Dear Shadow Minister,

I may well be delusional in expecting transparency
and accountability from the current government.
As well as any reasoned, intelligent, unbiased
commentary from you.

The current state of affairs is deplorable.
And at least for me - lies, rhetoric, and slogans
do not work.

Shadow
There is simply two lines of thought here, yours and the other conservatives who are willing to accept the Abbott line of "stop the boats" and do not much care as to how that objective is achieved. Be it by paying people smugglers or the extreme of applying some sort of gunboat mentality to the problem. You simply apply the ends justifies the means principle, end of story as far as you are concerned.
The other side of the argument is what those of us who in fact also support the objective 'stop the boats' but are unwilling to trade off our support for human rights and goverment openness and accountability. There is no way we are about to blindly accept the Abbott line of simply 'trust me" and all will be well!

So in your ideal world Paul, what possible solution can you offer? What is a better way to stop the boats, if you genuinely agree they need to be stopped?

Dear ConservativeHippie,

No - the boats need to continue.

As the AIM News points out -

"Apart from the mental gymnastics it takes to connect
the towbacks, pushbacks, detention camps and paying
people smugglers and reach the conclusion -
"The boats have stopped," (although we don't really
know if they have stopped due to the secrecy of
'on water operations') - what has actually stopped?"

The AIM news tells us - "for Mr Abbott to
have any hope of winning another election he needs the
boats to continue."

We're told that Mr Abbott and his colleagues "get all the
favourite headlines that the Murdoch media can produce about
how tough Mr Abbott is."

No matter what question is asked on what subject, the
answer always is - "We stopped the boats!"

"What we do is stop the boats by hook or by crook, because that's
what we've got to do and that's what we've successfully done!"

"And we'll keep on doing it!"

And as we know "when we have a population that thinks it is
okay that some people should die either in those offshore
detention camps or in sinking boats on the way to Australia -
then we have a population who no longer thinks all lives are
sacred and that it is okay for some people to die if we
don't like them."

The AIM News states -
"Once we have a subdued population that willingly accepts that
human rights are not universal and are the whim of the
government of the day - we have a population willing to blindly
obey for fear of the consequences.
Losing citizenship anyone?"

Finally -
"If we are willing to sit back and say it is acceptable for a
government to trash international conventions, human rights,
moral obligations, the end justifies the means - strip
citizenship of people on a minister's whim" and that
government " is not
accountable to the electorate or the media then why would we
think a government with that much power will stop at people or
boats?"

Dear Foxy,

Ah ! The 'wag the dog' theory: that if it's possible to benefit more from an alternative tactic, then it must have been chosen.

Also that could be termed the Thor Heyerdahl hypothesis: that if something could possibly be the case, then it is the case. If rafts could have sailed from South America to Polynesia, then they did. [Forget about the Frenchman who sailed the other way, to disprove the theory.]

Sometimes I wish I were paranoid, it sounds like so much fun.

Love,

Joe

'Thanks for your run-by.....although your knowledge of climate science is only slightly more nuanced than my cat's.'

must be embarassing for you Poirot that your cat has more sense than you.