“Not ever before have we had an election that is so important in terms of national security. We need to make sure that we have strong, secure borders.”
So said Peter Dutton yesterday. That should make it a pretty tight race, since Labor has shown no sign of departing its platform of me-tooism when it comes to national security.
“When it comes to national security, Labor and Liberal are in this together,” Bill Shorten said last week. “The truth is if you’re a cyber criminal, or you’re a people smuggler, or if you’re a terrorist, both Liberal and Labor are equally committed, and we work together.”
If the election will be fought on Australia’s asylum seeker policy, whom to support? The party that favours indefinite offshore detention and offloading our refugee obligations onto poorer Asian neighbours or …
Dear Crikey team
Two days in row the editorial stops in mid-sentence. Logged in or not, doesn’t make any difference. This one finishes here:
If the election will be fought on Australia’s asylum seeker policy, whom to support? The party that favours indefinite offshore detention and offloading our refugee obligations onto poorer Asian neighbours or …
“Brown or white bread for your merde sub?”
…or the Greens. Perhaps it’s time we admitted the Greens are a major party. Not the biggest. Not likely to win a majority in the reps. But major in the sense of giving voters a real choice. The Greens have consistently supported the most ambitious policies on issues of global significance, such as refugees and climate change. And Richard Di Natale communicates these reasonably enough to be given a place in a leaders’ debate.
Labor and the Coalition are in lockstep on this because to take any other policy position means electoral annihilation. Australians have not wanted unauthorised boat arrivals by a massive majority for years and Labor have learnt that the Twitterverse echo chamber of leftie outrage is a tiny fraction of our community. Dismantling the pacific solution was the single most egregious policy stuff up in the RGR years and Shorten will not make the same mistake again. The open borders set have the Greens to vote for so everyone has an option.
No, no, no David. It’s because caring politicians don’t want these poor people to drown at sea. Haven’t you been paying attention.
Focussing the community’s anxieties and anger on those arriving by boat distracts people from seeing just how many more rorts there are in the ‘legitimate’ migration program – the number of bodgy spouse, skilled migrant and 457 visas, and the numbers who arrive by plane with some sort of visa and then apply for refugee status after they arrive far, far exceed the numbers who have arrived by boat, even at their peak numbers
Exactly.
Running huge immigration numbers to suppress local wages and support the property bubble is OK, but a rounding error’s worth of desperate refugees are a national catastrophe.
At some level though, you do have to admire the skill and sheer sociopathy of the people that have run that pea and thimble trick.
The “business model” of the human traffickers who profit from hapless asylum-seekers might better be broken with the Asylum-Seeker Sailing Program I’m setting up in Indonesia next month. Cut out the middle-man. At the conclusion of the course, successful ‘seekers will be offered a spot on the crew aboard one of the vessels in our Christmas, Christmas Island Regatta! (we’ve applied to the Catalyst Agile and Innovative fund and are quietly confident of the outcome..;)
OneHand – as always with your perspective distorting mirror, let us remember 60K over 6 years when our annual immigration rate averaged 200K per year, ie 1.2M. Some problem, some nut.
“Not ever before have we had an election that is so important in terms of national security.”
Dutton has just watched the final episode of House of Cards.
So how does Turnbull deal him out?