It's On You Now

All right. The government has decided that if you try to claim asylum via a boat journey, you're not getting in. You'll end up living in Papua New Guinea, at best. The government has decided that this will stop the boats, and the government is telling us that this is necessary to save lives, because the most pressing need is to stop people drowning at sea. The government is clear that this has nothing to do with pandering to xenophobia, nothing to do with a lowest common denominator grab for votes, nothing to do with embracing the politics of fear. It is about saving lives. The government has a responsibility to stop people taking risky sea voyages, and so they've put in place a plan to stop them.

Very well. They can own that then.

Personally I never thought drownings at sea were the fault of the government. I never thought that any government in Australia had ever "lured" people onto leaky boats. I thought it was ridiculous to suppose that simply by maintaining the possibility that people with a legitimate claim to asylum could find assistance and refuge and a better life in Australia, our leaders were somehow tricking those silly foreigners into believing their journey across the sea would be safe. I thought that I was in no position to judge whether refugees from war-torn lands were right to risk their lives to improve their circumstances. I thought that asylum seekers were neither halfwitted morons unable to figure out the dangers of a sea journey in a rickety boat, nor mindless puppets reacting only to the string-pulling of Australia's government - pull this string, they come, pull that string, they stay. I thought that in a world of refugees, we cannot prevent people taking terrible risks to escape terrible situations: all we can do is our little bit to assist those who come to us seeking assistance. I thought it is not our place to lecture those who've seen terrors we can't fathom on whether the chance of death at sea is worth taking if it means getting away from those terrors, or if it means avoiding decades eking out a fearful, hopeless existence in a refugee camp, or if it means giving their children the chance of a future containing possibilities. I thought the government does not bear responsibilities for the tragedies caused by the sick and sorry state of the world - only the tragedies resulting from the treatment it metes out to those who beg it for help. I thought that accepting desperate people into our country and allowing them to become Australians was the noblest thing that our government does, and that the ones who came by boat were no more or less deserving than those arriving by other means.

I thought all these things.

The government thinks differently.

Well, fine.

But they should know, they can own that now.

I never believed the government bore responsibility for deaths at sea, but that's a responsibility they've taken on. Both major parties have stood up to willingly declare that the blood of asylum seekers who drown is on the hands of the Australian government.

Let them own it.

The PNG plan is said to be the way to prevent these drownings. The Opposition has their own tow-back, TPV plan, that they say will prevent these drownings. If this is the way they wish it to be, if this is the priority they wish to adopt, if this is the function they see as proper for the Australian government, then this is the standard by which they will be judged.

Because if Labor puts the PNG plan in place, or if the Coalition implements their own Howard redux policy, they'll have achieved their goal. They'll have done what they claim is necessary to stop deaths at sea.

And that means every death at sea from that point on is on them.

And we've got to hold them to this. If asylum seekers drown on their way to Australia, after the government declares that drownings are its responsibility and its policy the proper reaction to them, then with each death our politicians will stand judged as murderers - not by our judgment, but by their own. And it'll be up to us to remind them of that.

It's on you now, noble leaders. You want responsibility for their deaths, you got it. We'll hold you responsible, and see if you are so eager to hang yourselves when you've got no excuses.

The Business Of Cruelty

"Since off shore processing began in August last year, 15,543 people have arrived in 259 boats. Seven hundred are on Manus or Nauru and the cost is heading into the billions."

"I want to die. I don't want to live more, because we don't have anything to do here. Your questions doesn't have answer, your fate is not clear, what will happen to you?"

"You see many guys here do suicide or hurt themselves, just because they don't want to harm the others. They just harm themselves because of bad situation, or because they show - they want to show their feelings"

"By last November there'd been reports of mass hunger strikes and at least eight attempted suicides. And a 35 year old Iranian man, near death after a 50 day hunger strike, had to be evacuated to Australia"

"There are temperatures in the 40s and humidity around 100 per cent. Heavy rain, no air conditioning and ah, insufferably hot. Um muddy tracks, um and when it rained a faecal smell of inadequately you know drained sewage effluent."

"There are now thirty children in the Manus camp. Most have been there more than four months"

"Journalists, cameras, and even photos are banned from the Manus camp"

"the minister's refusal to front up for an interview for this story with no reason given, other than we could turn up for one of his doorstops if we liked"



None of this is news, not really. Four Corners this week was really letting us in on the secret we all knew - that Australia's government is now in the business of cruelty. And this isn't a partisan thing. It's not Labor versus Liberal. The business of cruelty is a thriving joint venture in which both major parties are enthusiastically involved.

This business is allowed because these brave servants of the public interest which we elect have successfully entrenched the Big Lie that the government's responsibility lies with preventing desperate people in other countries from deciding how best to improve their lives, rather than with taking care of the desperate people that find themselves in this country. The government has decided its jurisdiction extends all around the world when it comes to deterrence, but doesn't even include its own territory when it comes to caring.

We've accepted that and other Big Lies, such as the one that tells us that our leaders are striving to represent the acme of compassion, with these policies designed to ensure that when refugees die, they have the decency to do it far away from us, in foreign camps, or on boats heading anywhere but here. Designed to ensure that the world is in no doubt that if, when you've got nowhere else to turn, you turn to Australia, you will be imprisoned, and isolated, and brutalised, and driven right over the brink of madness by a government determined, at any cost, to make itself monstrous enough that people stuck in the worst places on earth would rather stay put than risk coming here.

The hellholes created by our fearless leaders are not unfortunate unintended consequences of sensible policy: they are the entire point of the policy. They are not locking up children by accident. They are not causing people to hurt themselves, starve themselves, and kill themselves in spite of their best intentions. This is exactly what the policy is supposed to achieve. The government is deliberately causing suffering, because they have decided that causing suffering is the best way to achieve their aims.

Because their aims are to avoid criticism, to avoid protest, to avoid electoral punishment, from that great mass of Australians who become outraged whenever they sense that the government is being too kind to people who didn't have the good sense to be born into first-world privilege. Their aims are to neutralise "excessive humanity" as an electoral negative.

So please, when we discuss politics; when we thrash out the respective merits of the different parties; when we laud the prime minister's unwillingness to be lectured on misogyny by that man; when we proclaim one side's virtue over the other's:

Never forget that no matter how much better one side is than the other, both sides are in the business of cruelty. The lesser of two evils remains evil, and its evil is deliberate, ongoing, and vicious.

This government, this prime minister, this Labor Party is engaged in wilful and knowing savagery against its fellow human beings. This Opposition protests this savagery only inasmuch as it is insufficiently savage.

In the unlikely event that any members of either government or opposition end up reading this, please know, you are reprehensible. If you sleep at night, it speaks only to the humanity that you jettisoned long ago. If you can look at your own deeds without being blinded by burning tears of shame, you are lost, and so are we who have somehow allowed you putrid beasts to rule over us.

May you all go to Hell.

A True Larrykin

If there is one thing I love, it's a larrikin. Know what I mean? A good old-fashioned, mischievous, good-humoured, larrikinish larrikin, the kind of larrikin that made Australia what it is today: i.e. a country full of larrikins.

The trouble, of course, is that although this country is full of larrikins, we are ruled over by a bunch of decided non-larrikins. Our politicians are all so soft and wishy-washy and feminised they wouldn't know larrikinism if it jumped up and shoved a sugar glider down their pants.

Our media is decidedly non-larrikinish too. Michelle Grattan is a poor excuse for a larrikin. And with the best will in the world, I think you'd have to concede that Ross Gittins is very far from being the intellectual heir of famed SCG wag "Yabba" Gascoigne. In fact, the entire press gallery is not the intellectual heir of famed SCG wag "Yabba" Gascoigne, and it seems a bit of a shame that the media watchdog is so obsessed with so-called "cash for comment", and never gives the slightest thought to redressing the lack of "Yabba"-resemblers in our media landscape.

However, we need not immerse ourselves entirely in gloom, because there is one man willing to stand up for tradition and patriotism and not-climate change left in our great nation, and that man is Larry Pickering.

Pickering has been one of our greatest larrikins for decades, of course, his larrikinish cartoons bringing joy to millions and keeping alive the larrikin flame that has been burning bright since Gallipoli, when the Anzacs staved off the horrors of war with cheeky japes and drawings of Billy Hughes's cock.

It is in that tradition that Pickering continues to hold the "stuffed shirts" to account on his website, and in particular in brave, truthful-yet-larrikiny pieces like this one, in which he exposes the monstrous threat to our democracy that is Anne Summers and her radical femo-socialist agenda, finally pricking that balloon of man-hating, excessive body hair and mandatory lesbianism that has been hovering over the great southern land ever since Paul Keating rammed through legislation that allowed women to exit buildings.

In the best larrikin tradition, of course, Pickering is not a vindictive man. He is slow to anger, but sharp as a tack and full of boisterous and wittily logical argumentation when roused, and this was no exception. As he writes:

I had never heard of a person called Ann Summers (not sure Ann is with or without an "e" and I couldn't care less really) until she said somewhere that my scribblings were responsible for Jill Meagher's murder.

See how he first demonstrates how he is the bigger man - he had not even heard of Summers, because he has better things to do, like defending our democracy. He emphasises how far above the pettiness of the world by indicating that he doesn't even care how Summers's name is spelt. This is a good sign of a lofty mind.

But then we get to the nub: the reason why any man of good conscience would speak up at this point: Summers accused Larry Pickering of being responsible for Jill Meagher's death.

What's worse, she did it "somewhere": if there is anything worse than a woman who calls an innocent man a murderer, it is a woman who calls an innocent man a murderer in an indeterminate and ill-defined location. Luckily, I've sleuthed a tad and found out exactly what Summers said in this disgraceful smear. Her words are as follows (be warned it is fairly strong stuff):

I just saw television footage of thousands of people walking in a peace march along Sydney Road past Hope Street to honour the memory of Jill Meagher. It was a beautiful sight and a powerful reminder that for all the Alan Joneses of this world, most Australians are decent honourable people who are disgusted by this culture of vilification and violence.

I'm sorry I had to put that on the blog, but you had to know how depraved "radical womanhood" (god Pickering has a way with words) can get. Look at that paragraph. "It was a beautiful sight" she writes. "Most Australians are decent honourable people". "I just saw television footage".

VOMIT.

We know what you're saying. You can couch in separatist anarchist neo-Greerist psychobabble all you like, Ann(e), but when you write "disgusted", we can read between the lines: you are saying that Larry Pickering murdered Jill Meagher. We're onto you. What a revolting accusation.

But all good larrikins know how to make freedom-lemonade out of feminazi lemons, and Pickering does so by taking the opportunity to expose the misandry and harridanism at the heart of public life. Having gone to notorious communo-hotbed "The Drum", a website run by the ABC Politburo, Pickering found more of Summers's "work". Like any red-blooded larrikin, Pickering "couldn't bring myself to read it closely", and who could blame him? But reading things is unnecessary to identify radical agendas - indeed it can be counterproductive. The important thing is that in his article he draws, with uncanny plausibility, a direct line between Summers, her big fans Christine Milne and Lee "Uncle Joe" Rhiannon, the plummeting value of Whitehaven Coal shares, Tanya Plibersek's husband-fronted drug operation, child sex, drink-driving, fraud, and prunes. It's a vast conspiracy and it takes a journalistic mind of remarkable acuity to pull it all together so neatly, but that's what Pickering has done, and it's a relief to us all I'm sure that he's manning the parapets as Castle Australia is assaulted by this army of green red pink warmenist homosexual vagina-owning orcs.

And it's those aforementioned prunes, the ones clogging up Summers's reproductive tract, that as Pickering notes, are the whole problem, as they have led to this she-beast breathing fire all over our constitutional rights and causing us to not only have to stand an "elected" prime minister with ill-fitting jackets, but also enabled the violent, financial and sexual crimes of the modern Australian Labor Party. Thanks a lot Anne, you armpit-hair-encouraging, child-molester-enabling, economy-destroying, lipstick-flaunting "writer". You have wrecked Australia and now we may as well live in Afghanistan, if it's not already infested by all the feminists which Larry Pickering's blog commenters wish to send there.

So all power to you, Larry Pickering. You are not only a savvy journalist and a masterful artist, you are a patriot, a freedom fighter, and most improtantly, a larrikin of rare note. Don't listen to those who wish to silence you, who wish to repress the truth. Don't listen when they tag you "sexist" or "misogynist" or "racist" or "insane" or "a bankrupt serial conman" or "a sad old derelict sniggering at his own dick-pictures" or "a rambling maniac who can't even concentrate on one thing for the five minutes it would take to compose a coherent blog post".

Don't listen to any of them, Larry. We TRUE Aussies know what you are, and we salute you for it. As your loyal reader "gungit" notes:

"Why is it all the ugly woman are so prejudiced?"

Exactly. EXACTLY.

The TROUBLE with Government

Do you know what the TROUBLE is with our so-called GOVERNMENT?

It is that the GOVERNMENT is out of TOUCH.

Everywhere ordinary Australian CITIZENS are gathering around their water COOLERS and having conversations about the ISSUES which affect them PERSONALLY. These are ISSUES like:

- the high cost of living
- how much it costs to live
- the price of things
- prostitutes
- how much money you have to spend on items these days
- the modern problem of life being expensive
- Cabcharges
- LIES

But the GOVERNMENT does not UNDERSTAND these issues, because the government has no WATER COOLERS, and they are in CANBERRA, not the inner WEST where real people LIVE.

The government, in fact, thinks that LIES are FINE, because only LIBERALS object to them. So when ORDINARY people say, "hey government stop LYING", the government says, "this must be the work of LIBERALS!" This is a very OUT OF TOUCH thing to say. Also, they government believes the cost of LIVING is fine, and ordinary Australians need to stop WHINING, even though as Australians we have RIGHTS. If the government was IN touch instead of OUT of touch, it would KNOW this.

These are the issues the GOVERNMENT thinks are important:

- shaking the president of America's hand
- taxing the air in our Coke cans
- destroying wealth
- having sex with Bob Brown
- assassinating each other

These are not things the PUBLIC approves of. But as an ORDINARY Australian who works for NEWSPAPERS I am here to tell the PUBLIC that the GOVERNMENT does not care what it approves of because it is out OF touch.

The trouble is that the GOVERNMENT has never had a proper JOB. People in government don't WORK like you and me, they have STUPID jobs like union OFFICIALS and LAWYERS and political OPERATIVES who never see the sweat of their own hands upon their brows.

Here are some jobs that REAL Australians who UNDERSTAND issues have:

- journalist
- opinion writer
- television pundit
- coal miner
- royal watcher
- water cooler maintenance operative
- commentators
- steel worker
- John Farnham


Here are some jobs that POLITICIANS have:

- politician
- idiot who will one day be a politician


Is it any WONDER these people are out of TOUCH? The Prime Minister has never spoken to a NORMAL person in her entire LIFE. She has not even spoken to a marriage CELEBRANT because she won't get MARRIED and she has never spoken to an OBSTETRICIAN because she does not have CHILDREN. I have children and I can say that it gives you a PERSPECTIVE on life that people who don't HAVE children and are pathological LIARS do not have. That is WHY I am giving this free ADVICE to the GOVERNMENT based on years of EXPERIENCE as a real Australian with functioning SPERM.

I am sure the FAT cats in Canberra will dismiss this hard-hitting and HONEST article as simply another case of LIBERALS, but all I want is for the government to get in TOUCH with everyday battlers and REALISE just how much we HATE it when politicians LIE to use about how they paid for their SEX workers, and when they ask their ASSISTANTS to shower with the door OPEN. If the government does not stop being out of touch SOON, all our shower doors will be open and we will vote in the LIBERALS because at least they are IN TOUCH WITH US.

Please LISTEN to me, I am a JOURNALIST (see above).

A politician being IN TOUCH with ordinary Australians

How To Carbon Tax, Or Else Not

Hello, how are you? I am here to talk to you about carbon taxes and other things of that sort which are good for saving the environment or possibly destroying the economy if that's what you're into.

What is a carbon tax? It is a tax on carbon, if that's not too complicated.

What is carbon? According to Wikipedia it is the chemical element with the symbol C and atomic number 6. Scary? Perhaps or not. Not much is known about carbon except that it is necessary for life and also kills people. So what to do? We must put a price on it.

Why must we put a price on it? Because we have capitalism and if we do not put a price on it we will not have capitalism, and that is called kibbutzes. Do we want to live in kibbutzes? Probably, but on the other hand no. Consider the fact of glaciers. Not convinced? Go to Tuvalu. You can't, it's dead. See? Indeed.

But just because we accept that we are all going to die doesn't mean that we are agreed on the best way to go about it. Should we solve the problem by ignoring it? That usually works. But will it in this case? Probably. So let's do that. But no! We can't! Because of economics.

Economics demands we take action! ACTION! But should this action be direct or indirect? There are pros and cons to say the least.

DIRECT ACTION: This means action will be direct, which means Tony Abbott will give lots of money to lots of people who will promise to be good. It is like prostitution, except instead of sex people will sequester carbon. If you ask a prostitute to sequester carbon she will but it costs extra. But it won't cost extra to get business to sequester carbon it will just cost a lot. The advantage of direct action is that it will cost a lot. The disadvantage is that it will be so direct it might hurt, like being kicked in the neck. OUCH!

INDIRECT ACTION: This means action will be indirect, or "passive-aggressive". Under the government's plan, carbon will be persuaded to commit suicide through a system of rumour and innuendo. Is this the way to go? Certainly it will be cheaper, but also it will be more expensive, so what is the man in the street to think? We asked him:



Clearly emotions are running high. How are we to know who to trust? Should we trust the scientists who want us to stop climate change, or should we trust the scientists who want us to increase climate change until we all burst into flames? The answer of course is yes, but how? Perhaps Cate Blanchett has the answer.

But can we trust our future to such an unstable and luminous person? Shouldn't we trust our future to someone like this:




So in the end it comes down to whether we want our planet in the hands of a psychotic woodland monster, or a bionic man. It's a hard choice but one we must make unless we don't, in which case our children will have a horrible life unless everything is wrong in which case they won't, although they still might, since they may just be bad people. You should have raised them better.

But let's not quibble. One thing we can all agree on is that climate change, for better or for worse, is definitely possible if we accept the word of someone or other. If we don't then the opposite might be true though this seems unlikely doesn't it? No, not really.

THIS IS FINISHED

Rich

There has been a lot of debate in the media lately about whether a family with a combined income of $150,000 is "rich", triggered by the federal government's provocative failure to say they were at any point in time ever.

So I'm here to answer the question: Are they rich?

Well, it all depends on your definition of "rich", of course.

They are certainly not "rich" in the sense of "Oh I just can't decide which yacht to sail down to the shops to buy my new diamond-encrusted microwave".

And they're not rich in the sense of "My life is a lot more relaxed since I became CEO of Microsoft".

And they're not rich in the sense of "Every day I spend $20,000 on high-class prostitutes who are willing to call me 'Atreyu'".

And they're not rich in the sense of "This chocolate cake is so rich and delicious".

However...

They are rich in the sense of "being richer than almost everyone else on Earth".

And they are rich in the sense of "Seriously? You have $150,000 a year and you want welfare? That's a bit frigging rich".

And they are rich in the sense of "Stop bitching about how the government isn't going to give you as much free money".

And they are rich in the sense of "Seriously, dude, just shut up".

So we can see how there are arguments on both sides. On one hand, you can easily say that people who earn that much, while not "rich", obviously have enough money to get by without relying on government handouts, and are far enough at the upper end of the income scale that suggesting cutting their welfare is an "attack on average Australians" is so inaccurate as to be demented.

On the other hand, it's also true that people are incredibly whiny, and that it's an outrageous act of Bolshevik class warfare to force people to pay more tax just because they earn more money, and people are doing it tough and can't do without their welfare payments, and the government's Budget will act as a disincentive for people to get ahead because who on earth would want to have more money if they knew they were going to have a little bit less than they would have had if they had a bit more than that?

So why DOES the government want to punish people for hard work? Why DO they want to criminalise success? Why ARE they going to inflict severe spinal injuries on everyone with two cars?

It is probably because the Prime Minister does not know what it's like to have children.

From the Border Mail, 27/1/11

Have you been wondering why this country is in such trouble?

No need to wonder: Greg Wild is here to explain it to you!

Government is unconstitutional


IT is most important that Australians be brought up to date with the current status of the Australian Parliament and the republican movement.

The method of constitutional change being pursued at this time without the realisation of all Australians and without referendums is the alteration of the 1901 language of the constitution.

The land masses Victoria and NSW were changed in 1980 by an unlawful judgment of the High Court (Ward vs the Queen).

In this case those responsible for proper evidence left out the position of the original surveyed line and included a section 5 of an invalid part of an Act for Better Government 1855 which was not Crown approved and too late to effect the Separation Act of 1850.

The word "discrimination" is practised in Australia by the Australian government.

Indigenous people were Australian people or residents of a state in the constitution in 1901 and therefore equally treated.

The world "reasonable" appears in section 100 of the constitution but today applies to illegal agreements.

Today's prime minister isn't qualified to hold the office in the 1901 meaning because she refuses to take the proper oath inter alia.

She was sworn in by the solicitor general, not the governor general; did not win the last election and does not recognise the right of the people's parliament to defeat legislation.

There is no authority or responsibility to legislate something called climate change without a referendum to include it in the constitution.

Tony Abbott might have been prime minister but the majority of his party are republicans and therefore do not recognise referendums.

The Liberals are no longer a Westminster party.

GREG WILD, Corryong

So I'm glad we cleared that up.

IT IS NOT THE AUSTRALIAN WAY

Floods? Oh yeah, we're happy to help. It's what makes Australia great, our willingness to band together when our fellow countrymen are in trouble and put every hand to the tiller to help out. It's mateship, it's the Australian way, it's what makes us unique among nations, our eagerness to help, our can-do spirit, our indefatigable love of pitching in to see our friends through a rough spot.

So absolutely we'll help. We'll work as hard as we can, we'll give till it hurts, we will do everything that is humanly possible to help you poor buggers get back on your feet again. 'Cos we're Australians, and Australians lend a hand when times are tough. With you all the way.

Oh great! Then would you mind perhaps just paying a little bit extra tax for a short while?

HOW DARE YOU WHAT A DISGUSTING NOTION THAT IS COMPLETELY UN-AUSTRALIAN GO TAKE SOME MONEY FROM SOMEONE ELSE LEAVE ME ALONE YOU GREEDY BASTARDS

Read This. Now

You know the government's insulation scheme? How it was an absolute disaster and caused all those terrible fires and killed literally millions of people and there was blood on Peter Garrett's hands?

Yeah, remember that?

There is, unbelievably, somebody alive in this world still willing to look at facts. This somebody is Possum from Crikey. Read what he writes here. NOW.

Pay particular attention to this bit:

That makes the insulation program around 8 times safer in terms of fire incidents compared to the state of the industry before the program. Even if we take the best absolute possible estimates of what went on before the program – say, 80 fires per year off 75 thousand installs – the program is still 7 times safer in terms of fire incidents than what occurred before the program.

Got that? Good.

The Problem For Today

The Problem for Today is this:

Refugee Policy.

What is wrong with refugee policy? Well, here is the thing: a lot of debate circulates these days about whether the government's refugee policy has "failed". Fair enough? Of course. But when you're discussing whether something's failed, you must decide what exactly success would mean. And the thing about the refugee "debate" is this:

It has been entirely based on the premise that the purpose of refugee policy should be to stop people coming to Australia on boats.

This is why the debate goes like this:

"Has the government stopped boats coming? If not it has failed!"

"Wait, no! The boats come for other reasons! Therefore, it has not failed!"

You see? Government and Opposition argue over whether the policy has failed, but on both sides exists the tacit understanding that the reason we have a policy is to prevent boatpeople arriving.

But WHAT IF this was a false premise?

WHAT IF refugee policy, ideally, was not aimed at simply stopping boats?

WHAT IF refugee policy's success or failure could not be judged purely by numbers of boats coming to our country?

WHAT IF refugee policy, in fact, should have as its primary concern the protection and welfare of refugees?

WHAT IF the Australian government decided that it would calibrate its policy toward the end, not of stopping the boats, but of achieving the best outcome possible for the greatest number of desperate, dispossessed, and fearful people of the world?

WHAT IF every time the Opposition screamed, "THEY DIDN'T STOP THE BOATS! WE WILL STOP THE BOATS!" the government calmly replied:

"We are not primarily concerned with stopping the boats. Perhaps someday, when the number of boat arrivals comes anywhere near even remotely posing any kind of threat to sustainable population levels or our way of life, we might have to adjust this approach, but for now, we consider it far more important to bend all our efforts towards helping people who have suffered hardships and terror far beyond what most of us here in Australia could fathom. For now, we will do our utmost to ensure that genuine asylum seekers are identified, protected, and assisted with settling in the country that so many Australians have worked so hard to make attractive enough for people to give up all they have and risk their lives to reach. For now, we will work on educating the Australian population on actual facts, such as the tiny number of boatpeople who actually come here, the circumstances in which refugees find themselves overseas, and the total and indisputable legality of anyone claiming asylum on foreign shores. Should you, in Opposition, wish to pursue electoral success by appealing to the worst instincts of people, by spreading fear, racism and xenophobia via the propagation of lies and distortions of reality, go ahead. We believe most people are intelligent, decent and capable of rational thought, and we choose to appeal to these qualities in our attempts to remain in power. Do your worst; we will do our best."

What if that?

Haha, only kidding! As if!

Asylum Seekers: A User's Guide

Written by me.

Brown people - providing comedy fodder through their misery for over five hundred years!