ROGER Deshon (Opinion, CL 8/5/11) makes a series of assertions re those who seek protection in our country that require challenging.
Common sense does not appear to have featured in previous government decisions that cost Australia more than $1 billion, from 2001 to 2007, to process fewer than 1700 asylum seekers in the Pacific Solution’s off-shore locations of Manus Island and Nauru. This meant more than half a million dollars per person.
A reintroduction of this policy would involve similar financial costs.
Those who come seeking protection are not illegal immigrants. They are people whom Australia, as a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention, is obliged to assess.
Potential terrorists do not come to this country in boats that are often less than seaworthy. ASIO does checks and did not discover any such among those who endured the Pacific Solution.
Australia’s annual refugee/humanitarian intake is between 13,000 and 14,000 – a fraction of those taken by other Western countries (eg Canada – 30,000 asylum-seeker applications over and above their annual refugee quota of 10,000) and miniscule compared to the 1-2million found in several developing countries with far fewer resources in “water and living space” than exist in our country.
Our refugee intake is also far outweighed by our current annual migrant figures of 168,000 persons.
Other countries do allow asylum seekers to live within the community and do not find it necessary to have a system of mandatory, indefinite detention as exists in Australia.
Your correspondent states that “charity towards others and lack of common sense should not be one and the same thing”.
Surely, as Christians, we can exercise both in ensuring justice both for those who come and for our own.
GENEVIEVE CAFFERY
Greenslopes, Qld
