Wow, 400+ posts on this thread!

Loudmouth, I fully share your concern about the numbers of arrivals.

This is such a huge part of the whole issue.

Not meaning to knock Lexi’s great humanitarian spirit, but we just simply cannot have open borders. We cannot have a situation where our acceptance of asylum seekers leads to a large escalation in the number of arrivals, and then to much higher numbers coming here in an ongoing manner.

This is the great blind-spot of the Marilyn Shepherds and Sarah Hanson-Youngs of the world. Surely they can see that this sort of escalation would lead directly to the implementation of a decisive policy to stop the boats or greatly reduce the number of arrivals. Surely they could see that there is simply no way in the world that the Australian people or their politicians would allow a large and potentially much larger number of asylum seekers to come here with no end in sight, with all the enormous expense and complications associated with it.

Surely they can see that their open-arm attitude MUST have led, sooner or later, to a decisive move to stop onshore asylum seeking / people smuggling or at least wind it right back.

And surely they could have seen that when this happened lots of people were going to get caught in the middle of it.

The refugee advocates who have condemned the government for doing anything other than totally facilitating this asylum seeker movement must share a large portion of the blame for the current situation.

Loudmouth
You seem to have your eye on the ball. From my experience on Murray Island (Mer) it was 16 (20 ltr)drums of petrol from Badu to Mer and a reload there of 24 drums of petrol to the Australian coastline all done at night in a longboat with a Johnson 50 longstick motor.
People, guns, drugs it's been going on for years.
I'm sure there will be some clued up PNG crims ready to bring the paying customer to Australia.

Thought some of you might enjoy this story.

http://au.businessinsider.com/this-former-iraqi-asylum-seeker-tried-to-repay-centrelink-more-than-18000-after-he-became-a-success-2013-7

csteel: From the link. He came to Australia through legal channels. His uncle, a doctor already living here, was eventually able to sponsor him, and he arrived on the first day in May, 1999.

Makes a BIG difference.

Actually I was wondering where you were. Eventually come out from under the Threepence eh.

Dear csteele,

Thanks for the link.

And what an amazing story.

Yes, this man did come to this country legally - however
it says a great deal about his character that he
did not take anything for granted, worked hard,
contributed to our society, and wanted to pay back
the debt that he felt he owned it. Certainly breaks
with the stereotype image - being bandied about.

Dearest Lexi,

That story, of a legal migrant, is testimony to the hardships and anguish of the millions of refugees around the world. But it doesn't add one skerrick to the case for open-slather for all and sundry. Whatever our annual refugee quota, there will always be more than that wanting desperately to come to a safe country like Australia.

We can't take all sixteen million refugees, or thirty million displaced persons. So like it or not, we, the public, and the government too, must set some sort of annual limit on how many we take.

Personally, I think they should kick it up to 30,000 per year, or 300,000 over ten years, which - since the refugees tend to be young - would grow to half a million in those ten years.

We could probably handle half a million people if they had high levels of skills, from extremely diverse backgrounds, I don't have much problem with that. But I have my notion of a limit, when we have to shut the gate, and I'm sure you do too.

So thirty thousand ? forty thousand ? one hundred thousand ? all of those desperate people - forty six million ?

Love,

Joe