Safe in your nice living room are you? No threat of having your hand cut off at the next election? Haven’t seen your wife, sister or mother raped lately? Not about to have your house burned or bombed? What if any of this applied to you? 150 (approx) people died recently trying to find freedom and safety, yet politicians want to point score rather than find a humanitarian solution.

The heading is today’s prize quote from Australia’s Minister for Immigration and Citizenship.  Well, no, he isn’t really, I agree.  What I find distressing is we have (primarily) four politicians on the mainstream sides of politics playing political football with the lives of asylum seekers yet again.  Twitter is awash with it, the papers are reporting in various shades of objectivity and subjectivity.  The loss of approximately 150 lives on a boat carrying more than double capacity gives plenty of point scoring opportunities to both sides of the house.  How about caring for the people and stopping the point scoring?

Asylum seekers on the roof of Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, Sydney (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Good grief, just find a humanitarian way to take care of our fellow humans.  It can’t be that damn hard!  I agree WE are not responsible for the problems from which others flee. I believe (atheist that I am) we should remember “there but for the grace of God go I”.  Yet again I say, the von Trapp family, in the movie The Sound of Music, were asylum seekers.  They just didn’t catch a boat, they climbed mountains.

A tweet I saw today:

Chatting to a South African guy. He laughed at our concern about #refugees. We get a few thousand a year: they get a few thousand a week.

@JulianBurnside

Julian drew my attention to an article by Michael Brull.

What happens when asylum seekers continue arriving by boat? Well, Bowen has already explained:

“Every time Tony Abbott or Scott Morrison complains about something in detention, complains about the boat arrivals, I will be pointing out they are hollow, hypocritical, pathetic words because they have the solution in front of them.”

That is to say, the “Malaysia Solution”. In Bowen’s words, “we can’t process people offshore because Tony Abbott won’t pass our legislation”. Plainly, this is the preferred approach.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3737400.html

Michael, great article.

If you are at all interested in issues surrounding asylum seekers and refugees, anywhere in the world, please visit Michael’s article.  He has some great links to follow and some very astute analysis.  Astute if you are a humanitarian, that is.  If you aren’t, you probably won’t be reading this!

Related articles

• Stop the politicking and start saving lives (smh.com.au)
• Asylum seekers in Australia (teamoyeniyi.com)
• The High Court of Australia sees justice done again (teamoyeniyi.com)