What to do when the law gets in the way.

A despairing diatribe on Australia's moronic immigration policies.





What to do when the law gets in the way.

Change it!

Sick and tired of finding creative ways not to help asylum seekers, the government today approved in caucus the plan to change the Migration Act. After all, if the court says what you did was illegal - hey presto! just make it legal instead!

There's still a little road to travel on this. It's got to be put before Parliament, putting the Libs in the unsavoury bind of either siding with the ALP (which they're hellbent on avoiding) or siding with the Greens (which they'd rather eat a fresh Texas sh!t sandwich than do).

Still, here we go again, finding ever more stupid, complicated, unethical and ridiculous ways of avoiding an obvious truth - it is safer, cheaper and more in accord with the law to go for onshore processing. Every other signatory does onshore processing, a good example being Canada (that does onshore processing) that spends a tenth per head of what we do (offshore-beat-them-if-they-talk-back processing).

This issue is not about 'people smugglers' or 'sending a message'. It never has been. If we wanted to stop people smuggler operations and open safe channels of immigration, we would be launching a co-ordinated law enforcement/humanitarian aid program with the major stakeholder nations. We don't do that.

Instead we lock desperate, miserable frightened people, including children into modern day concentration camps, we dismiss their claims of being shot at, beaten, raped or tortured, we drag our feet processing their claims, we make it time-consuming and almost impossible to appeal a rejection (whether well-founded, or all too frequently, not). We almost sent them to a country that beats, tortures and imprisons asylum seekers fer chrissakes.

They haven't come here to make our politicians look good or bad, they haven't come here because Villawood's like the Hilton. They've come here because they believe the bullshit we like telling ourselves - that we're a decent, compassionate, democratic country that believes in the rule of law.

What crap. If we believed in decency or the rule of law, we wouldn't be juggling people's lives about like they're meaningless.

I don't expect much in the way of brains out of the Libs, they are simply a cartel of right-wing idiot hatemongers - that's their constituency now and they play to it. The ALP should know better, but they've pissed away their conscience in their nosedive to chase the bottom of the right-wing barrel. Given there's no conscience voting in the ALP, you'll never know if an ALP hack feels bad about this callous hatred being perpetrated by their party. Still, if they had the cojones they'd break party line. A spine's gotta count for something right?

If this vote goes the way I expect it to, then you will most likely be reading a longer, angrier rant out of me in the days to come.