Attack by sea!!
Written by Jennifer Blake
So Australia finds itself once again the victim of a vicious attack on our maritime borders by … asylum seekers: men, women and children who pay enormous sums of money to people racketeers to make a dangerous journey by sea; in order to reach the ‘boundless plains’ of Australia. ‘Queue jumpers’, ‘boat people’, ‘others’, ‘illegals’ … anything but humans, or, heaven forbid, genuine refugees.
A second boat intercepted yesterday makes two scares in one week, a sum total of 316 people intending to make a claim for refugee status. Cause enough for Ruddock to jump back into the headlines with a claim that Rudd’s softening of policy towards asylum seekers has opened up a pipeline through which we could be seeing “10,000” unlawful arrivals per year. That’s a lot of leaky boats interrupting my morning Bondi swim. A veritable invasion.
And an abominable exaggeration of the true figure – only1648 passengers and 64 crew have arrived by boat this year. The vast number of people living or arriving unlawfully in Australia are hopping off planes, with or without papers, and either applying for asylum when they arrive or disappearing into the teeming cities when their visa runs out. There are 48,500 people currently living in Australia illegally, and they’re not all Sri Lankan, Indonesian, or even of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’. They’re pulling beers in pubs in Coogee and couch-surfing their way through eternal summer: the ubiquitous British backpackers. Many of this number arrive legally and overstay their visa. Send out the army.
Ruddock has seized a remarkable opportunity to slam the seemingly can-do-no-wrong Labor government as being soft on asylum seekers. Its an issue that’s proven a winner time and time again for the Australian people – there is no real need to remind anyone of the Tampa incident and its sizeable role in Howard’s 2001 election victory. But K-Rudd couldn’t resist the temptation, and with a certain amount of petulance reminds Ruddock that despite Howard’s “we will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances under which they come”, about half of the asylum seekers on the Norwegian boat have been settled here.
Its hard to say Rudd’s gone soft when he personally petitioned the Indonesian government to turn back a boat of 260 people over the weekend who had not yet entered Australian waters. An intercept in Australian waters would have stretched the Christmas Island processing facility to breaking point.
And despite the fact that the xenophobic fear Ruddock is trying to tap into exists; it is unsubstantiated. Even a “pipeline” (I have this great picture of Rudd building an underground tunnel to make the sea passage between Indonesia and Australia a little easier!) of 10,000 unlawful arrivals per year won’t break our pledged intake quotas of 12,000 refugees per year.
Hardly a cause for panic. Try again, Philip Ruddock.
Image Credit: http://www.inkcinct.com.au/Web/Australian-Cartoons-List/AUST-social-general.htm
