The negotiations with Cambodia about re-settlement there of asylum seekers, currently under our protection, says more about political grandstanding than human decency.
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This government and the previous government set up a system of punitive measures to scare asylum seekers from trying to come to Australia.
We need to ask why, when the numbers have only ever been small.
Why is it that the government and the media get hyper worried about 50,000 asylum seekers arriving by boat without visas over a 10 year period, while at the same time not raising the issue of 50,000 people arriving here legally but becoming ‘illegal’ in a any one year period?
Somehow this doesn’t have the same visual image of an armada crossing the seas?
It can’t be publicised, ramped up and stopped in the same way as asylum seeker boats.
Claims of “humane” action in stopping boats and thus having no drownings at sea should be weighed against the punitive measures of locking people up in camps on Manus Island and Nauru, leaving them there to languish in steaming tropical conditions or alternatively being offered a place in Cambodia, a country of questionable human rights.
The government would do well to consider the words of the president of the Cambodian Association of Victoria: “The treatment for the refugees would be very bad. If they don’t listen, they will just eliminate them. They will shoot a refugee”.
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