Lexi,

You claim " I could provide you with all the stats in the world"

But actually you can't and that is the point. All the stats in the world point to the pacific solution working.

Dear Shadow Minister,

The following link may clarify things for you:

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3886792.html

Again Lexi,

As per your article "So the boats largely stopped arriving, but about 4,000 asylum seekers continued to come by air each year."

The Pacific solution was about stopping the boats which the article you linked acknowledged.

Q.E.D.

Dear Shadow Minister,

What the link actually did was state quite clearly, and I
quote:

"The trend of asylum seekers to Australia in the Howard years
followed world trends. The figures show that war, civil unrest,
and persecution determine refugee outflows rather than any
deterrent policies in destination countries such as Australia."

It went to clarify that:

"In the use and abuse of statistics, there is one very important
lesson - just because two things happen at the same time -
doesn't necessarily mean that the one causes the other.
It is clear that the major reason for the Asylum Seeker numbers
in the early period of the Howard government was NOT its own
policies but a decline in the number of asylum seekers in
the world. When the world refugee numbers rose again after
the mid 2000s, so did the numbers coming to Australia..."

And interestingly the link stressed that - "the UNHCR does not
differentiate by mode of arrival but Tony Abbott deliberately
encourages our obsession with boat people. It's obviously
good politics to focus on boat people only. We never hear him
admit that more asylum seekers come by air than by boat."

"The Sydney Morning Herald reported from Wikileaks that "a
key Liberal Party strategist" told a US Diplomat in Canberra
in November last year - that the issue of asylum seekers was
"fantastic" for the Coalition and "the more boats that come
the better."

"The 'Key Liberal Party Strategist' could not have been more
explicit about the political game being played."

I can see that no matter what I say or do - you shall
continue playing your party's political game. You believe
that the Pacific Solution worked. And you shall continue to
believe it worked.

Luckily, experts and those in the know - don't agree with you
or your party stance on this issue - and in our democracy,
that's something for which - we can all be grateful.

Lexi,

I have noticed frequently that not long after I wash my car - it rains.

I realise there is no scientific explanation that connects these two events, yet it appears (to me) to happen more often than mere coincidence.

My influence on the weather is probably just localised and not particularly widespread but it seems to be real.

Using typical Pacific Solution logic, and thereby ignoring other possible external factors, I can therefore claim a direct causal relationship between my physical act of car-washing and the weather.

Isn't that what politics is really about? It's not "the art of the possible" but the "sale of the improbable".

Lexi,

There are no experts that state that the pacific solution didn't work.

The link you provided was a political one, and not a genuine analysis. Anyone with basic statistics knows that you need specific related data, the link you provided does not. The pacific solution specifically targeted the boats, and you link contains no information on the boats whatsoever. The statistics given are only vaguely related, and useless for the purposes of evaluating the impact of the pacific solution on boat arrivals.

In 2001 boat arrivals dropped from 4000 p.a. to nearly zero. This was not in any way mirrored in any of the OECD countries. The correlation worked mathematically is greater than 90%.

For the plane arrivals the only relevant policy would be the TPVs, and it is notable that for the OECD countries where the arrivals dipped by 45%, in Aus the arrivals dipped by 70%. From 2001 to 2008 The asylum seekers to Aus dropped far far more than anywhere else.