobody can help you :)

For what it is worth, I don't play left/right politics. My politics
are issue based, not party based. The left call me right wing and
the right call me left wing, because I am perhaps somewhere in the
middle, each issue has to be addressed on its merits, not on what
the party says.

*They're
the vilest form of life - because they trade in the
tragedy of others."*

Foxy, doctors live off the suffering of others. They are business
people who get paid for services rendered.

I have long ago stated that I think that the present asylum seeker
policy of first on a boat to sail here, is an extremely poor way
of judging who should settle in Australia. Increase yearly numbers
if you wish, but find another way of allocating refugee numbers.
If people are jumping 5-6 countries to get here, clearly they
are economic refugees who are picking and choosing where they would
like to live. They can afford to do that, most in refugee camps
can't.

If on the other hand you think that there is nothing wrong with the
present system, don't knock the people smugglers, for they are
simply responding to a demand created by Australian policy.

Horus, Leigh, Col Rouge and the other refugee bashers have never expressed an opinion about the 90% of asylum seekers who arrive by plane, but watch them froth up over boat people!

And the best justification they can muster for this bizarre, one-sided fixation is that it's completely different if asylum-seekers arrive with passports, or that it's actually the progressive media making a big deal of sea arrivals, as though the imaginary Left that wants an open door migration policy would shoot itself in the foot by shouting about every tiny boat that pulls up.

I have an alternative theory: Right-wing OLO commentators know next to nothing about how immigration works in this country, and simply jump on every White Australia bandwagon rolled out by the media. Now they're trying to save face and play down the fact that, while they howl over the arrival of a single leaky boat, none of them was even aware of the thousands of illegal, queue-jumping economic migrants pouring into Australia each year.

This is what happens when people simply repeat what they read in The Australian's editorials, rather than educating themselves about an issue.

I particularly enjoy Leigh's argument that "these people come here legally, and it is up to the government and immigration department to deal with them if they overstay. Action is taken, and we rarely hear about visa over-stayers in detention before they are sent back from whence they came.".

Really? Where's your evidence for that claim? How do you know what action is taken, and that they don't just disappear into migrant communities? How many are caught, of the thousands you didn't know about while you were snarling at boat people?

Are you sure, Leigh, that you didn't mean to say "Andrew Bolt hasn't said I should be outraged about this, so I assume it's not a problem."

I look forward to reading the hastily cut-and-pasted links to far-Right nationalist websites that you will now post to cover up your profound ignorance of the issue.