BTT

<Mr Abbott and Immigration Minister Scott Morrison held a media conference today to say it had been 100 days since an asylum-seeker boat had reached Australian shores — and that over the same period under Labor there were 66 boat arrivals. With nearly 4000 illegal immigrants.

With an estimated average of 4% of illegal immigrants dying at sea, Abbott has already saved about 150 lives and is happy to continue this humanitarian work.

“It's too early to declare the job has been done but nevertheless we can safely say that the way is closed,” the Prime Minister said.>

Quite an achievement and made even more difficult by the sympathisers of illegal migrants and others who make a living out of them.

All western countries have an illegal migrant problem. Some have drownings at sea, while others find dead in shipping containers and so on. It is despicable that anyone would support people smugglers, yet in Australia there are some who even claimed that these criminal gangs were innocent too!

Hi Steele,

<<You took my quote...Comprehensively stripped of any humans...>>
The point was to juxtapose your source which sought to paint the attacks as concerted campaigns against the hospital(s)that continued over many days -- with another source which portrayed them as isolated incidents.

<<Best also to use authoritative accounts ...[not Sri Lankan govt sources]>>
LOL if you were really concerned about "authoritative", you'd have to discount i) Any Tamil sources ii) Any human rights gravy-train-passenger sources and iii) any journalist after-a-sensationalist-headline-story sources--and what would you have left after that,eh?

<<Foxy should be taking notes>>
Don't worry, don't worry Foxy is over at New Matilda desperately searching their archives for something to link us to bolster your failing!--FAILED-- prosecution.

Humanitarian, i don't know if manus is humanitarian. And what about negotiating with pol pot about taking some of that humanitarian work.
One mill / refugee for resettlement sounds fair.

OtB
I do not expect an ongoing perfect score, but it is gratifying at this point. The message will get out as I hear there are less illegals arriving in Malaysia and Indonesia.

The costs will be lowered as more get sick of being detained and elect to go home and that should be encouraged. We then can progressively shut down the detention centres.

Morrison needs to keep telling the illegals that they will not get residence in Aus and that they will never be able to bring their relos here. I wonder if we fingerprint them in case they try again. That should be a big cross on their record and a note against any relos. Keep up the good work, Morrison gets my encouragement award.

Steele,

Now you are really grasping at straws. The war in Sri Lanka that occurred 5 years ago is red herring precisely because it has nothing to do with Abbott. You failed to show how Abbott should not have any dealings with Sri Lanka because of their war crimes, yet the only example you have given has been demolished by SPQR, and rejected by the UN commission. TA has not in any way condoned the actions during the war, but chose constructive engagement with Sri Lanka to save lives rather than Labor's fascination with futile gesture politics and letting people drown.

Secondly your feeble claim that TA should have supported Juliar stripping all remaining asylum seeker protections to support the Malaysian solution, and thus shares culpability fails on so many levels:

1 It wasn't working. The boats had slowed not stopped under the threat of being sent to Malaysia, but the 800 people limit was almost full by the time of the court case, and was in reality already failed. The Malaysian solution was yet another failed thought bubble like the East Timor solution.

2 TA stopped the boats completely in 3 months without labor's protection stripping laws simply by doing what they had been begging labor to try for years.

3 Juliar promised in 2010 that she would not send illegals to non signatory countries, and her as her coalition had a majority in the lower and upper houses, how on earth can you try to pin responsibility on the coalition to help Labor break another promise to the electorate?

The deaths at sea from 2008 to 2013 unambiguously fall at Labor's feet. Labor simply could not bring itself to admit that Abbott had been right all along, or to abandon its claims that the refugees were being pushed not pulled, and that the pacific solution had failed, and rather let nearly 2000 people die rather than admit it had been wrong.

Arafat, Peres and Rabin were awarded the Nobel peace prize, not sainthood because they had made the compromises necessary to achieve the better good, as has TA.

Dear Shadow Minister,

I think you may have, completely inadvertently of course, got your commissions mixed up.

The UN commission to which you referred is actually a bunch of bleeding heart do gooders without a humanitarian bone in their body. They would have us believe "the conduct of the war represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace".
http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/Sri_Lanka/POE_Report_Full.pdf

It found amongst other things that;

The Sri Lankan military shelled on large scale the three Safe Zones where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate. It did this even after saying it would cease using heavy weapons.

The Sri Lankan military systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines. All hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery, sometimes repeatedly, despite the Sri Lankan military knowing their locations.

The Sri Lankan military shelled the UN hub, food distribution lines and Red Cross ships coming to rescue the wounded and their relatives. It did this despite having intelligence as well as notifications by the UN, Red Cross and others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_of_the_Secretary-General%27s_Panel_of_Experts_on_Accountability_in_Sri_Lanka

All complete nonsense of course and completely demolished by the Commission you were actually quoting from. That one is far more authoritative and unbiased than the UN's. It was specifically set up by the Sri Lankan government to counter the obvious lies being propagated by the UN and the US State Department. This 8 person panel even included a Tamil representative, how more fair could it have possibly been. It also had among its members people well placed to give incredibly well informed advice since both the chairman C.R. de Silva and member H.M.G.S. Palihakkara were senior government representatives during the final year of the war. Here is Palihakkara on CNN specifically denying the GSL forces were firing near or at hospitals.
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/02/03/stout.sri.lanka.war.zone.cnn?iref=videosearch

I've just been emailed asking if you would consider paid employment as a Sri Lankan government spokesperson in Australia. I've expressed my great esteem for the efforts by you in ensuring the truth about the humanitarian efforts of the SLG are given full voice.