Asylum Seekers; Beginning of End of Australia in Afghanistan?
Bolt Time:
Andrew Bolt claims that because Labor’s asylum seeker policy is more humane than the Coalitions, refugees are coming here and dying, and so Labor is killing refugees. Because Bolt is so compassionate, he thinks we should be crueller to refugees.
I wish I had the talent of Swift to make fun of this guy. He claims that Labor has effectively killed 42 refugees. By his logic, Labor would have been more humane if it simply shot 20 refugees, deterring all future asylum seekers from coming to Australia.
He is, however, good at pointing to at least some hypocrisy. For example, here.
Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Julie Bishop on yet more brazen hypocrisy from Smith, Julia Gillard and Labor:
What is really disturbing about this debate is the government’s hypocrisy. Yesterday the Minister for Foreign Affairs lectured us on the inhumanity of the Howard government’s border protection policies. Yet in 2004, a year in which only three boats arrived, the then shadow minister Stephen Smith said in a press release dated March 2004: “The arrival of a boat on Ashmore Reef should be a wake up call for the Howard government to adopt Labor’s tough stance on people smugglers.”
So, if one boat is a ‘wake up call’, what are 42 boats? Thanks to Laurie Oakes’s demolition of the Deputy Prime Minister’s credibility on this issue on Sunday, Australians now recall the 2003 press release of the then shadow minister for immigration, Julia Gillard, with a headline screaming ‘Another boat on the way, another policy failure’. This was in 2003-04, when there were three boats in total. So, if ‘another boat’ is a policy failure, what are 42 boats? Apparently, three boats in one year is a policy failure but 42 is a policy triumph—according to Labor.
The racist language of both parties (another boat another failure) shows how cruel and callous they both are. They are both disgraces to Australia. In the Age, there’s a challenge to Rudd on the supposed malevolence of people smugglers.
Afghanistan
Apparently, an end to our role in the occupation of Afghanistan at some point in the future is being considered. Great.
Senator Faulkner is leaving for a NATO meeting on Afghanistan later today and says he has been in discussions about possible exit strategies since taking over the Defence portfolio earlier this year.
This doesn’t mean it will end. But it’s a good sign.
Michael Brull 