On Thursday, a day when boats were overturned and children drowned, my children and I heard the dulcet tones of Mr Abbott through the car radio. My reaction made my daughter think that her brother's life was in danger (from the Leader of the Opposition, not from me!).
I find it hard to fathom why Australia finds it so hard to agree upon a humane policy regarding refugees and asylum seekers. The rhetoric is blatantly inflated, the figures so tiny, and so bedraggled and haunting. But even if we play their game and pretend that Australia is in danger of being overrun by foreigners, that this is a threat to Australia's sovereignty and that the country has to control immigration for the sake of... a nation of immigrants. There is still a pretty simple solution, one that doesn't require overturning a commitment to the refugee convention and international human rights standards.
Stop the planes. Instead of stopping the most desperate, the worst off, the poorest, stop the ones with the 457 visas, the skilled migrants, the thousands who come in for blatantly economic purposes. Put an end to it. Instead, search among the lost and displaced, those seeking asylum and stuck in the no-persons-lands of camps, hostels and Malaysia. Let them be at the front of the queue. Upping the numbers let in, giving people hope that they might be resettled from the camps that are (almost, if you squint) on Australia's borders, would lessen the temptation to arrive by boat.
And the money saved from the shutting down of multi-million dollar facilities could be pumped directly into the countries where we getting the refugees from, into education and housing and sanitation and not not not guns and bombs. And maybe we'd be helping to staunch the flow of refugees into Indonesia and Malaysia, and giving them a chance to rebuild lives, homes and communities in the places they didn't want to leave in the first place.
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