The Refugee Question That Richard Marles Couldn’t Answer

The fact is the only election the ALP have convincingly won in the last 20 years was 2007 when Rudd actually did lead on humanitarian grounds instead of racist scapegoating and demonising.

Marles is an ignorant hick coward and even some of his staff are embarrassed by his laziness.  We need to ask why we keep paying these ministers for the only visas they have to personally approve are refugee visas, the rest are delegated.

Which means for the past 5 years the immigration minister from the ALP and now LNP have not done any work at all beside dream up new punishments for the same 2,000 innocent people.

A murder, rape and hand cut off on Manus Island on Saturday still won't make them take responsibility for their crimes against humanity.

Burke pretended to care about a baby coffin but the ALP were in charge when the refugees were left to drown while authorities ignored 37 may day calls over 2 days so he killed the baby and then pretended to care as justification for killing even more babies.

unsolicited refugee arrivals by boat is a diabolical problem all around. If unsolicited arrivals can't be controlled, what is the point of Australia even having a planned refugee intake?

So, ugly and difficult and confronting as it is, its important to have this policy sorted out now.

Firstly, these people should be treated with humanity and respect and within the law wherever possible. This is where I agree with The Greens.

But at the same time, welcoming unsolicited refugees with even semi-open arms, and issuing residential visas for all who qualify as refugees, will certainly encourage others - many others - to contemplate risking the journey. From 2007-2013 we only started to see the tip of this potentially enormous and tragic iceberg. This is where I disagree with The Greens.

Worldwide, the number of people in legitimate peril, with the means to travel, and who would consider an unsolicited journey to Australia via SE Asia and then a boat or by any other means, if they thought they had a real chance of resettlement here, is in the hundreds of thousands+ (assuming just a tiny fraction of the worlds current refugees seek/can finance this option: http://www.unhcr.org/53a155bc6.html).

How many unsolicited legitimate refugee arrivals into Australia (and deaths at sea during the attempts) are The Greens happy with? 

Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

Even assuming millions, Australia would eventually have to turn off the unsolicited-arrival-by-boat tap by any means anyway - because otherwise, arrivals - and drownings - would continue unabated until eventually an overstressed Australian infrastructure began to resemble the very disfunction these people were fleeing - only then would the appeal wane.

Who presently living in Australia would want this? What would be achieved? Would The Greens ever change their policy? If they did, what would it be to?

So, unpalateable as it is, I see little option but for the opposition to adopt some aspects of the LNP policy that has been demonstrated to work. It should be possible to develop this policy in collaboration with our neighbours, because it is also in their interests - eg. many refugees currently in Indonesia are only there because they thought Indo was a stepping stone to a better option - Aust (or NZ).

If Australia/NZ is off the table, Indonesia as an incidental destination likely will be too.

What to do with existing refugees is another problem. Prompt resettlement - presumably by negotiation with neighbouring countries - is the only humane thing to do, and I hope Labor can sort this out promptly once they are in government. It certainly doesnt seem as if the LNP are going to do the decent thing here.

what else should labor do? Boost planned refugee intakes, reinstate foreign aid programs, reinstate abc australia broadcast services, basically all the things that help make australia a good global citizen...that the current government has stopped the boats AND slashed these other services is totally disgraceful.

Visitors, uninvited or otherwise, are fine mjs. Visitors.

I posed some questions of my own. Interesting that you didn't address any of those. .....

If Greece with all their financial woes, can welcome asylum seekers in the thousands, then damn sure we can do the same. Only problem is this appalling racism and xenophobia that has been encouraged to take deep root and spread into the Australian population by Abbott and cronies, poisoning all it infests. 

We are an incredibly wealthy country, paying something like $400,000 per person and counting, to lock them up in a tropical hell hole where they can be abused and mistreated with apparent impunity.  To resettle them would cost nothing like that. Doubtless, many could contribute significantly to their new home. Not only is it the right thing to do, it is the most sensible, economically and socially.

2009 was the year the numbers spiked by 10x matt. And then went up further after that.

http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/fact-sheets/asylum-seeker-issues/boat-arrivals/

Maybe the numbers would have come down again all by themselves. But the numbers stopped in transit and now in-limbo in indonesia suggest otherwise and hint at what might have happened next.

even including these, Australias numbers are tiny by comparison with other countries, but those are totally unsustainable -disastrous in some cases ( http://time.com/3967531/lesbos-greece-refugees/). Hardly the basis for a sensible comparison. Our seaways are also much more hazardous than the Mediterranean. So more casualties here as a percentage. I reiterate - do we have a pre-emptive discussion on this with small numbers, or 'open borders' followed by a reactive discussion with big numbers?

and mjs - is that truly the best you can muster? A mis-analogy and dismissal? Lame.

Ok thanks Ross. Excellent. A source and some numbers. Let's see what we have here and what possible scenarios we can use to explain them. I suggest Occams Razor to arbitrate between them if you concur.

Under the heading: Are we being swamped by boat arrivals? we have some numbers:

Country 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 | Total
--------------------------------------------------------------------+--------
Australia 60 148 161 2,726 6,555 4,565 | 14,215
Greece 9,050 19,900 15,300 10,165 1,765 1,030 | 57,210
Italy 22,000 19,900 36,000 8,700 4,348 61,000 | 152,821
Malta 1,800 1,800 2,700 1,470 28 1,574 | 9,372
Spain 32,000 18,000 13,400 7,285 3,632 5,443 | 79,760
Yemen 29,000 29,500 50,000 77,310 53,382 103,000 | 342,192

[Edit: Table looks great in Preview :(  'Formatted' font missing? ]

The first thing I'd say is this is a very haphazard and overwhelmingly insufficient collection of numbers to show much other than a very hazy picture of increasing numbers of displaced from Middle-Eastern conflicts, less from Africa(since rising exponentially), and anyone could have told us that. The second is that they are, in terms of our capacity to process and absorb them, insignificant. Since those numbers, we've had over 40,000 new boat-arrivals, and they still represent neither a currrent, or future threat, because their numbers fit the historical curve, in proportion to the numbers of newly displaced refugees with some sort connection with Australia. I would like to see your evidence that the millions of refugees held in Malaysia and Indonesia are being somehow prevented from attempting the dangerous boat-ride to Australia. Most of these people just want to go home. We should be nice to them and push for peace in their regions instead of stirring up conflict, over and over. It ain't rocket science.

That's it, that's all it ever was. They are displaced, and have a link to Australia. Documents from the UN, APH and Australian Archives just do not support the 'exponential-rise' hypothesis. Since no-one else seems to have done it, I'm (slowly) working on some graphs after being inspired by a recent Michael Brull piece.

What do you think these numbers show?

There are no people smugglers doing anything.  HOnestly how do people get to be so lazy and brainwashed.

EL:

Get the Indonesians to impose the Death Penalaty [sic] for People smugglers.

'People smuggler' is a bullshit term invented purely fo political convenience. These people have only ever operated a perfectly legal ferry service: no more. Completely within Indonesian and Australian law.

What precisely is the 'crime' for which you would have these people cop a death penalty? Offering to transport people who have no means of their own over international waters to Australian territory where they can legally claim asylum?

Their boats may not conform to everyone's idea of seaworthy craft, but they are good enough under Indonesian law for fishing in local and international waters.

Now maybe in Indonesian law  there is some sub-clause somewhere that says only a registered and properly certificated water taxi or ferry can carry paying passengers, but I doubt it. (By 'properly certificated' in the Indonesian context one means that all inspectors, police and other officials have been satisfactorily bribed.)

Of all nations, Indonesia probably has the most internal maritime activity; more even than Greece.

MattQ..numbers that rise successively in order of magnitude increments - 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc, is the very definition of an exponential notation

(https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/errorman/exponent.htm).

That was the broad growth pattern for recent boat arrivals here - although obviously still in the early stages for Australia, and now nipped in the bud.

Refugee arrivals at any destination are not just directly proportional to the number displaced as you opine above, they are also proportional to the establishment of an effective delivery mechanism and growth of its capacity - eg. small boats in the Australian example.  Initially, there won't be many, because a system has not been well established/tested, and so is very uncertain. Once a system has been proven to work reasonably effectively, it scales up geometrically as more onlookers progressively seek to join in. Thats how exponential growth works.

Sure, push factors and fluctuations of the displaced are in the mix too, but lots of people have been sitting in refugee camps for lots of years - we can hardly blame them from taking their own initiative to have a crack at getting to a first-world country like Australia once an effective pathway becomes clear.

You only have to review the statistics of some other countries (from the link I provided earlier that you reproduce above) to see how quickly a trickle can scale up. Lots of refugees now trapped in 'transit' countries like Indo and Malaysia give an idea of the potential numbers if left unchecked. Why do you think these countries are referred to as 'transit' countries?

I don't begrudge anyone from trying to get to safety - that's what I'd do in the same situation. But there must be a better way to proactively intervene than mopping up the remnants of yet another small-boat sinking tragedy off our shores.

If they don't set sail, they can't sink. But getting to that point is confronting. 

Perhaps he is correct, he may be able to convince other Pacific countries to resettle Manus/Nauru refugees.

Perhaps our Kiwi neighbours could be persauded. Their refugee intake totals only 750 per annum. Of those, ONLY 107 come from the Middle East and 108 from Africa. The rest come from the Americas, South Pacific & Asia. SBS should do a story on the Kiwis policy. 

http://www.immigration.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/BFA5A365-51D3-44C7-BAEE-112683F82C18/0/refugeequotaprogramme201314to201516.pdf

New Zealand I guess though has earnt the right to have such a low numbers, seeing they rarely poke their noses into other country's business. 

Our government should do the same. Ignore the rest of the world's conflicts, then we don't need to help clean up the mess. If weveryone did that the middle east would be a region of peace, presumably?

That said, the jews would have to leave..........funny that the only country in the middle east where religious freedom is permisable would have to cease to exist for there to be peace in a whole region. SSM would be set back a bit too. Gays would always need to pack a parachute lest they get tossed off a tall building.

Not really OP, the Persian culture is far superior to the culture of the British colonial settlements which were built on genocides.

RossC Lol I'll allow you some frustrated condescension. A sequence of 3 numbers is not a series, as you allege. Ask a mathematician.

1 million. The number is meaningless by itself. So is 150, or 20. Numbers are used in analysis to show relationships. By itself, each number tells us very little of what we NEED to know to manage refugees adequately. I don't give a fig what the numbers ARE, I need to know what they MEAN. The data seems not to have been compiled to do this, and I'm working on it.

Here's what you need to do to convince me:

 If you can show me that the proportion of refugees heading to Australia has departed from it's historical relationship with the global population of new refugees who have existing links to our country, and that proportion of refugees is on an exponential trajectory upward and not just from 3 lousy data points on only one relevant number(devoid of meaning-creating relationships), I will be convinced.

What will it take to convince you that the worlds disposessed are not descending upon us? That we can easily handle ALL who wish to come here, usually with extremely marketable skills, often in short supply here.

'Gut'-feeling is an insult to ourselves and those on the boats. We have to do better. We're cutting off our nose to spite our face and soon I'll have all the data to show the truth of this, or be forced to admit I was wrong. Whatever, I seek data to justify or disprove the opinions built from the numbers seen scattered across the internet. Belief should be compelling, not convenient or worse, lazy.

OP You're haring off into the distance, and I agree such modelling would be very difficult without access to historical data(masses of which are used to model stock-trading: ref Margin Call). I'm not so ambitious - I just want to gather the relevant historical data and produce some graphs of the past vs present.

From discussions with you this year, I suspect this is where we differ: in our internal models of human behaviour. Maybe. But I feel that even were I to prove that the numbers arriving still track historical relationships, you might claim this wave of emigration is unprecedented since the gold rush, rendering all data in-between irrelevant. That's your prerogative.

I need to know, right or wrong, and I need to know on my terms - data analysis. Anything else is just lazy. If it turns out I prove myself wrong, then national priority number 1 must be to stop refugees being created in the first place, and take some responsibilty for those we helped create. It's not ok that we did that for George Bush and his neocons. We can give billions to corporations, fine, but unless we're working on prevention, we're not working seriously on the number 1 concern, it seems, of Australians.

It's a myriad interconnected issues that can't conceivably stop until we can agree on the core imbalances across modern, and now perhaps necessarily global, civilization. We'll start working on sane, human solutions, once we're allowed to bring these imbalances and their consequences up for debate.

Until then the 'conversation'(i.e the conversation about the conversation), necesarliy, obsesses on obfuscating the primary-coloured, dancing troop of elephants represented in the House. Much more instructive to play just 1 game of http://agar.io (btw don't play it it's really addictive...sry. <space>to split, <w> to give, but don't play, really don't)

We will inevitably choose equilibrium, eventually, once the consequences of the alternatives are inescapable, and not entirely escaped. But, yeah, thanks.