Three men are dead. Dozens more bloated bodies will be found.
It’s believed 200 asylum seekers were crowded on the rickety vessel when it capsized off Christmas Island yesterday. Only 110 have been rescued, including a 13-year-old boy.
Still they come, robbed and desperate, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Still we don’t know how to stop them.
Tony’s right, you know: we must stop the boats. Not at sea, but from ever leaving shore, for the toll is too great. There must be a better way. We must find it.
That is about all you can say about the latest unfolding tragedy. May politicians today feel the same.
With regard to “Tony’s right, you know: we must stop the boats”
This is a ludicrous comment – Tony does NOT want the boats to stop anytime before the next election.
But if we stop the boats before they get to sea, how will TA be able to make political mileage out of a human tragedy?
With apologies, that may be even too cynical for me, but I can’t help but feel that the coalition has no interest in solving this problem, witness the intransigence on the Malaysia policy and the desperate clinging to Nauru as a solution in spite of dept advice that this will have no negative effect.
You’d think that human tragedy would be more important than scoring political points.
And you’d be wrong.
Scott Morrison, TA and the rest of the coalition are playing an unspeakably vulgar game.
i agree, but surely if the people on this boat are sri lankan and by all accounts the civil war there is over then they must be classed as economic refugees
perhaps its time to change the criteria and just face the reality that many many poor people from all over the world just want to come to our country for a better life
As distasteful as it may appear, there seems now to be no doubt that
the so-called Malaysian solution would have stopped these boats,
and their associated disasters, stone dead. So who has blood on their
hands? Tony Abbott, absolutely, and I hope David Manne is pleased
with his handiwork as well. It is all very well to be a raging human rights
advocate, but how exactly does that benefit these particular humans?
A lot of them are now dead as a direct result of the actions of these
two men.
Harsh words, I know, but there is no way the vast majority of the
Australian community will accept the “pie-in-the-sky” bleatings of the
Greens. In other words, we are NOT going to send aircraft to Indonesia
to bring the aspiring refugees to this country. Why should we? It
should be obvious to all that the more we bring in, the longer the line-up
in Indonesia (and adjoining countries) will grow. And in recent weeks,
it has become clear that many of these so-called refugees are anything
but. Too busy running people smuggling rackets from the safety of
tax-payer funded accommodation in our country.
Some people need to GET REAL!
No, you get real, the boats come because we 1/ Support genocidal regimes in the refugees homeland ( eg Sri Lanka) 2/ Support US war crimes perpetrated by invading places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and deliberately keeping the conflict going long after the (spurious) reasons for doing so have passed. 3/ Providing arms to repressive regimes (eg Burma, Saudi Arabia etc) 4/ allow our mining and agribusiness corporations to rape and pillage at will (Bougainville, West Papua etc)
If we supported people in their homelands rather than terrorise them with superior firepower and economic power, we would not have any boats.
See.