"Rather than playing a populist tune, resulting in dead-boring mantras about being 'tough and humane', repeated over and over again by the Prime Minister deeply offensive to the electorate and implicitly insulting their intelligence, the Prime Minister, Immigration Minister Chris Evans or Ms Julia Gillard as the Minister for Education, have done absolutely nothing since coming to power with the overwhelming evidence that Australians are unbelievably ill-informed about Australia's obligations under not just the Refugee Convention, but also under other UN Conventions." (quote by Erika Stahr from Jack H.Smit, Project Safecom).

Under UN convention refugees must obey the law of the land.

ekastahr2 (Erika?)

Why can't you be a little more constructive and actually propose a thing or two (always good for discussion).

It's easy to condemn, but until you can suggest something that won't alienate at least 50% of the ostriches, nothing is going to change.

ekastahr2,
It's not Julia's job specifically.

Secondly we are dealing with peoples emotions and there adherence to conditioned dogma.

Societal mores encourage the notion of national elitism (right) to our profligate lifestyle regardless.
Economics encourages/ is built on profligate consumption to support 'profit' etc.
Self interest encourages us to stop anybody from joining in or otherwise
threatening our culture/lifestyle.

As a consequence people DON'T want to know the truth many believe that they voted and that is the end of their responsibility to apprise themselves with issue like those you mention.

That might require them to use their 'good sense' and actually examine reality as determined by actual facts not impressions. This may in turn show them that much of their opinions are nothing more that unprovable prejudices and no one likes being wrong.

If the Govt spent money advertising the laws the opposition would do the only thing they're apparently capable of being oppositional to the spending.

PS I don't hate look down on people I just note the observable. Political parties with their self serving dogma, is a different proposition all together.

In regards to the UN agreements, I think it's appropriate for all reasons that Australia, not wishing to live up to the agreement, formally withdraw from the agreement- if the locals don't want to be held to the obligations, the global community does not wish to try to guess which countries take its own declarations seriously when trying to allocate assistance and priority of countries, and probably ambiguously making ourselves an attraction to people we don't actually have any intentions of taking in, it's for the best in every single way.

I can't understand the opening post of
this thread - because the accusation is
inappropriate. For any intelligent Australian
who can read - there are newspaper articles
available on the subject - where the problems
are discussed in great detail. The topic has also
been diagnosed on enough TV programmes to keep
Australians "informed." The PM simply takes
Australians to be intelligent and able to keep
up with these issues. In any case, his position
and that of his Government's - has been reported
in the media.

For those who may feel "uninformed" the following
website may be of interest:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/03/26/1017089533231.html

"The big lies of 'border protection."
Written by Malcolm Fraser.