The refugee debate just got very interesting… as well as very worrying.
On the weekend Brisbane’s Sunday Mail disgraced itself by ambushing a innocent refugee family in a local supermarket and then humiliated them in a front cover article under the headline: “they’re here”.
In the Courier-Mail Paul Syvret sarcastically spelt out the sub-text:
Lock up your daughters and bolt your windows. For they walk among us.
I kid you not, my fellow patriots.
Thanks to the bleeding-heart leftie Rudd Government’s misguided decision to honour Australia’s international humanitarian obligations, it is now no longer safe to even walk the aisles of the local supermarket… “they’re here” - hordes of illegal, alien, dark-skinned persons with funny accents and armed with shopping trolleys.
Yet this fear-mongering is really no more than a distraction from a devilishly difficult policy conundrum.
As yesterday's Daily Telegraph punned: Australia’s refugee policy sunk by 100th boatload.
This month saw the all-time highest number of boat arrivals, topping the number that arrived when the Taliban regime was at the peak of its powers in 1999.
When we discussed this same issue last year, I encouraged readers not to ignore the so-called 'push' factors.
This was soon after the capitulation of the Tamil Tigers, which seemed to provide a legitimate explanation for the sudden arrival of refugees from Sri Lanka.
I have to admit that this line of argument now seems impossible to sustain. ‘Pull’ factors are driving the human trafficking.
A comprehensive graph broadcast on Sunday's Insider's program made crystal clear the link between the various changes in policy and the boat arrivals over the past decade. (scroll down to segment: Rudd's asylum seeker policy called into question)
This debate can be very polarising for Christians, even when we agree that the starting place is the Bible's injunction to 'welcome the stranger'.
Neither reason nor compassion are owned by one side of the argument.
On Monday night ABC viewers were treated to a sustained discussion of the issue on the Q & A program. One audience member even attacked the Liberal Party for not acknowledging that the bulk of asylum seekers come by plane not boat.
But this line of argument misses the point that sea crossings are highly dangerous. Flying into Kingsford Smith is not. Surely, no one wants a policy that encourages refugees to take the potentially deadly sea crossing in leaky fishing boats.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t big holes in the Liberal Party's current policy.
A tougher approach will have a human cost. Mental health expert and current Australian of the Year Professor Patrick McGorry has called mandatory detention of asylum seekers ’‘an absolute disaster’’ and detention centres as ‘‘factories for producing mental illness and mental disorder’‘. Research has shown that the previous Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) regime made this trauma even worse.
What do you think?
Does the Rudd Government need to swallow some humble pie and rethink its approach? Or is a return to the previous tougher detention/TPV regime unthinkable?
