It's time we confronted some of the myths about asylum seekers.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a deal had been cut to send 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia, in exchange for Australia taking 4000 UNHCR-assessed people from Malaysia. During her press conference, the Prime Minister used the same language she deplored last July when she revealed the now failed plan to establish a regional assessment centre in East Timor.

In a speech to the Lowy Institute, Ms Gillard said: "For too long, the asylum seeker policy debate has been polarised by extreme, emotionally charged claims and counterclaims; by a fundamental disrespect that I reject . . . I speak of the claim often made by opposition politicians that they will, and I quote: 'turn the boats back'. This needs to be seen for what it is. It's a shallow slogan. It's nonsense."

But on Saturday, Ms Gillard used similar inflammatory language long used by the Coalition: "The truth is, if you spend your money, you get on a boat, you risk your life - you don't get to stay. You go to Malaysia and you go to the back of the queue . . . We will take people from the front of the queue, people who are already in Malaysia and already processed as refugees."

FACT: There is no queue, something the Prime Minister herself acknowledged when Labor was in opposition. People fleeing wars and violence do not leave their homes in an orderly manner. There are arbout 92,000 people waiting in asylum seeker camps in Malaysia, including at least 3000 children who have been arbitrarily detained since 2004, according to the local rights group, Aliran.

When announcing the East Timor detention centre idea, the Prime Minister said she had told the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees "that my Government is not interested in pursuing a new Pacific Solution".

FACT: The changes the Prime Minister announced at the weekend are the Malaysian solution. Prime Minister Gillard says sending 800 people to Malaysia will be lawful, and that's because she's using a law former prime minister John Howard created after the Tampa boat incident of 2001. This is on top of the impending return of temporary protection visas.

Malaysia is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention - the same reason Ms Gillard has ruled out reopening the Howard government's detention centre on Nauru.

When an Amnesty fact-finding team from Australia visited in 2009, they learned 120 men were "detained in a building no bigger than a tennis court for 24 hours a day", at temperatures of more than 30 degrees. They were given "two small meals a day and the fish is so salty it burns your throat". The Prime Minister says "Australians are hospitable people and we believe in honouring our international protection obligations".

By that logic, we should not be sending 800 people to a country that considers asylum seekers to be illegal and has had them caned.

Australians are hospitable. A Red Cross survey has found 86 per cent of respondents would flee to a safe country if they felt they were under threat.

Nearly one in three people questioned told the Red Cross they know of someone who has come to Australia escaping persecution in another country.

The Australian Immigration Department has told me that "detention arrangements in Malaysia are a matter for the Malaysian government". It is also Malaysia's policy to detain children. We're going to spend nearly $300 million on the deal with Malaysia.

Finally, it is not illegal to seek asylum. No one matter how many times shock jocks and conservative pundits want to use the term "illegal immigrants" to describe asylum seekers, people can seek asylum - 95 per cent of asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat are found to be genuine refugees. The 800 the Prime Minister proposes to send to Malaysia should have their claims assessed in mainland Australia.

This was first published on the National Times on the 10th of May 2011.

The following is an article published by Dow Jones newswire, and elsewhere, after Dow Jones reporter Enda Curran interviewed Senator Brown one day after the federal budget.

Australia's Greens party, a key power broker in parliament, Wednesday said the outcome of negotiations with the government over a planned carbon pricing scheme is more important than any reservations it has over the annual budget, leader Bob Brown told Dow Jones Newswires.

The remarks indicate lawmakers are already moving the policy debate forward after Tuesday's 2011-12 budget with Prime Minister Julia Gillard's pledge to put a price on carbon top of the agenda.

As part of a pact with the Greens to keep her in office, Gillard was forced to break an election promise not to introduce a carbon tax. But the final shape of that policy remains far from clear with the Greens pushing for more punitive measures on big polluters, an objective which trumps any worries it has over the budget measures.

"The outcome of that is more important than whatever settings we can change in the budget," Brown said in an interview in his Canberra office.

From July, the environmentalist party will hold the balance of power in the upper house further bolstering its negotiating hand.

The carbon tax debate has the ability to make or break the future of the minority labor government, with the issue polarizing the nation, and opposition parties seeking to ensure it remains central to the political debate. Australia's long discussion over carbon policy has already claimed a number of high profile scalps, including former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who was ousted by his Labor Party colleagues a year ago.

Brown also said it's not yet clear how the carbon policy will impact business. "There's lots of speculation as to what impact that will have on business, whether it will be a positive one for the future, we have yet to work that one out," the Greens leader said.

Under Labor's proposal, Australia's biggest emitters will have to pay a carbon tax from the middle of next year before transitioning to a free floating mechanism in future years. Gillard has already promised that households and energy intensive or trade exposed business will be compensated. Steel makers in particular are opposed to the plan.

But the Greens have other policy concerns too. Brown warned that his party has still not reached agreement with the government on its proposed new mining tax and he urged Gillard to abandon a promise to cut the corporate tax rate.

Cutting the corporate tax rate is a key policy platform for the minority Labor government, which has pledged to lower the tax rate to 29% from 30% as part of plans to introduce a new tax on miners.

Sending a warning to Labor, Brown said he has so far seen little of the details on the final make up of the mineral resources rent tax and his support cannot be taken for granted.

"That legislation is being formulated, we haven't seen it. The government knows full well our position," he said. "Because of (opposition leader) Tony Abbott they will be able to claim they have it just right, well they haven't," he said.

The MRRT is a watered down version of an originally proposed super profits tax with lower thresholds and applying only to iron ore and coal mines, a policy which met fierce resistance from the mining lobby.

"We're not getting a fair return on coal, iron ore, silver, lead, zinc, gold and uranium," Brown said. "Money is being sent out of the country in record profit lines to investors in Rio Tinto and a whole swagger of other corporations who are exporting money without paying fair taxes," Brown said.

One area of the budget where the Greens have concerns is Treasurer Wayne Swan's plan to lure 16,000 skilled migrants to regional areas. Brown said more should be done to skill up the local communities instead.

"We're going to look very, very carefully about that," he said, adding his party will prefer to negotiate rather than oppose outright aspects of the budget.

Last week the federal government's budget revealed the Education Department would spend another $222 million over four years on the national school chaplaincy program.

In light of revelations that the Victoria-based Access Ministries is reportedly using the program to ''make disciples'' of students, the Australian Greens question whether that's money well-spent.

Contrary to what some pundits claim, per se, we are firm believers in an individual's free choice, be it the right to marry whom they choose, or in this case, the right for each school across Australia to determine how they should use the $74 million annually earmarked for chaplains.

Each generation knows being a young person is tough. Today's young people are confronted with challenges that didn't exist when I was in school, such as cyber bullying. Before, a bully would taunt a child in the playground, on their way home. Now, that still happens, but the bully also attacks via social networking websites or mobile phones. Relentless assaults on one's self-esteem can happen at any hour.

Australia's students need the right people looking out for their well-being, to assist their parents or carers and ensure they reach their full potential, clearing the obstacles life throws at them. That's where a properly-qualified school counsellor or youth worker could help. Someone who has the credentials and expertise to identify what a child is experiencing, and help them through it. There is no requirement under the current program that chaplains have to have any of this specific training.

I'm not against school chaplains, but I am opposed to the federal education department telling a school the only Commonwealth-funded support for student wellbeing must take the form of a chaplain. I think a school's principal, parents and citizens' groups and similar bodies that underpin our schools should themselves decide how they will use the federal funds to provide a qualified person to help that school's young people.

It may well be a school decides they want to retain a chaplain. That's fine. Or, a school may instead opt for a youth worker or counsellor or someone who has experience in liaising between students, support groups and government agencies. In each case, however, the school's adults - and students too - should have a conversation about the services they need or want, and allocate their resources accordingly.

The government should not be insisting schools stick to the chaplaincy program and extend it to other schools, as Treasurer Wayne Swan announced last week, before a review into the program's effectiveness has been finished. It is poor financial discipline, and frankly inept management, to be announcing an increase in funding and an expansion of a scheme that has not yet been shown to achieve value for money, let alone proving that it offers the support our children deserve.

First published on 'The National Times' on May 17, 2011

If medals were handed out for inaction, Australia's water ministers would take the gold.

On Friday they gathered in my city of Adelaide to agree that 2019 was the preferred starting date for all communities in the Murray Darling Basin to adjust to diversion limits. Another eight years before taking action. Before the ministerial council meeting last week, my state South Australia, and New South Wales were to have begun their water-sharing agreement in 2014.

While it's pleasing that there is finally national uniformity on responding to the crisis jeopardising the basin's future, it's downright frustrating that that consensus won't start much sooner. NSW Primary Industries Minister Katrina Hodgkinson reportedly said the wait for 2019 "will pass in a heart beat".

Try telling that to communities along the lower reaches of the Murray who have struggled for years to try keeping their farms viable despite over-allocations upstream. A spokeswoman from the Australian Conservation Foundation said that the ministers were again deferring a decision on tackling extraction amounts, despite having agreed in 1994 they needed to.

We can't keep pushing back painful action to reduce what we remove from the river, delaying responses until after at least two more elections.

Murray-Darling Basin Authority chairman Craig Knowles told reporters in Adelaide that he did not think all of the answers to water extractions should be based on science. "This is also about real people living real lives and who have to have their social fabric recognised," he was quoted as saying.

We need to put the river system on a sustainable footing to benefit both the river and communities. To achieve that, we must use the best available scientific evidence to inform our decisions.  We know allocations should be at the higher end of the scale suggested by the authority last year of about 7600 gigalitres if we want the river system to exist in the coming decades.

The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists recently quit their involvement in discussions. They argue the sustainable diversion limits are not going to be high enough, that is, we won't be returning enough water to the river system to keep it alive. It begs the question, why go through this long, drawn-out process of planning, if it doesn't deliver the reform needed to give the river system and communities a future?

The ministers heard that the Murray Darling Basin Authority's draft basin plan should be completed next year. The plan's release is being delayed until the federal parliamentary committee chaired by independent MP Tony Windsor releases its findings on water sharing. Don't forget that the initial efforts by the basin authority were attacked relentlessly by the federal Coalition and resulted in the resignation of the authority's chairman, Mike Taylor. It seems to me that the decision to delay the draft plan until after the committee's report is just another excuse to avoid taking action.

The Adelaide meeting's communique also said: "Ministers expressed frustration at the pace of implementing infrastructure projects and agreed to explore the development of an outcomes-based framework to streamline the use of infrastructure funds."

Plenty of residents in South Australia and other parts of the Murray-Darling basin are frustrated that their water ministers cannot move faster to ensure all the necessary steps are taken to protect water flows. The mouth of the Murray closed in 1981 and very nearly suffered the same fate in 2003 and in March 2009. We know that reducing the extraction rates and removing the temporary bunds near the mouth are the only ways to ensure the river survives.

We must not let the recent flood waters cover our eyes to the truth that limiting what we take from the basin will ensure the system survives the droughts of the future.

First published in the National Times, on 31 May 2011.