PatTheBogan,
I certainly do not put "all" the blame on Australia for Nauru's plight. No doubt, the reason's for Nauru's impoverishment are many and varied - and much of it the result of unprincipled financial management.
However, the ecological devastation wrought upon the island is real and tragic, and a good example of an unsustainable industry bringing a country to it's knees. Much of Nauru is described as a "moonscape" today.

By the way, I found this link - interesting rum down of the refugees on Nauru:
http://www.noborder.org/iom/display.php?id=157

The idea is a good one do not write it off yet if not ET it will happen some other place.
It will cost a lot but voters want an end to these numbers.
Let those who say no consider the people sitting in camps being betrayed by these who seem to be able to buy a ticket on such boats

Hi STG... the interesting thing about that graphic from twitter is this.

Although the numbers are comparatively small.. you could reverse them and make the large area 'relative crime/social disruption' caused by those same people.. and it would approach the truth.

I rang the Santiago Task force yesterday to enquire about the "Lebanese Crime family" (Chaouks) in Melbourne, where I saw footage of a group of them trying to do the 'tribal' thing of confronting police during a raid. Fortunately the police have learned from the works of Tim Priest and the South Western Sydney experience and anticipated a swarm of 'family and associates' creeping out of the nearby houses, and had plenty of backup.

The thing which upset me, was when one of the scum in a hoody made an "I'm gonna cut your throats" sign in full view of the camera's to the police. They said that 'person' (I use the term loosly) is now being interviewed about "threats to kill")

They said

-"about half the family is in jail now".
-They all come from the same village in Lebanon.

These are 'refugees'

So the impact ...can be quite disproportionate to their numbers.

We know this is factual from the Sydney and now the Melbourne experience.. but it's cropping up in Adelaide and Perth..not just from the Lebanese, but Somalis and others.

As the police related..this is nothing like 'normal criminality' it is way above that.

If someone from that same village in Lebanon applied for a visa to come here.. it should be refused purely on 'likelihood of family/tribal criminal association'

StG, that little graphic is quite striking. But of course it is oversimplistic and hence quite misleading when it comes to the impact of onshore asylum seekers.

However, it is true that onshore asylum seeking is just one small part of our refugee / border-protection / immigration issue.

There is currently a very cynical view of Gillard’s clamp-down on border-protection which is held by a considerable portion of the population, as has been much-expressed on OLO. So she really does need to now prove her genuineness by expanding the policy and dealing with the other main facet of asylum-seeking – fly-in visa overstayers. If she did that before the election, it would go a long way towards alleviating fears that she is just acting cynically in the lead-up to an election.

If she went a step further and advocated a larger refugee intake (while considerably reducing our total immigration intake) and an increased international aid input into refugee issues, with a progressive shift of expenditure that is now being outlayed on onshore asylum seekers going towards our offshore refugee programs as the onshore issue eases, it would also help secure her credibility substantially.

It does look a bit odd at the moment that she has strongly addressed just one small part of the border-protection / immigration / refugee issue. But there is a clear path that she needs to follow in order to address this, IMHO.

Julia Gillard seems to me to be either very naive in the way that
diplomacy works or is a very slow learner.
She has been in politics for years and in parliament for six or nine
years and has not understood anything about how to negotiate with a
foreign government.
She rang, not the head of government of Timor, one night and early
the next morning blows it all over the media that we want to open a
Timor Sea solution in East Timor !

We need to suspend all immigration for a period while we take stock on
what we have done to the country, and what we want the country to be.

Have we in fact with the numbers that are now coming instigated an
invasion, not a designed immigration scheme ?

Very quickly, Australia is fading away.

Belly, it is unfair to single you out here, you know you are not alone, as do I and many others, but you wrote this... "Let those who say no consider the people sitting in camps being betrayed by these who seem to be able to buy a ticket on such boats".

As I understand it, the Blue Collars and Blue Bloods are both scared of a few boats turning up here, escaping the war the Australia helps to promote in their nation-state.

But neither the Blue Collars nor the Blue Bloods seem to notice the very few journalists, and maybe even a politician who have ventured into the 'other' area of 'illegals', as the BBs all like to call them, the fly-in-with-a-ticket crew, whose numbers, so I read somewhere, come to about 50k a year.

Now... where is your 'camp' waiting line?

Why do you focus on what the media tell you to focus on?

Why do you accept the commonsense views without question?

I really think we need to have explained to all of us what the warlords of the West are doing in Afghanistan to assist people who fall foul of both the 'enemy' and the puppet government of Afghanistan, to prevent people feeling they have to leave there and come here, clearly a 'safe haven' and a welcoming nation-state for them to come to, because there we are, in their country, fighting a war to 'help' them (and not to secure a strategic spot of land and its mineral wealth).

Belly, could there be a link between our presence in Afghanistan, and the flood of their citizens to here?

As for Sri Lanka, well, the entire world is clearly not interested in either the war that went on there, or in calling the government to account afterwards, so do we as a nation have some global citizen role to play in bringing the government of another sovereign state to account, before blaming its reluctant citizens who see a 'paradise' over the horizon?