Who'd want to be an Afghani asylum-seeker today? After all, consider the options - wait for months or years in detention in Indonesia, waiting against hope to be granted refugee status, eventually patience worn down, desperate for self or loved ones to escape, pay some crook $6000 for a space on a worn-out fishing boat heading for Australia. Drown, or see loved ones friends and travellers drown. What point then of escape to paradise Oz, refugee status.
Or to have got into Britain, with a UK government which lets asylum-seekers in, then throws them out, deports. Almost more cruel? The bureaucracy facilitating bonds of new community, then sending back to the places from which you fled.
Rubbish rationale in Australia to the Indonesian lockout - that this refusal to welcome, 'this processing' off-shore will ultimately defeat the people-smugglers. Meantime tragedies simply accumulate - boat after boat, suicide sfter suicide. People die, or drown.
Too many officials are tying themselves in ugly knots over these disasters. Their focus above all seems to be the boats, the people-smugglers, the point of sale. But it's surely not so hsrd - I suggest an easy solution for the Oz/ Indonesia crisis: simply send the Australian Navy to successively transport asylum-seekers here, on-shore, into communities. So that not only are people physically safe but lo, the people-smuggler business is destroyed. The trick is, to enable the policy-makers.
Or to have got into Britain, with a UK government which lets asylum-seekers in, then throws them out, deports. Almost more cruel? The bureaucracy facilitating bonds of new community, then sending back to the places from which you fled.
Rubbish rationale in Australia to the Indonesian lockout - that this refusal to welcome, 'this processing' off-shore will ultimately defeat the people-smugglers. Meantime tragedies simply accumulate - boat after boat, suicide sfter suicide. People die, or drown.
Too many officials are tying themselves in ugly knots over these disasters. Their focus above all seems to be the boats, the people-smugglers, the point of sale. But it's surely not so hsrd - I suggest an easy solution for the Oz/ Indonesia crisis: simply send the Australian Navy to successively transport asylum-seekers here, on-shore, into communities. So that not only are people physically safe but lo, the people-smuggler business is destroyed. The trick is, to enable the policy-makers.
