Fortress Australia

Refugees vs Convicts - that's like Dinosaurs vs Robots in the epic battle front. You convicts might have the edge, maybe having murderers amongst their midsts but I imagine when people are desperate like the refugees that can fight pretty dirty.

Unfortunately at the moment the smart money is on the convicts. I saw an Australian politicians on the news this morning who said the main problem they had with the ship'o'fugees is that they are not going through the proper channels and therefore it would be unfair to all the other refugees who want to go to Australia (and don't get let in). Hooray for Australia and their sense of fair play. Who says the Empire is dead.

Apparently now East Timor are going to take them. Talk about out of the frying pan.

"everyone walks around with a perpetual smile acros their face" KINKS , Australia

Norway had offered to take some of them.

V. embarrassing for (sane) Australians, with ranting radio demagogues determining Australia's national policies, with a supine, opportunist Prime Minister cynically seeking re-election by encouraging Queenslanders with sunstroke (tho' I'm stereotyping) to take aim at chimeric notions of asylum seekers.

This week in Oz has been absolutely insane: rants about Muslim invaders everywhere, actively encouraged by politicos (both Labor and Conservative). The absolute stupidity of some of these people has been astonishing; yes, obviously Afghanis are advanced spies for an Indonesian invasion, given their cultural and linguistic commonalities and all. What can you reply to that?

> V. embarrassing for (sane) Australians, with ranting radio demagogues determining Australia's national policies

Sounds like the good ol' US of A (Fatfuck Limbaugh, anyone?) The common denominator in both countries probably being the thoroughly odious Rupert Murdoch.

get out - rupert murdoch is not a fucking asutralian, and he should...well, anyway, y eah it sucks, yeah there's a lot of ozzies who don't support this shit and yeah we are tyring to make our views heard.

The situation is complicated by the fact that refugee integration is a really big problem anywhere - I'd like to see how the US would handle the same situation. The European Union might be fairly generous to illegal refugees, but a) this has already caused huge amounts of racial tension in the more affected countries, b) their overall refugee intake is still much lower per capita than Australia (population density is relevant, but tends to be misleading - much of Australia is inhospitable) and c) they're ultimately far tougher when it comes to rewarding offical refugee status.

Making it a flat policy to not allow 'illegal' refugees to enter a country is irrational and impossible to enforce, but taking the opposite approach does mean that there will be less 'legal' refugees accepted (as the overall number is fixed). I tend to give the former group the benefit of the doubt and take their claims to refugee status at face value, but the transformation of refugee-status to a user-pays system via people smuggling is disconcerting, not because it undermines the claims of those who resort to it (I would in their situation), but because it does not allow for those who cannot afford the ten thousand dollar detour through Indonesia. The official refugee allocation system at least tries to address that issue.

That said, I feel the handling of the Tampa situation by the Government has been over-reactive, irresponsible and far too politicised, turning a human welfare issue into an election issue. Alexander Downer (our tosser of a Foreign Minister) further degraded himself in my eyes by trying to bring East Timor into the equaton, which is so preposterous I initially thought it was a joke. Furthermore, I feel strongly that the conditions of the detainment centers for illegal refugees are both appalling and an inappropriate method of discouragement.

And yeah, extremists on either side tend to destroy the debate - surely these issues can be discussed at a more sophisticated level than just "throw open the borders" vs. "the muslims are coming!"?

I just realised that nowhere did I point out that I reckon the boat *should* have been allowed to land... I just reckon the situation is more complex than a lot of people on both sides of the debate make it out to be.