SAILING BLIND What a bloody joke? Kevnie from Brizzie says a review of Australia’s obligations under the United Nations refugee convention might be needed as part of a new policy aimed at stemming the flow of asylum seeker boats. That’s how Labor’s hymn sheet, the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald has today reported the recycled Prime Minister’s latest thought bubble on illegal entrants. The review would be, get this, part of a three-pronged policy shift to address the refugee issue globally, promote regional co-operation and tighten the refugee assessment process in Australia. Add that to the current diktat to the Refugee Review Tribunal to consider new assessments of conditions in source countries - such as Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Iran - being prepared by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Then there’s the directive, issued five days before Kevnie knifed Julia Gillard, which said asylum seekers with genuine identity documents must be given priority over those who either have fraudulent documents or do not co-operate. That order began to strip away the farcical notion that there was no queue of people trying to come to Australia illegally – even though thousands of people are queued in Indonesia and airport lounges stretching back from South East Asia to the Middle East and Africa. The Fairfax press has also taken aim at the highly effective Opposition spokesman on Immigration, Scott Morrison, for saying migrants should “integrate” and raising the possibility of applying an English language test to those seeking citizenship. Imagine that – migrants becoming familiar with Australian culture and actually having to speak at least some English before handed their citizenship papers. How cruel, inhumane, humiliating and discriminatory to apply something like the same tests to new migrants as applied for decades to the new Australians who helped make this nation prosper. Morrison said integration was no longer a “dark and negative term” suggesting the blurring of cultural identities and that he agreed with the policies of the past 30 years, which included multiculturalism, and their purpose “to get Australians to live together and not be separated by language or religion or culture but to actually find the middle ground where we live together as Australians”. Hardly novel, but to the dwindling band of Fairfax readers, such a commonsensical idea is a heresy. As for Kevnie’s new, new review, Morrison said: “Rudd is always talking and raising expectations about what he might do on border protection, but his record shows he does very little.” Actually, Morrison is wrong. Kevvie has been a lethally destructive force on border protection as the bodies rocking in the depths of the sea and nearly 50,000 unauthorised entrants testify.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 22:39:38 +0000
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