How did “at least six experienced people smugglers”, who came to Australia by boat, win refugee status? How are they able to ply their trade from our shores? These are the individuals described by refugee activists as the Oskar Schindlers of Asia. Four Corners traced the tragic voyage of 97 people believed lost at sea en route to Australia and showed the callous lies of the people smugglers as they fooled relatives into thinking their loved ones were safe while continuing to collect money for the ill-fated trip. The deaths of those poor people and hundreds of others are a direct result of this government’s failed, incompetent, naive and dishonest handling of border protection. It will be a nightmare for the next Coalition government to put right.
Classic Miranda, 2011: “As a leaked draft memorandum of understanding revealed Malaysia deleting any reference to human rights, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen admitted children would be among asylum seekers Australia plans to ship off to an uncertain fate in a Third World country that routinely canes illegal entrants. The aim of outsourcing Australia’s human rights obligations, Bowen told Lateline’s Tony Jones on Thursday night, was to “break the people smugglers’ business model”. He was “making an example”, as Jones put it, of the children. Imagine the outcry if the Howard government had planned such a thing. Yet the Left is extraordinarily restrained as suddenly meek refugee activists say they’re willing to give the Government the benefit of the doubt.
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Julian Burnside: “The Malaysian Solution provoked another bout of amnesia. Both major parties have forgotten the spectacular cost to taxpayers of trafficking people to other countries, whether it is Malaysia or Nauru. Not to mention the pointless cruelty of it all.”
Sarah Hanson-Young: “The Australian Greens have condemned the Malaysian Solution reached today which will involve sending up to 800 people, including unaccompanied children, to an unknown fate.”
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The integrity of our border protection system is under threat, with implications for national security, for fairness, and for continued community cohesion in one of the great immigrant nations of the world. No starker evidence of the chaos exists than the 16,000 unauthorised boat arrivals since the Rudd and Gillard governments dismantled the successful Howard-era border protection policies. The arrivals are escalating and are so frequent they barely make the news, unless a tragedy occurs. The government’s policy lurches are luring people here on false pretences, inducing them to cheat, and rewarding them for breaking our rules.The problem for the Coalition is how to put the genie back in the bottle once they gain office. They have a plan but it is not going to be pretty.
Classic Miranda, 2011: “Just how the money is spent was revealed by Simon Benson’s report in The Daily Telegraph this week: $2.5 million is spent each month to house extra asylum seekers in motels and other accommodation outside detention centres. For 13 days in November alone, the bill at the Darwin Airport Inn was $778,000 - that is $60,000 a day for a motel that has 136 rooms.
Even if the whole motel were booked out by the Department of Immigration, the price works out to be $440 per room, per night - or almost double the quoted rack rate of $235 for the motel’s most expensive room: a two-bedroom business suite. We should not be surprised at this laissez-faire attitude to taxpayers’ money - that is the hallmark of this Government and will be its lasting legacy.
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““At the heart of our plan for a stronger economy is getting government spending down…” said Mr Abbott.
Presumably down from Howard government levels. In those 11 years there was not one in which government spending was reduced. It grew by an average of 3.7 per cent in its final five years. Current projections for spending growth have an average of 1.5 per cent. And for fond memories you don’t put into the economic equation a global recession which took more than $140 billion from the tax revenue of the new Labor government, a plunge more severe that anything which hit the Howard Budgets. Memories have to be selective to be attractive, as there are bits of the golden age which can never be polished, even by Mr Abbott. For example, the Regional Partnerships Program which ran for eight years makes Labor’s Building an Education Revolution scheme look like a a well-oiled economic mechanism of integrity and efficiency. The BER never funded a Queensland coastal hotel which boasted gaming and strippers, but a 2005 Senate inquiry was told that’s just what the RPP did. As the Auditor General reported in 2007 on the $330 million spent by the RPP, “The manner in which the program had been administered over the three year period to 30 June 2006 examined by ANAO had fallen short of an acceptable standard of public administration, particularly in respect to the assessment of grant applications and the management of funding agreements.”The audit found “instances where no application for funding was received prior to funding being approved”. They were instances either of psychic accounting or pure electoral pork barrelling.”
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/it-takes-selective-memory-to-call-Howard-era-a-golden-age/
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Classic Miranda, 2010: “Former Howard immigration minister Philip Ruddock has likened his policies to “castor oil, something you have to take a dose of to deal with the problem”. “The first thing to do is to stop the boats,” he told me this year. “Stopping the boats stopped people losing their lives. Humane decisions along the way are good public policies.” Off-shore processing centres such as Nauru, the excision of islands from the migration zone and temporary protection visas all played their part. But Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard thought they knew better.
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“Note that the 2001 figures in the table below include passengers on boats that were intercepted by the navy and whose passengers were either returned to Indonesia or taken to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. The figures also include passengers on the SIEV X boat which sank in October 2001, killing 353 people. The rationale for including these boats is that they illustrate (a) the increasing numbers of people attempting the journey to Australia in 2001 and (b) the high proportion of children on the 2001 boats.
We know other things about TPVs. We know that people who were granted permanent protection visas could access family reunion programs and arrange for their families to join them. We know that this option was not available to TPV holders - mainly men - who therefore had no official channel by which they could arrange for their wives and children to join them.”
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2757748.html
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It’s surprising how closely people fleeing from war and persecution follow our country’s politics
Through difficult trial and error the Howard government developed a suite of measures including off-shore processing in centres such as Nauru, the excision of islands from the migration zone, temporary protection visas which prevented family reunion, and yes, safely turning back the boats, which they managed to do seven times.
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Asylum seekers and people smugglers know that Howard policies meant that they would get to Australia eventually, they are no longer a deterrent. TPVs mean relatives have to get on boats to reach their loved ones; as Sarah Hansen-Young says: “TPVs were a major reason why the numbers of women and children on boats spiked during the Howard years, including on the SIEV X which claimed 353 lives after the government began using Nauru,”
The Greens policy is to make sure asylum seekers are processed orderly and quickly and then transported to Australia so that they don’t have to get on boats. If we can’t do that we could at least make the Indonesians stop confiscating the people smuggler’s good boats so that they don’t have to use crappy ones.
Did the Howard policies even work? Quote Jack the Insider:
“Certainly there was a reduction of asylum-seeker arrivals by boat in the last six years of the Howard government. The opposition claims that this was due to the successful application of Howard government policy; the Pacific Solution, TPVs, the occasional boat tow back.
The UNHCR and other aid agencies point to a relative lull in the global movement of refugees during this period. Those same aid agencies now say that since 2009, asylum-seekers are on the move in number, fleeing persecution and violence from places like Iran, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
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So the poorest of the poor, the disenfranchised, the naïve, are punished, while the people smugglers and their well-heeled passengers who pay $10,000 to force their way into Australia, are rewarded.
Every one of those Indonesian youths jailed is an injustice, which is noted and keenly felt by Indonesia, and which will come back to haunt us.
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She’s right that the so called “people smugglers” that are getting locked up are scapegoats, but so are the so called “well-heeled passengers”. If you were wealthy would you really get on the sorts of boats that are arriving, boats that look like they could sink and often do? That $10,000 is very likely their life savings and these passengers probably have a good set of clothing to wear on special occasions like arriving at a new country in which they wish to live. Miranda never criticized the Liberals when they were in government for doing the exact same thing. It’s also rich to criticize Labor for defaming an innocent group of people, and then finish your article by defaming an innocent group of people.
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Classic Miranda, 2002: “We should be seeking solutions to the refugee issue, not building conspiracy theories, writes Miranda Devine
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She then proceeds to use the term “illegal immigrants”, argues the majority of asylum seekers are middle class (if they have money why are they risking their lives on rickety boats?), claim that asylum seekers get on boats because of greed for the Western life (instead of the fact that they mostly come from violent countries full of persecution), children are put on boats to trick authorities into sympathy (rather than the fact that the families of the children probably could only afford to save the children) and then says the solution is being tough on asylum seekers rather than people smugglers. If you are going to get on some shitty boat packed to the walls with people, I’m going to say you’re desperate and willing to tolerate anything. That doesn’t mean they should have to, we should be trying to help these people rather than making their lives that much harder. But no, Miranda thinks the real victims were the Howard government, which makes as much sense as offshore detention.
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Classic Miranda: “Howard and Ruddock were demonised for their clear, firm stand in 2001 after the Tampa crisis. Yet the results were more humane in practice than the rhetoric might suggest. Boat arrivals all but stopped by 2002 as the criminal syndicates who run people-smuggling rackets got the message that there was no point risking people’s lives in leaky boats. The drownings at sea stopped.
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Maybe it was karma for demonizing asylum seekers, you know with all the lies about them throwing their children in the water.
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