So you've essentially supported my contention. They were under no threat of being attacked, and they moved to "have a better life" - therefore they are economic migrants. They couldn't cross the border by legal means, so they went illegally.

I think the government should strip 433 of his ability to get a passport and severely limit his work options to cash in hand jobs with no work cover or any other rights. See if he thinks he's "safe" then.

So you've essentially supported my contention. They were under no threat of being attacked, and they moved to "have a better life" - therefore they are economic migrants. They couldn't cross the border by legal means, so they went illegally.

You are special.

What do people think of this as a solution to settling asylum seekers, both those who arrive in Australian and in Europe.

Okay, so basically a number are legitimate refugees, as per the 1951 Refugee Convention. However, the aim of the nations taking them in should be to provide them with a safe environment, but not necessarily a wealthy environment. I agree with many who suggest that many legitimate refugees still aim for places like Australia, Sweden, Germany, the UK. They aim for wealthy places. Who can blame them? I certainly don't. I'd probably do the same if I was in their shoes. But from a policy-making viewpoint, it's bloody difficult to facilitate.

So how about, when, say, a refugee family arrives in a place and is found to be legitimate refugees, they then go into a ballot to decide where they'll be settled. It might be Australia or Germany but it might be the Czech Republic or Indonesia. They don't get the choice. The only condition is that the place has to be regarded as a place where they won't be persecuted. It would have to be a multilateral agreement between all these nations; wealthy ones and less wealthy ones. That way, all these nations would still be discharging their duties of the Refugee Convention. The refugees are safely resettled. Each country takes on its share of refugees. It might not be the kindest thing but it's a fair compromise surely?

I thought of this in response to the boat people crisis. As far as I'm concerned successive Liberal and Labor Governments have been utterly inhumane towards asylum seekers. And there's definitely a racist agenda in the minds of some Australians. Rhetoric of "stop the boats" and calling them "queue-jumpers" (what "queue" do they line up in?) is racist to the core. However, there are many benevolent people on both sides of politics and involved in the Royal Australian Navy who believe that if we have onshore processing and then grant asylum, there will be numbers of people who jump in leaky boats and will drown at sea. These people just want to prevent that. They see off-shore processing as the lesser of two evils because they genuinely believe it will stop people from taking highly risky passages to Australia. This is not racist, this is about saving lives. Well, what if asylum seekers knew that, by going to Australia, they may well get asylum but not necessarily in Australia. If they knew it was a lottery and they may as well go to some Asian country and they would have the same chance of being granted asylum in Australia, surely they would do that? They would be resettled in a country where they won't be persecuted, even if it's not the wealthiest of countries.

I disagree with 433 but fuck me yu are such a shit poster. Instead of arguing with the facts you insult peoples intelligence etc.

Fuck me if this isn't the most hypocritical post on 442 this year I don't know what is. You are the most hateful, abusive poster here. 99% of the time adding absolutely fuck all.

Talk about glass houses.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241.abstract

peer reviewed

So LNP have polled poorly on all major areas now but Shorten still took a hit (can only assume due to public sentiment about the delay of the FTD).

Labour still leading after preferences.

Makes me wonder if it can get any lower than this?

-PB

Oh i bet we can . We have to of the most incompent people running both sides of politics

The next test of whether things can go lower for the govt is the Canning by-election.

They hold it with a 12% margin. Historically, govts take a swing of 5% or so in by-elections. So anything more than that will pile on the pressure. If they lose the seat Abbott will be gone without a doubt.

Two years on from the Coalition's 2013 election victory, one of the three experts who "independently verified" its campaign costings has been found guilty of breaching auditing standards.
Len Scanlan, a former Queensland auditor general, has been penalised by CPA Australia for failing to uphold professional standards in the work he did for the Coalition.
But in an unusual move reported on the CPA website on May 25 the disciplinary tribunal found there were "exceptional circumstances" involving his work for the Coalition's Joe Hockey and ordered his name not be published.
Mr Scanlan was one of three members of the shadow treasurer's independent review panel. The other two were Geoff Carmody, a former head of Access Economics, and Peter Shergold, a former head of the prime minister's department. Mr Scanlan is the only one who belonged to a professional accounting association, and so the only one subject to sanction.
The panel produced a four-paragraph report released two days before the vote saying it believed the Coalition's costings were "based on fair and reasonable assumptions" and represented "a fair estimate" of their impact on the budget.
It enabled Mr Hockey to claim: "all of our policies are fiscally responsible and independently verified".
But in a complaint to CPA Australia, economist Betty Con Walker and emeritus accounting professor Bob Walker pointed out that the relevant standard requires accountants offering assurance to provide a description of any significant inherent limitations on their findings. One limitation was that the finding was prepared without direct access to Commonwealth records. Another was that several of the Parliamentary Budget Office costings relied on by the panel were themselves described by the office as being of "low to medium reliability".
The panel itself did not produce a statement of the level of assurance it was prepared to provide for each item costed, as required by the auditing standard, nor did it disclaim responsibility for Coalition's achievement of the results as required by the standard.
The costing endorsed by the panel found the Coalition's program would improve rather than worsen the 2014-15 budget deficit.
Professor Walker and Dr Con Walker's complaint to CPA Australia follows another they made to the Institute of Chartered Accountants after the 2010 election which fined two Perth accountants for breaching professional standards in their work for the Coalition.
The accountants had allowed Mr Hockey to describe their work as an audit which it was not, and to say that they had certified "in law that our numbers are accurate".
A subsequent treasury review found mistakes including double counting amounting to $11 billion.
The CPA Australia disciplinary tribunal decided to impose no monetary penalty on Mr Scanlan in May and instead imposed "the penalty of an admonishment". It "exercised its discretion" to direct that his name not be disclosed.
Mr Scanlan holds the CPA National President's Award and in 2003 he was awarded a Centenary Medal for distinguished service to the public sector.
He told Fairfax Media he did not want to comment on the tribunal's finding.
Professor Walker said it was "hard to think of a more blatant ethical breach than the publication of a defective report on government finances just days before a national election". The primary responsibility of accountants was to act in the public interest.
The Coalition was forced to use an outside panel to cost its 2013 election promises because of a provision inserted in the Parliamentary Budget Office Act by Labor that prevents the office from costing policies confidentially once an election has been called.
It means that Labor will face a similar problem in this election as will any accountant who works for it.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/coalition-auditor-for-2013-election-costings-breached-standards-20150905-gjfxwj#ixzz3l3WOpffE
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

-PB

Some points re Europe's refugee crisis:

-People keep categorising the refugees as EITHER economic migrants or 'genuine'. That is a false dichotomy - reality is more complex. Obviously there are economic reasons driving people to wealthier countries. But that doesn't then mean they have no legitimacy to their claims.

- People are arguing "why don't neighbouring countries take their fair share"? The reality is that they have. Turkey has 1.9m registered refugees, Lebanon 1.1m, Jordan 629,000, Iraq 249,000 and Egypt 133,000. The vast majority of refugees are in neighbouring countries. The issue is that they don't have to capacity to adequately look after them, so people are trying to get to Europe.

- They reality is that the amount of people coming through (although large) is easily able to be absorbed. Europe's population is about 500 million. There have been around 300,000 people coming through this year - about 0.0006% of the population.

- The other point is that you have to deal with these people, you can't actually stop them from coming. Whether you think they are "economic migrants" or not, what is your solution? Build a wall? Shoot them? Keep them in camps? The numbers are such that the only real solution is to absorb them.

- Europe desperately needs young people, their demographics are greying rapidly. A lot of the people escaping are educated, obviously highly motivated, and precisely the type of migrants needed. This is a large part of why Germany is welcoming these people, and distributing them out to towns that have declining populations.

- The civil war in Syria is a highly complex, 3-sided conflict with no simple solution. You have Assad - a highly brutal, cruel dictator, but one who is secular, against ISIS, against a mix of rebel groups that go from secular to Islamist and everything in between.

-There is no clear solution, and arguing for or against military intervention is not clear at all.

- As mentioned by others, Syria had a massive drought leading in to the Arab Spring where they lost 85% of their arable crops, pushing millions of people from the countryside into the city, creating mass-unemployment etc.

So I guess in conclusion, I am just saying that I really hate this simplistic and superficial arguments that are out there at the moment. Its not a simple situation, and there are no simple solutions.

It's simply too fantastic to suggest that you can absorb hundreds and thousands of migrants if not millions, integrate them into society, teach them English and this will massively boost economic activity. The reality is displaced people are often not motivated to work or do not the skills, suffer psychological scarring, do not quickly pick up the language and usually form enclaves with their own kind and struggle to integrate either socially or culturally into broader society. This has been the experience right across the western world.

Especially Australia, which has crumbled economically and culturally post WW2

[size=1]sarcasm[/size]

Edited by marconi101: 8/9/2015 04:31:02 PM