Asylum hypocrites...

[Rorschach]

Children in detention: protesters harass the people solving the problem
Date November 27, 2014 - 12:15AM
Paul Sheehan

A passive-aggressive civil disobedience movement has been underway in Australia for months with activists occupying the offices of federal Coalition ministers and refusing to leave. They demand to be arrested. They use social media to demonstrate their civil sacrifice.

The occupiers have started carrying children's soft toys, as a signal of their noble intent.

They think that caring about children in detention is self-evidently good and pure and noble. Members of the Uniting Church have been foremost in the more sanctimonious aspects of these displays.

The occupying movement is called Love Makes A Way. However, when it really mattered, when the problem of children in detention was getting out of hand, when nearly 2000 kids were locked up and others had drowned at sea, when the federal Labor government was opening detention camps all over Australia, then announced a hell-hole in Papua New Guinea, there was no occupying movement, complete with soft toys.

It wasn't until the problem was being solved, and the peak number of 1992 children in detention, reached in the middle of 2013, had been slashed in half by the incoming Coalition government, that the sit-ins started.

Yet there were no sit-ins while Labor was opening detention centres in Inverbrackie, Pontville, Wickham Point, Curtin, Scherger, Yongah Hill, Blaydin Point, Darwin Airport Lodge, Berrimah House, Adelaide, Brisbane and Port Augusta, after filling Christmas Island, which it had called a "white elephant" to overflow.

Thousands of beds were installed, thousands of strands of razor wire were installed, 50,000 people were placed in detention, including 8000 children. No government offices were occupied by church activists.

The Coalition government then quickly stopped the flow of undocumented arrivals, and started closing detention centres, and reduced the number of detained children by 75 per cent on Christmas Island, and by more than 50 per cent in the rest of the system, and is preparing to release the rest of the children into the community when required legislation has been passed.

Labor and the Greens created a problem which simply did not exist when Labor won power in 2007. Their moral grandstanding led directly to the deaths of more than 1000 people, the incarceration of 50,000, the re-emergence of a gouging people-smuggling trade, a quagmire in the Australian legal system, and a $10 billion burden on the federal budget.

Because the electorate was profoundly opposed to the idea of open borders – the tacit policy of the Greens that they refuse to admit – the Labor government had to institute the worst-of-both worlds, a deterrence policy and an enormously expensive admissions process which let most undocumented arrivals into the country anyway.

So why was this national disgrace not a matter of civil disobedience? Why is the government – which released close to 1000 children from detention – being condemned for a problem it did not create and is quickly solving?

So far the offices of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, federal ministers Scott Morrison and Julie Bishop, assistant ministers Michaelia Cash and Jamie Briggs, along with the office of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, have been occupied.

Those who are occupying offices and demanding to be arrested are presumably not idiots. They must know that the placement of hundreds of children into care is a large-scale bureaucratic process. It takes months, and most of the children speak no English.

Caring about children in detention is laudatory. The activists of Love Makes A Way are to be commended for caring and for doing something about it. But I find their belated, selective, passive-aggressive, toy-brandishing, arrest-me, social-media grandstanding to be nauseating. The people who are busy solving the problem are being harassed and blamed.

Labor was hopelessly wrong on this issue both coming into power and going out. It mocked the Coalition's policies to solve the problem. The electorate did not. So successful has the Abbott government been in stopping the boats and reducing the numbers in detention that it has ceased to be an issue of national debate.

The antics of what I regard as Hypocrisy Will Find A Way – which just happens to be targeting a conservative government – affords an opportunity to look at the numbers and commend the federal government for staunching, defusing and dismantling the national detention disgrace. It has done so with quite remarkable speed, given how overwhelmed the Rudd-Gillard government was in fixing the mess it so methodically created.

[mantra]

Considering Cambodia is going to be paid $40 million to take in 5 people - there's going to be a lot of controversy over this deal.

The government's plan to scatter tens of thousands of asylum seekers everywhere but here looks like it might fail. They have already allocated postcodes for them to be sent - mine included as long as they're willing to work. I don't know where they're going to put them as all suitable blocks of land have now been sold and there's nothing left. There is also fierce competition on the coast for jobs and unless you're lucky you've got to travel. It's going to be hard for everyone.

I can't locate the codes now - but there was a list published this morning.

But the numbers in the Senate are now firming to force Scott Morrison, the immigration minister, to make a big concession – to honour a deal he did with Clive Palmer in September in which the PUP believed it had won support for a new five-year “safe haven enterprise visa” (for refugees who agreed to work in regional areas) that would lead to a permanent visa.

The legislation implementing the deal between Morrison and Palmer, which passed the lower house last month, went far beyond what had been agreed with PUP and did not provide any details or any clear pathway for safe haven visa holders to achieve permanent residency.

Guardian Australia understands the Senate is very likely to insist on a clear “pathway to permanence”.

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-ne ... settlement

[Rorschach]

A bad deal is a bad deal mantra.
Lets wait and see before we shoot our mouths off about it eh.
Certainly the Greens, the ALP and the Progressive Left luvvies all get it wrong.
Certainly the Asylum hypocrites are not the current government.
Certainly they also did not start detention centres or make a deal with PNG. Or try one with East Timor or Malaysia... so lets not turn a blind eh just because we are one eyed eh...