SM,

Lol! - "opinion columnist", Chris Kenny - now there's a right-wing yabberer of renown!

Loudmouth,

"I think Tony Burke's characterisation of the Greens' policy on boat-people, as 'line-of-sight' refugees, was most appropriate."

"Here are a few quotes from Burke in 2008 - having wrested immigration fromthe LNP.

".....In the area of refugee policy the key themes running through the Labor platform are humanity, fairness, integrity and public confidence."

"Labor committed to abolishing the Pacific Solution and this was one the first things the Rudd Labor Government did on taking office. It was also one of my greatest pleasures in politics. Neither humane nor fair, the Pacific Solution was also ineffective and wasteful."

(My personal favourite)

"....the Howard government sought to outsource our international protection obligations to less developed countries when we should have been shouldering them ourselves."

" When we came to office there were people found to be refugees left rotting on Nauru because of a political decision taken by the former government to keep them there. I must say I was pleased to discover that the department were very keen to bring them to Australia quickly, and we did this in less than two months."

"......The Pacific Solution was not about maintaining integrity or public confidence in Australia’s arrangements. It was about the cynical politics of punishing refugees for domestic political purposes."

Nothing changes....

Poirot,

That was in 2008 just before embarking on Labor's single most sanctimonious and extravagant cock up in border security history. Oh how they must regret their hubris, telling everyone that asylum seekers were due to push factors, not pull factors and that relaxing border security would have a negligible effect on numbers in spite of the advice of their departments.

Australians now look back at this as one of the biggest lies that labor/greens told the voters second only to the carbon tax lie.

SM,

All it displays on this issue is that Labor reckon the govt is on to a great vote puller - especially in conjunction with the copious flag-drapings and fear-mongering presently undertaken by our dingbat PM.

So what we have is a govt telling us it's "stopped the boats" while simultaneously still prodding them away, by taking them on board naval craft, sailing around for a bit, dumping them in boats and paying the people who delivered them to take them away again.

I always figured if the boats were "stopped" it meant they weren't actually coming anymore - silly me!

"Australians now look back at this as one of the biggest lies that labor/greens told the voters second only to the carbon tax lie."

Lol! - you do have some gumption, writing such things...when your hero is a PM who lies at a rate of once every 24 hours.

So many lies and debacles that one layer is quickly overlaid with another.

Some have very short memories.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0MHRSFz6FM

Poirot,

I see that you and other left whingers are trying to use schoolboy logic to take an extreme view of the meaning of stop the boats and trying to claim that this has not been met.

This might be rewarded with a few sniggers from others from the looney left, but 90% of Aussies know perfectly well what was meant and that Abbott has succeeded spectacularly, and think that those making the claim are pedantic idiots.

This follows the same pathetic and strained reasoning that claimed that the carbon tax was not a tax.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Why don't you Google -
"Abbott's Lies."

Perhaps then things may become clearer for you.

The boats have not been stopped.
Merely diverted.
There's a difference.