THE BEST SOLUTION TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION???

Opposition has key to stopping boat arrivals

BY:   GREG SHERIDAN, FOREIGN EDITOR
From:The Australian
December 24, 2011 12:00AM

A TITANIC battle of wills took place yesterday between the Gillard government and the Abbott opposition and, as far as we can see, the opposition is not going to remove its veto on the Malaysia Solution to the illegal arrival of boatpeople.

The only way that would change, one presumes, is if the nature of the Malaysia Solution changed: that is, the Malaysian government signs the refugee convention or institutes similar guarantees into domestic law, or at least gives them a much greater degree of formality than they have now.

If that happens the opposition will be able to claim it has greatly improved the quality of the Malaysia Solution.

The government has had some success in getting commentators to blame the opposition for the recent policy impasse. But really, the whole illegal immigration-boatpeople fiasco is the government’s problem, the government’s fault and the government’s responsibility.

Yesterday’s events in a way make the government’s position even more incoherent. Yesterday, the government was publicly prepared to open an offshore processing centre on Nauru. If the opposition maintains its veto on Malaysia, what then is the government’s position? How can it be that Nauru was OK yesterday but no good today?

The absolute failure of the Gillard government to show any conviction, consistency or policy coherence on the boatpeople matter is at the heart of its failure to manage the issue effectively.

No one, least of all the people-smugglers, believes, or takes at face value, or invests with any sense of consequence, a single word the government says on this matter, so all the serially contradictory and wildly varying policies it has adopted and then discarded end up achieving nothing.

There are many layers of complexity and contradiction all through this business.

In Wayne Swan’s letter to Tony Abbott on Thursday, he spoke of “our No 1, shared, overriding objective: to stop men, women and children from risking their lives on leaky boats.”

The tragedy of those people who drowned is indeed an appalling human tragedy. They were all human beings and they all have an absolute claim on human rights. In my view there is no one in Australia, at any point of any spectrum of this debate, who does not want to stop such deaths.

Surely all of us involved in this debate can afford each other this much goodwill: that there is no one who wants, or who is directly responsible for, these tragic deaths.

And it is absolutely correct that avoiding these deaths must be an extremely high priority of policy.

But if it is the only policy priority, then the Greens’ policy is the logical one to follow. Indeed, if avoiding deaths at sea is the only consideration of policy, you could quite reasonably be a lot more radical than the Greens.

The Greens want us to take tens of thousands of people from Malaysia and Indonesia. If we did that it would certainly, in the short term at least, prevent deaths at sea.

Why would anyone get on a boat when they knew they would come to Australia in short order in perfect safety? It would also massively increase the numbers coming to Indonesia and Malaysia.

More than that, if avoiding deaths at sea is the only priority, if the people involved really are refugees and have a right to claim refuge in Australia, then we should send our navy out to meet the boats and help them as early on their journey as possible.

I am not being sarcastic or ironic here. This was the position I took on the Vietnamese boatpeople of the late 1970s and early 80s. I believed they were genuine refugees. I strongly supported Medecins du Monde, which sent out boats searching for Vietnamese in the South China Sea. I helped try to set up a branch of MDM in Sydney, wrote columns about it, held a meeting for it in my home and on several occasions was invited to join its expeditions in the South China Sea.

If you believe these people really are refugees, and really are entitled to resettlement in Australia, this is the only logical response.

I have 100 per cent changed my view since then because I believe that overwhelmingly we are dealing today with determined illegal immigration, not refugees. The bureaucratic process to decide who is really a refugee is completely unreliable, especially when people throw away their documents before landing on Australian soil so their stories cannot be verified.

Middle-class Iranians, Pakistanis pretending to be Afghans, Afghans who have only ever lived in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils who don’t want to join the tens of millions of Tamils in India: all of these people may reasonably want to live in Australia. Overwhelmingly, they are not refugees.

So a serious object of policy also has to be to prevent people from confronting Australia with an unmanageable problem of illegal arrivals by boat.

This is a perfectly sensible objective, which the vast majority of Australians want upheld. But it is almost impossible to achieve while ever the ultimate prize of permanent residency in Australia is available.

That is why those who claim it is hysterical for us to get worried about relatively small numbers of illegal immigrants are misguided or disingenuous. Once the route to Australia is established, the numbers will increase inexorably.

In the first half of December we had the highest rate of arrivals for many years. We have had more than 14,000 boat arrivals since late 2008, when Labor changed the successful Pacific Solution policies John Howard had implemented. The arrival rate is accelerating and all these people will bring relatives under family reunion. This is an immigration outcome, pure and simple, and one that the government has completely lost control of.

Offshore processing by itself will not stop the boats and, therefore, will not stop the drownings.

Once people are detained at an Australian facility, be it on Nauru or Manus Island, there will be strong calls from within Australia that they be processed quickly. If they have got rid of their documents, and are determined to live in Australia, the government will find it very hard to send them back and ultimately most will be accepted into Australia.

The boats thus will keep coming. This again would be a failure of process and a defeat for Australian sovereignty and the will of the people of Australia and of their government.

Ultimately, solving this problem must include a determination that if you arrive illegally by boat, whatever your circumstances, you will not get permanent residency in Australia. This is why the opposition’s approach of offshore processing combined with temporary protection visas, with no family reunion rights, is likelier to work than the government’s approach.

The fact that the Abbott opposition, like Howard before it, looks as if it really would enforce these policies means it would have a better chance of staring down the people-smugglers and their clients.

Credibility, which on this issue Julia Gillard has entirely lacked across her whole prime ministership, is crucial.

~~~

Some responses from a Facebook thread:

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ John – If Sheridan was right in his absolute belief that the boats are filled with illegal immigrants then it would not be the case that 9 in 10 make successful claims that they ate refugees. We have blood on our hands in most of the source countries through our direct military involvement in the conflict people are fleeing from or from our failure to challenge, for example, the treatment of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka.

We cannot stop the boats, but international cooperation could lead to more hope of resettlement.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Daniel – This is a stupid article, though it is interesting to see Sheridan’s evolution of thought on this issue.

As it happens, the only reasons Sheridan wanted to help the Vietnamese was because they were fleeing communism, and as a Cold War warrior, that was consistent.

No he claims to ‘know’, somehow, that the majority of boat arrivals are not who they claim to be, while the Department of Immigration and ASIO spend months and often years checking out their stories.

This then grants him what he perceives is an ethical license to treat people — who Australia’s best analysts determine as genuine refugees — so badly that no one else will want to try and arrive this way.

Quite simply, this even still breaks Kantian ethics which says that humans are always ends, not means.

The real problem is not that Labor doesn’t have the balls to treat boat arrivals (no, they are not “illegal” boat arrivals) as appallingly as the Howard Government (or as St Paul would phrase it, “doing evil that good may abound”), it is that we have a regional problem with Indonesia and Malaysia having complete contempt for refugees, but not enough to stop them either arriving with proper visas or fueling the economy when they try to make it to Australia.

Hundreds of people die every year trying to make it from Cuba to Miami, but because Cuban-Americans have such leverage in any Presidential election, no one would dare tow those boats back or even claim there is a problem with, cough, illegal boat arrivals, or even blame the US for the drownings (because that is of course Cuba’s fault).

ABC reporter Sarah Ferguson (Tony Jones’ wife) has interviewed hundreds of asylum seekers, and the Indonesian people smugglers, and has contempt for both the major parties’ policies. Yet in Australia people make up their minds from the ignorance of their armchairs mostly, not with the slightest knowledge of the people’s lives most affected.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Johnathan – One thing that occurs to me:

We insist on treating the boat people as though one solution will deal with all their problems. But something I glean from this article is that there are at least three and maybe four distinct “flavours” of boat person.

1) Refugees. Escaping something. Would probably be in most circumstances a law-abiding citizen, but desperately trying to get away from whatever it is that is threatening them.

2) Determined and considered illegal immigrants. Want to enter Australia, laws don’t particularly concern them. Not under any threat, simply opportunistic.

3) Well-meaning and ignorant people. Would probably not take to boats if they were aware that it was illegal. Not under a threat.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Johnathan –  ¢â‚¬Å½4) People smugglers. Like 2) but with an added aggravated nature to their criminality.

As you can see, since there are so many distinct types, it’s foolish to think that a one-size-fits-all solution will work!

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Daniel – There is no one-size solution, Johnathan. Alas, Indonesia, one of the most corrupt counties on the planet, is decades away from ever being to climb up from this list (below), and probably cannot do anything significant to stop the people smugglers (not least because its army takes a share of all the spoils . . . the last boat which sank was estimated to have reaped at least one million dollars, whether the people made it to Australia or not).

The only solution is a regional solution, which at least Labor is attempting, however flawed it is.

Put simply, there is nothing Australia can do on its own that will both ethical and legal that will “stop the boats” (a disgusting slogan if ever there was one).

Italy was getting as many boat arrivals as we get in a year every week during the Libyan crisis, and there was no simple solution for them either.

As for Sheridan’s point about asylum seekers throwing all documentation away, well, as all of the interviewed have said, it is a condition of the people smugglers that they carry no ID, because it covers the people smugglers’ trail to some degree. It’s poor form to blame asylum seekers for being Machiavellian when it’s their handlers who enforce such a requirement.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/dec/01/corruption-index-2011-transparency-international#data

Corruption index 2011 from Transparency International: find out how countries compare

www.guardian.co.uk

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Rowland –   Daniel and Johnathan: very helpful, thanks! Cleared up a number of misconceptions…

One dimension that’s rarely mentioned openly except by shock-jocks: with the current majority-Muslim migration statistics, how long will it take for Australia to become a Muslim-majority country?

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ John – What drives people to get on boats, to take what seem to us to be ridiculous risks, as a complete loss of hope by any other means. Refugee camps in Malaysia and Indonesia offer no hope to Afghans. they are tens of times worse than indeterminate detention in an Australian facility.

Stopping the boats requires a global solution – Australia can’t do it alone. We need more countries offering resettlement and we need many more places being offered, so that if you are one of the 100,000 refugees in a camp in Malaysia you can count on being processed and offered a place somewhere in the world in a year or so.

In the absence of such a global agreement, people will still exercise their rights to actually get to a country and seek asylum there. They are not breaking the law – they have been given this right by the global community.

The saddest dimension is that there are sharks out there willing to prey on the vulnerable by offering passage on un-seaworthy ships.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ John    ¢â‚¬Å½@ Rowland – There is barely 6% of the population claiming a non-Christian religion and Muslims are a small subset of that number. The media creates the illusion that we are being overwhelmed by Muslims, just as they create the illusion that we live in a violent society. Neither are sufficiently true for us to be afraid.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Daniel – Now, while almost no one wants to say this (no progressive, that’s for sure . . . and those who do are usually borderline racists), most immigration departments in western nations have tracked immigration patterns from various countries and various religious and ethnic groups to gauge the successes and failures of either multi-culturalism and/or the non-discriminatory immigration, and how to fix them.

What many western nations have discovered (but mostly will never release publicly) is that during the period where the Middle East was ruled by dictators determined to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and related Islamist movements, a lot of those seeking asylum in the west were from Muslim majority countries who hated the culture and values of the west and either wanted their own haven of conservative Islamic values or a place where they could organise and support Islamist causes from abroad, like the Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini in France, and the whole gang at the Finsbury Park Mosque in London.

So, while no western country wanted to implement a religious test for immigration, they had plenty of political tests to sift out too many communists and other groupings that would have limited allegiance to the country in which they were seeking asylum.

Now, unlike refugees from pretty much any other culture, Muslim refugees have shown less willingness to assimilate than others, but their children have become way more conservative than their parents, which pretty much goes against every other immigrant community.

Now, in the UK, second generation Muslims are almost three times more likely to support suicide bombers, approve oft he death penalty for apostates from Islam and approve of attacks on British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even in a liberal place like Holland, gay men fear walking the street because they will be bashed by Muslim youth, something the youths’ parents would never do.

So . . . while you will get right wing parties slurring all Muslims because of this with gleeful abandon, countless social researchers realise this is a problem but feel they have to blame the society that gave them haven for creating this phenomenon, because no civilised person can blame a refugee for anything, let alone their religion.

However, there needs to be some honesty in all of this, without blaming Islam or Muslims as a whole community. Every western country accepting refugees and immigrants knows that their political leanings are crucial to, firstly, the party in power (even in Australia, countless people suggested that Fraser wanted Vietnamese refugees because they were not likely to vote for a left-leaning party like Labor), and secondly, their ability to be either loyal citizens or potential ticking time bombs that might turn on their ‘new’ country.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ John – For some more development of my ideas on this issue check this out – http://djittydjitty.blogspot.com/2011/12/stop-boats-global-problem.html

The News in Black and White: Stop the Boats!!!! A GLOBAL PROBLEM

djittydjitty.blogspot.com

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Greg –    ¢â‚¬Å½”One dimension that’s rarely mentioned openly except by shock-jocks: with the current majority-Muslim migration statistics, how long will it take for Australia to become a Muslim-majority country?” – A very long time. It’s currently about one percent. Buddhists are about three percent, and that was all the massive refugee migration from Vietnam in the 70s achieved. Not all those fleeing from muslim countries are muslims, and of those who are many are minority sect muslims. The Tamils are Hindus, some of the Afghans and Iraqis and Iranians and most of the Burmese are Christians. And actually the current MIGRATION statistics are not majority muslim. You’re talking about the asylum seeker-refugee statistics which is totally different.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Greg –   According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in mid-2010 5,993,945 of the Australian resident population were born outside Australia, representing 26.8% of the total Australian resident population. Of these the top 40 countries of birth included 8 that were majority muslim countries, but with some of those the migrants from there would be mixed – many Malaysians would be Catholic, as would many Lebanese for example. Malaysia was 9th on the list, followed by Lebanon at number 14 and Indonesia at number 18. The number one was of course the UK.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Rob –   I don’t think ethnic mix is a big problem.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Rodney –   Rowland, no one has answered your question about when/if Australia will become a muslim majority country.

Certainly in western sydney the politicians need the muslim vote to get elected.

The interview of a person who was on this recent tragic tragedy said that unless they close the boarders people will keep coming and there will be more deaths. Or you have to adopt the greens position.

Don’t look to Indonesian politicians to stop this. I am sure they take delight in causing Australia discomfort. And as a muslim nation they would prefer to see more muslims in Australia.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Evan – I think it’s nonsense. There is no such thing as an illegal refugee. As to the government being entirely to blame he seems to have forgotten the realities of the numbers in parliament. I think it is just his usual tosh

With the proportion of boat arrivals of our immigration it would take centuries for Oz to become majority muslim

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Peter –   Returning to boat people… something we really don’t want to return to is the Temporary Protection Visa, at least in its recent form. It is probably one of the most evil decisions of recent Australian history. People get left on these literally for years with no right to work, no right to medical care, no family reunion rights of course, and, in many cases, no support networks except people in the same situation.

Not even the welfare services are supposed to assist them, though they often do through food parcels (outside the Government subsidised system) and, in many cases, personal donations from the workers’ pockets.

In other words it is a system which forces people to beg. I have heard of people who have developed chronic health problems over the course of, say, seven or eight years on a TPV — problems which could probably have been averted had they been able to access suitable health care when the problem first emerged.

This is the system the Opposition wants put on the table.

We also don’t really want the Malaysian solution while there is no clear legal protection for people sent there.

This is the system the Government has been plumping for.

Nauru and other “solutions” being discussed are too expensive, legally no better than Malaysia, or compromised by Governments unable to honour the commitments they make.

We don’t want people risking their lives in unseaworthy boats trying to get here. This is the one thing on which we all agree.

We should remember that off-shore processing was a measure adopted by the Howard government largely to avoid the political fall-out that was developing because of the detention centres, an inhumane Keating Government idea which had been worsened by privatisation of their management.

It seems to me that we need to get away from preferred solutions and instead focus on the problems: that is, we can’t keep trying to force people to conform to the boxes we find easiest to develop: we have to devise boxes, if at all, to suit the needs of the people.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Tom –   John C… have you done any statistical analysis of the demographics of Australia’s Islamic community showing comparative fertility rates of this and other subsets of the Australian community? I’m not a statistician, but most Muslim families I know have four or more children and none of my Anglo friends have more than four (and that’s thought unusual). Most of the Muslim families I know are ‘second generation’ by the way. If that demographic trend continues ( and I said “if”) then clearly, as some point, there would be more Muslims than non-Muslims. Looking at other ‘western countries” with significant percentages of Muslims, this trend seems to be continuing into the third and fourth generations. For example in France, the fertility rate in the Muslim community is estimated to be between 3.5 and 4.4 children per family, while the overall fertility rate in France is 1.97 children per family. This has led to an interesting effect.. around 10% of the Franch population as a whole are Muslim but over 30% of teenagers and young adults are Muslim.

Evan… your comment is correct, but that’s not the only source of Islamic immigration to Australia. Personally, I think we should take a lot more refugees but a lot less Muslim immigrants.

I’m intrigued by the ‘throw away their documents’ statements. Having lived in a developing country, most people didn’t have so much as a birth certificate. If such people were members of an oppressed minority, how would they get legitimate travel papers?

For example, in Afghanistan, there is no way to apply for asylum in Australia. http://www.dfat.gov.au/missions/countries/af.html . There is also no local language version of the embassy’s web page. People are redirected to the embassy in Pakistan for visa information, but when you follow that link, (again to an English-only website) there doesn’t seem to be any information about asylum or refugee claims.

If you have a relative already in Australia, perhaps you could follow this lead…. “All partner and family migration applications from Afghan nationals resident in Afghanistan or Pakistan are processed by the Australian Consulate-General in Dubai.”

When you get to the Dubai link… again all English (we love to make it easy)… you find that for ‘offshore registration’ for a humanitarian visa, you need to have a ‘proposer’ in Australia who will complete a “Form 681” and lodge it, together with your “Form 842, Application for Offshore Humanitarian Visa”, at the Offshore Humanitarian Processing Centre in …. MELBOURNE!

I don’t know why anyone would think this was complicated for, let’s say, a member of a rural Afghan minority with limited literacy skills. Note… there is no facility in Afghanistan – neither at the Australian Embassy nor the UNHCR – to assist someone with this process….. so guess what they do…. ?

Australian Embassy, Afghanistan – Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

www.dfat.gov.au

The Australian Embassy in Kabul operates from a number of locations that are not publicly disclosed due to security reasons.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Maelor –   I thoght this was one of the more pertinent comments – “If Sheridan was right in his absolute belief that the boats are filled with illegal immigrants then it would not be the case that 9 in 10 make successful claims that they are refugees.”

 ¢â‚¬ ¢

Daniel –  ¢â‚¬Å½@Tom, you are right about people in, say, Afghanistan who want to claim refugee status. But the Afghans who make it to Indonesia obviously have at least a passport to get into that country.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Rowland Croucher Thanks everyone for a most helpful pro/con discussion of the issues…

Something no one has mentioned (I think): what about better/more government/local community-sponsored immersion programs to acculturate incoming migrants re Australian values, etc.? Would this prevent some of the radicalization of the 2nd/3rd generation? But then competing with weekly sermons from the mosques is a challenge!

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Daniel –   Well, until September 11, the general theory was that the worst second generation migrants would get up to was create a ruckus at the tennis when a Serb played a Croat, or something along that line of things. (Though the French could have told a lot of people about the takeover of much of the youth by radical Muslims in the 1980s, but that wasn’t tied to terrorism.)

So, now you have those two sides I mentioned: the left blames the state for not being sensitive enough; and the right blames Islam or the culture.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Rodney – Daniel, I have never heard of people being discriminated against not because of what they might do but what their children might do.

Rodney – Daniel, you don’t need a passport to get into Indonesia, just money. I know where there are hundreds of people in Indonesia illegally.

Rodney – It seems to me that this idea of an Australian identity is becoming a thing of the past. Many groups, not just muslim, do not assimilate but maintain varying amounts of their heritage.

Tamils sent a lot of money back to support the tigers.

Serbs did go back to fight.

British migrants and their children did go to fight in www1 and 2.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Daniel – No, Rodney, I certainly wasn’t arguing for any sort of discrimination based on 2nd generation patterns. Just describing a phenomenon, which partly explains David Cameron, Nicholas Sakozy and Angela Merkel’s recent comments on multi-culturalism.

Where genuine policy concerns end and pandering to bigotry for political gain begins is a much larger question.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Greg – The present muslim population in Australia is somewhere around 1 percent. About the same as the Jewish population. Three percent are buddhists by comparison. And that one percent comprises all sorts of mulsims, including some who hate the others’ guts. Not a united group of conspiracists ready to plot an overthrow by any stretch of the imagination. Should Christians oppose the lies of Islam by teaching the truth of the gospel? By all means! Should we evangelise muslims? Of course, after all they are trying to evangelise us! But as a nation we are hardly in danger of being overcome by them anytime in the next couple of hundred years. This is sheer shock jock xenophobic nonsense. People said exactly the same sort of things about the ‘Asian hordes’ to our north a hundred years ago. Nothing has changed.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Daniel – If 2nd generation migrants only had the odd few going to fight in Chechnya, Serbia or other places . . . people would put that down to youthful idealism. But when they go to fight allied troops, plan attacks at home and openly loathe democracy and liberalism, that becomes a problem.

In the UK, 35 per cent of 2nd generation Muslims under 35 approve attacks against British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and believe it is moral and ethical that former Muslims be killed. This is really quite a different clash of ideologies than all other first or 2nd generation immigrants in Western countries.

I am not sure how many French Muslims approved of the Algerian resistance, and that might be remotely comparable. But a lot of French thought so too, so I am not sure how similar the issues are.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Greg – Australia is different. Yes there are the radical muslims, mostly Lebanese, mostly around the Lakemba mosque in Sydney. But I’ve also met, for example, Albanians, Turks, and others who are indistinguishable from any other Aussie, whose wives wear ordinary western clothes and don’t walk three paces behind their husbands and who are very nominal in their practice of the religion. The term ‘muslim’ on a census form means many things. But whether we should have fewer muslim immigrants is a separate issue from how we should treat asylum seekers, whatever their religious allegiances are. The boat people issue is about humane treatment of those seeking asylum, not about immigration (illegal or legal).

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Daniel – Australia has been great. The British sent a research team down here years ago to find out how our Pakistani community had so seamlessly fitted into Australian society, while they had so many problems (the National Front [BNP] would be one hell of a part of that).

Australia has, as far as we can tell, hardly any female genital mutilation, honour killings, forced marriages (against the women’s will) and radicalisation. . . . which are real problems in Britian, France, Holland and Germany.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢

Gail – Point 1. Please explain to me if you an Afghan, Paki,Tamil, etc. how did you get all the way to Indonesia without ID??? I mean, isn’t there official, international borders to pass through before reaching Indonesia; like India, Thailand, etc? So, IF the refugees didnt have passports/ID at all, how do they get as far as Indonesia, othewise?

Point 2. If the boat-owners make millions from refugees, then are people with large sums of money “actual” refugees? Point 3. So, IF they are genuine refugees and pay their way through several countries “WHERE ARE THEY OBTAINING THIS MONEY FROM” in the first place? Point 4. IF someone is paying them bags of money to come here, Then…have you asked, “WHO” and “WHY”?

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Tom – Gail.. the internationally accepted definition of refugee does not include a requirement to be destitute. How do you cross borders without papers? Simply pay someone to take you to a point on the coast other than an official entry point and get off the boat. Like Australia, Indonesia has an enormous coast line that is unguarded.

 ¢â‚¬ ¢ Greg – The answer to points one two and three (leaving aside the factual errors behind some of the assumptions there) is that they spend their life savings to get out. That’s where the money comes from. Boat owners are not making millions either, that’s an exaggeration. Many of the boat owners are probably not much better off than the refugees.

~~

Then there’s this from Professor Robert Manne: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/how-the-left-got-it-wrong-20111221-1p5jd.html