I object you your assertion that it is us that has the problem.

What about you people having the problem of naivity and tunnel vision?

Not everyone who lands uninvited on our shores is telling you the truth.

Many of them are fleeing poor economic conditions and over population in their home country and not persecution, e.g. Sri Lankens.

The fact is that there are hundreds of millions more 'asylum seekers' around the world than Australia can accomdate without destroying our own environment and society.

Uninvited asylum seekers represent a potential massive and unregulated immigration stream and no one with an ounce of intelligence denies that we cannot allow this to continue unchecked. People smugglers and those who engage their services need to be stared down and thwarted!

We cannot, and the majority of Australians will not, have our immigration policy dictated to us by people smugglers and your minority lobby group.

If that means that some genuine asylum seekers get caught in the cross for then basically TOUGH!

There are millions waiting patiently in refugees camps around the world. These people should be a priority for any immigration places, not those who arrive uninvited and all but demand to be accepted!

Rescind the UN refugee convention and make our own arrangements under are democratically determined immigration policy!

"Please explain how someone coming here "uninvited" is any less worthy of consideration of those coming as "invited"? "

Less worthy in EXACTLY the same way that you would tell me to 'fuck off' if I lost my house and landed on your door step and demanded that you take me in because you owe it to me!

And then when you do tell me to 'fuck off' I start slashing my wrists and atempting to hang myself on your doo step. What would you do? Call the cops, that is what you would do!

"Does the refugee who has a human right to seek shelter and safety form the circumstances they find themselves in have to write to you and ask permission to make the journey, and risk being sent back anyway? "

I don't agree with you that they are all genuine refugees fleeing persecution. Many of them are simply seeking better economic opportunities in which case they can go back to where they came from and get in the queue to be officially invited.

"the convention that we as a nation signed obliges us to assist refugees, same as the law of the sea obliges nations to assist those in peril off their home shores."

All the more reason to bloody well rescind the UN refugee convention and stop you lot from using it to undermine our immigration policy to your own incomprehensible and narrow minded ends!

Narrow minded, how is wanting to find a reasonable solution to a problem we helped create, narrow minded? Have you stopped to think that if we were not bombing the shit out of and killing their people under the false pretext of it is a war on terror to protect us, that they would then have no need to look for safety elsewhere. I am like you, I do not want unrestricted open borders, but I don't think the emotive language and dehumanising of the people coming here is productive.

I did not say they are all genuine refugees, I said that who are you to distinguish between invited and uninvited. The process to vet these arrivals is vigorous and false applications are quickly exposed. An economic refugee is still a refugee, put the show on your foot and tell me what you would do?

Wrong, as a neighbour I would help as best I could and if it wasn't good enough direct you to the agencies who are good enough. You have no idea of my approach, I stop to see if people broken down on the side of the road are ok and at the very least offer my phone or water to them. I have had neighbours in domestic violence terro ask for shelter, I give it to them, and then minimise the risks by asking for help from those charged with keeping the peace. But if you come to me in a bogus capacity or false pretences I will turn you away, it is a judgement call and you and I are not in the position to make the judgements on highly complex refugee situations.

The premise of your arguments is that they are all genuine asylum seekers and should therefore gain instant access to Australia.

And then once they are within our borders and are determined not to be genuine asylum seekers, you lot then start up the emotional campaigns to allow them to stay in Australia anyway.

No thanks Dave. I am not prepared to give you lot that inch!

Send them back. If they are genuine asylum seekers they can make there way to a regional UN refugee camp and wait to be invited like all others in those camps.

I take it that "compassion" in not a trait you consider to be worthy?

Let us take the example of a genuine refugee - a person who cannot return home because they and their family will be killed if they do. Would any parent seek anything less than the best outcome for their children?

"I don't agree with you that they are all genuine refugees fleeing persecution. Many of them are simply seeking better economic opportunities in which case they can go back to where they came from and get in the queue to be officially invited."

I don't see anyone claim that all are genuine refugees, but most other developed countries manage to sort the real from the false - and do so without detaining people in the regional variant of a gulag.

What other parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would you like us to withdraw from?

I am not suggesting that Australia stop accepting refugees completely.

We should continue to accept sensible numbers of refugees that is consistent with zero net population growth.

I am suggesting that we rescind the refugee convention in order to eliminate it as tool that you dip shits insist on using to undermine immigration policy and will of the majority of Australians!

Dave
"Please explain how someone coming here "uninvited" is any less worthy of consideration of those coming as "invited"?"
What part of the words "lawful visa approved" and "sovereignty" don't you understand? Or to put it bluntly:
"WE will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come

But you are supporting denying people the right to seek (the unlimited) protection under the universal declaration of human rights. Seeking that protection is aright that Australia signed up to and now our so called leaders for political football want to pander to the old streak of white Australia. Pity that. back in the 30's a majority of Germans voted for Hitler that didn't make their actions ethical or right.

I swear to god Tim that you damn twits are as thick as posts.

No wonder this planet is in such and god damned mess with people like you running our civilisation.

There are hundreds of millions of people across the third world that are suffering desperately and are equally deserving of asylum.

But the simple irrefutable fact remains that hundreds of millions of such people CANNOT come to Australia without threatening the future of this continent and future generations of Australians.

And even if hundreds of millions of asylum seekers did move to Australia and entirely destroy this continent, the third wortld would soon generate another 100 million or more poor desperate suffering souls.

No doubt the hundred million or so asylum seekers who previously moved to Australia would generate a signficant proportion of those even greater numbers of asylum seekers all desperately looking for a non-existent haven on this now entirely spent planet.

Why wont or cant you get it through your thick skulls that it is US that is causing the problems on this planet, or more precisely the sheer number of us.

Immigration to Australia is a futile band aid solution that will NEVER solve the problem anyway but will cost future generations of Australians dearly.

IF we are to solve the problem it will be through the regulation of our individual fertility and of our populations.

Meaning that total reproductive freedom must be a thing of the past just as the freedom to solve personal disputes through duals etc has become a thing if the past.

Thanks Greg, I have found in your reply something that I can agree with, Homo not so sapiens is numerically a cancer on the planet. I don't believe that giving up the best outcome of world war two - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an effective way to deal with that issue. The declaration itself states that it can't be a case of pick or choose and it is all or nothing. I prefer all. Fortress Australia is no solution, it might be feel good for a while but look at what the germans gave up for the "living Space" in the East and the cost was horrendous. Decency can't be legislated away - think of Krystall Nacht.

At least we can agree on the root cause - overpopulation of a finite planet.

So what if they aren't telling the truth, does lying in this country put any other innocent person in a prison?

How many people have demanded your home though? I would suggest that no self respecting refugee would want to live anywhere near your racist self.

Why? Do we send home migrants or deny them entry because they want a better job?

Why only treat people asking for help this way?

If a patient turned up at a hospital claiming they were ill would you turn them away before finding out if it is true?

If a rape victim turned up at the cop shop would you turn them away without taking a claim?

If people turn up for a driving test do you turn them away without letting them take the test and then failing them?

Come on. Why do the likes of Greg Boyles have to infest every blog about this with his hate and bile and abuse.

As asylum seeker is a person asking for international protection. There is not such thing as an ungenuine asylum seeker.

Where is the back door and why would you think torture of innocent people is OK?

What if you ever have to seek help? Would you like to be helped or sent away.

Really I am sick to death of haters like you ranting and spewing out your rubbish.

There is no such thing as a queue, people seek asylum here from 60 different nations, they are not all in the same place which is what would be required for a queue to form.

It's not a supermarket dear.

But they haven't applied to come to Australia and they haven't come to Australia.

You are again confusing people who are poor but safe with people who are persecuted.

Two different things and us wasting $2 billion or so to torture the latter leaves the former to simply starve to death.

You see Tim the mentality of people like you is almost exactly the same as the mentality that leads some people in to thinking they can pay the interest on their current credit card debt by obtaining another credit card.

"Let's just let in 100 million or so poor asylum seekers", i.e. pay the interest of the previous credit card with another credit card.

Then 10 years or so down the track there will be 200 million poor asylum seekers around the globe, including perhaps several tens of millions generated by the 100 million asylum seekers that previously arrived in Australia.

Then where are should they seek asylum Tim??? Mars? The moon?

Or are you not capable of thinking that far ahead???

The intelligent answer to a credit card crisis is to cut your spending, i.e. cut humanities collective fertility and our total population.

Shut your hole Marilyn dear!

And I am seek to death of you open border socialists spewing your irrational emotion laden crap all over the internet and media.

Thank you for attempting to ascribe limited mental capacity to me, however I don't accept you straw man argument. Nowhere have you had the breadth of vision to address the important Universal Declaration issues. I'm uncertain that you have that capability. Of course this situation requires the reconciliation of conflicting needs, and this is where principles come into play, I regret that I think that is beyond your capability, attack anyone who doesn't subscribe to your simplistic non solution

Long may your lock step views prevail, they did for a while between 1030 something till 1945, they were difficult to eradicate.

OK Tim let's re-access here.

1) You agree with me that over population is incompatible with a sustainable society both on the global scale and within Australia.

Right?

2) You agree with me that Australia cannot force other nations to control their populations and that the only thing we have the power to do is to make sure that Australian society is sustainable based on the ecological limits of this continent.

Right?

3) If the number of uninvited so called asylum seekers rises signficantly above the current several thousand per year because we have followed th UN refugee convention to the letter and accepted all uninvited asylum seekers without question then at some point we will have to start defying the UN refugee convention and NOT accepting all uninvited asylum seekers whether or not they are legitimate.

Assuming of course that you agree with me that a growing Australian population is not compatible with a sustainable Australia.

Right?

Agree to point one. Point two is not an adequate discussion point. There are two parts to it, first we do not have the military capability to enforce birth control on the rest of the planet we are stuck with organisations like the UN, we can't stick our neck into the sand and say we have fixed our problem, I'm all right jack won't address the population issue and being a bigger bastard than the SS isn't much use either. The issue is global and we need to be global players with integrity not little nazis in our back yard

I AGREE with you Tim - we do not have the power to enforce birth control in other nations and nor should we even consider trying it.

Certainly we should offer any and every assistance to those nations who need and ask for help from the west to contain their populations.

Apart from the above the only other option available to us, as with CO2 emissions, is to implement a well forumated zero net population growth policy and SET THE EXAMPLE on the world stage.

I.E. Show other governments that it is possible to gain the cooperation of the populace with appropriate education/marketing campaigns, show other governments it is possible to manage the short term economic and social consequences and indeed show other governments that there are tangible long term social and economic benefits of maintaining a stable population and stable economy.

No doubt all this will require many decades to develop, will require substantial political courage and VISION and will unavoidably require a MAJOR overhaul of our banking and finance systems that currently cannot function without perpetual population and demand growth.

But the fact is that Australia and the entire world will have to face this difficult but unavoidable reality sooner or later. The sooner we do face up to the more gentle will be the transistion.

Some one has to go first!

Whilst the social construction and public hysteria surrounding ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘controlling the boats’ is perpetuated in political campaigns and throughout the media the reality is that Australia actually receives less than 2% of asylum seeker claims worldwide. The majority of asylum seekers are being received by third countries, least likely to be able to afford adequate protection and most likely to suffer from the economic strain.

With regards to asylum seekers being perceived as ‘uninvited’ and ‘demanding to be accepted’ asylum seekers have a legal and human right to seek asylum afforded, this is afforded to them under the Refuge Convention. Moreover research conducted both within Australia and internationally as shown that asylum seekers prior to reaching their destination countries have very little if any knowledge regarding immigration law and policy. These studies have shown that the majority of asylum seekers are unaware that they are likely to be detained upon arrival and have often been given false information regarding the laws by people smugglers (you can gain more information about this in this article: Spinks, H. (2013). Destination Anywhere? Factors affecting asylum seekers choice of destination country. Copyright Commonwealth of Australia, Australia.

"The Howard Government was quite happy to keep people behind bars while there was a political advantage, this Government is no better."
I don't know how this self-deluding trope continues zombie-like to infest public discourse. The fathers of using desert camps, barbed wires, and indefinite mandatory detention, were Paul Keating and Gerry Hand back in 1992. Labor has ALWAYS played race politics, right back to its origins in the late 19th century, and in the modern era through Gough Whitlam, and especially Keating. Labour's traditional racial dislike has been to 'Chinamen' - fucking "Vietnamese Balts" as Gough Whitlam so charmingly opined.
With Keating, the issue was to keep Asian boat people, so that Labor could continue to build its ethnic empires and branch-stacking through family reunion schemes for Bekka Valley Lebanese Muslims. Keating built the desert camps to cut the rate of Asian immigration. Howard changed Australia's immigration program to favour race-neutral skilled immigrants, rather than unskilled refugee 'family reunions'. By doing so, Howard green-lighted the largest wave of non-Anglo/European immigrants in Australia's history.
In the late 1990s, the intensification of Muslim boat people, saw a 500% increase in boat arrivals, resulting in the Tampa incident, and then a few weeks later, Sep. 11. Howard at least confronted the nation honestly, saying not only what he passionately believed, but what the electorate believed passionately. This is what democracies are.

No, it has dropped because they are not willing to go into detention limbo. They choose to return home where at least they speak the language, have a support network and are not being dehumanised by bigots.

Well then if they choose to return home where they are not being dehumanised and have a support network then they were never genuine asylum seekers in the first place and were not entitled to entry into Australia.

In which case you have no objection to them being sent home given that you do not advocate open borders.

Right Dave?

Tamils have not gone home and in December over 80% of them were granted refugee status.

Some Sinhala have gone home, many are jailed on return.

Why do you morons think that is a good thing?

The Chinese and others are still coming.

De-humanised is different from being persecuted. I love how your arguments centre around water and natural resources when you are a consumer of everything under the sun with no regard to your impact on the environment and resource base. But these people coming here are suddenly using everything at 200 times the rate you are and are therefore the reason we are in environmental danger. Same as your concern for the pensioners and homeless who until an asylum seeker topic comes up you couldn't give a fuck about. Refugees make up 0.1% of our intake, visa over stayers from mainly England and European Caucasian countries make up 90% of detention subjects if caught.

I'll have a go!

Imagine you are a person in a rural area in a war torn country and you are part of a persecuted ethnic minority that is vilified by the government. You don't have a passport, you may not even have any written record of your birth - after all you live in a hamlet in a country that has very little in the way of services, poor roads, very high rates of illiteracy etc.

How does this person go to an Australian embassy and claim asylum? There may not even be an embassy to go to. There is a war going on - how do you and your family even travel on the road without being attacked by bandits or worse? How does this person even get a passport? If you are considered an enemy of your government because you are part of an ethnic minority fighting for your rights/freedom then you probably will be seen as a criminal.

OK, so there may not be a queue for you to join. Your next move is to try to sneak out of the country, which means losing your homeland, your family, friends - everything people hold dear and because the constant threat of harm or death, you go to another country. Unfortunately it isn't a signatory to the UN convention on refugees, there are already many 1000s of refugees here in camps that don't have clean water and no welfare state to support them, and no legal right to work to support their family. So they must find illegal work and try to evade police. Then you decide you really can't wait 10 or 20 years in this situation, you would be prepared to risk it all to get on a boat to get to a country that is a signatory to the UN refugee convention where you will (according the the agreement) you will be taken in while your asylum claim is assessed and if found to be a refugee you will be allowed to settle there.

However this is not what happens, instead you are locked up for months with no idea what will happen to you on a pacific island in a tent with little access to legal or other services, told you will be expected to wait 10 or so years in a detention centre even though you are a genuine refugee and then you will be let in.

I think part of the confusion about how to treat refugees arriving by boat, is that politicians have been calling them "illegals" when they aren't. Boat people have a legal right to get on a boat and claim asylum. The worst they can be called is "unauthorised". Why the media has let pollies get away with this for the last 10 or so years is beyond me. Of course most reasonable and fair minded people think - if they are "illegal" or course we should chuck them out.

The only real answer is to increase our refugee intake to take the pressure off our neighboring countries. Over time, this will decrease boat arrivals, especially if we do our best not to inflame civil unrest in other countries, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan - this will decrease the number of refugees fleeing their countries due to war and the evil that brings to their populations.

It all makes sense to me Anne.

But the simple and undeniable fact is that there are some hundreds of millions of people with this very same story.

And hundreds of millions of such sad cases cannot be saved by immigration to Australia without puting our country at grave risk of the same problems that those hundreds of millions are attempting to flee from.

Sorry if truth hurts but we cannot and should not stick our heads in the sand and petend that Australia can absorb them all.

Not clamping down hard on uninvited asylum seekers risks allowing this illegitimate soultion to dificult personal cricumstances to blow out into a soverign threat to Australia!

Oh for god's sake they don't displace anyone.

What is wrong with people too frigging lazy to even understand that refugees who are accepted in other countries have zero right to come here?

It is an entirely separate program that has nothing to do with the rights of asylum seekers under the refugee convention.

What you twits are supporting is literally a voluntary expensive double dipping exercise.

The convention only covers those WHO ARE SEEKING ASYLUM, once protection is granted the people are not covered anymore.

What we do is pretend otherwise.

We pay out $60,000 per person who has protection and bring them to Australia as migrants but only if they suit us.

Then we pay out $140,000 a person to jail those who do have a claim to be here.

Perhaps the ignorant still do not understand that but they could do some frigging research and find out the difference between non binding voluntary resettlement and protection.

I am still confused Marilyn. What is the the overall proposition being proposed in the whole asylum seeker debate. I am especially confused by the heroic language being used if you support asylum seekers and and evil racist bigot implication f you oppose asylum seekers.

Could you please explain to me what is actually being proposed rather than expressions of horror at the way asylum seekers are being treated.

a) That the camps are horrible and asylum seekers should be allowed to be processed whilst living in the community and given citizenship or returned depending on the outcome?
b) That asylum seekers should be given automatic acceptance
c) That the default position should be acceptance and only the blatant manipulators of the system returned to country of origin.

That is simply not true. There has been many a suicide in these concentration camps.

Dozens of people have died in them, killed themselves and thousands have tried to.

The people who overstay visas have not committed a crime either.

Bowen had more suicides in a few months than anyone else ever had.

What an exaggeration!!! 'Dozens of people' 'many a suicide' This is all left wing propaganda.

Where you use socialists (red and green) pejoratively, Adolf Hitler used Jews. I'm withdrawing from this conversation as no supporter of lock em up is willing to engage with maintaining the essential legal framework of the Universal declaration of human rights so it has become a pointless exercise to continue attempting to ewngane.

You really are an intellectual midget Tim.

Yes the inevitable Hitler/racist slur!

This is not about eliminating a particular supposedly unworthy ethnic group(s) you god damned cretin!

This is about eliminating the scourge of over population, poverty and political instability once and for all so that ALL of us Tim can focus our efforts on more worthy causes like space exploration and cosmological research etc rather than fighting wars on terror with those (at present) fuckwit yanks!

It is about humanity refraining from behaving like the beasts around us, as most of us falsely believe that we already do, in breeding ourselves through endless population boom and bust cycles as all other mamla species tend to do.

Thank you for your assessment of my mental capacity, much appreciated. can I have a certificate to document your assessment?