Let's stop saying 'Stop The Boats'

No really, let's just stop saying it. Let's instead encourage a policy of complete honesty in the way we approach asylum seekers. The ALP slogan can be 'Chucking Them In The Too-Hard Basket' and the Libs slogan can be 'I'm Right Jack, Go Fuck Yourself'. That makes it a lot clearer yeah?

Look, we want to ignore the obvious. I get that, we're a pretty hateful country, filled with heartless people who think The Australian newspaper actually contains news. I get that. Australians hate foreign people, but we don't want to admit we hate foreign people. We're wrapped up in our #firstworldproblems, and so don't want to realise that - in some parts of the world - you can't just stroll into a government building, get a visa, and play Angry Birds on your iPhone while waiting for your flight to board. We'd prefer that - it's honest, there's a queue. When there is no queue, we tend to blame the player and not the game.

So, yeah, we can be hateful and selfish and intolerant and without a scrap of human empathy. True, we don't like to actually admit that - we'd look like complete douchebags. So, we faff about with talk of non-existent 'proper channels' or being tough on 'border protection' or 'people smuggling'. Nice little confections we can endlessly gobble, because the truth is too hard to digest.

Here's what it is. We're murderers. Feels a little horrible doesn't it, like waking in the middle of the night, realising you've swallowed a fly? A sick feeling of revulsion. But, you know there's no sense in hiding it. We kill people. We know they're in trouble and we send them off, at least being mindful that there's a good chance, if not an outright certainty that people are going to fucking die.

And you know what? Blustering at your workplace about these 'freeloaders' is a good way to feel morally righteous. How dare they come here without a visa? How dare they riot in the prisons camps detention facilities we put them in? How dare they expect us to give two flying craps about what happens in their country? This is Australia we splutter. This is a decent democracy we rage. We don't want them coming here and mooching off our system.

Nice confections all. They taste good don't they? These games of euphemism and sophistry.

If we send someone back to a certain, or even a likely death, we are murderers. If we support this system we're accomplices to murder. I suppose it's easy really. We don't have to actually watch it happen. We don't ever have to find out what happened to someone once they're booted off our shores. It's not like we held the gun, or the knife, or the police baton, or the electrodes. We don't have to think about it.

It's not like there's blood actually on our hands. Some people, however, don't have the luxury to play this word game. Some people see through this game of semantics for what it is.

"I told Immigration it's OK if they send me, you can send my dead body to my country because either way I'm dead."
Ismail Mirza Jan

No, our hands are clean. We are like Cesar the sleepwalker in the Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Our murders are done unconsciously.

But one day we will wake up, we will see all the caked, cracking blood on our hands. And then?

(this was written because of reading this piece at ABC News)