Another example of dodgy media
The Culprit
I was listening to the Twister Wire podcast this morning, trying to get more information about the NBN, while I try to decide if it’s going to be a good thing or a giant waste of taxpayers money. While I thought the content of the episode I was listening to was okay, the presenter, one Phil Dobbie, decided to destroy any creditiblity he had by dropping a totally irrelevant and completely wrong statement at the end;
“For Tony Abbott, he wants to show how he can stop asylum seekers, trying to escape repressive regimes, unless those repressive regimes have been accommodating enough to give them a passport.”
What a bunch of tripe that is! Is this guy for real? Let’s stop for a minute and check the facts;
These “asylum seekers” pay people smugglers large sums of money to sneek across multiple borders, and eventually be packed onto rickety boats for a life threatening ride to Australia.
There is no reason they could not claim asylum in other countries they pass through, and our governments refugee resettlement program would then take some of them, as would many other countries.
Let’s also remember that plenty of them do have documents with them when they leave, showing who they are and where they are from, but then go on to destroy these papers once they get within range of Australia. Why do they do that, one must wonder?
Considering what they pay to the smugglers, it’s pretty clear many of them have the means to do things properly, so the motivation for sneaking into Australia must be challenged. Is it simply that we are the soft touch, that hands out the big bucks to new arrivals?
Even if none of that moves you, how about the fact that these rickety old boats are a death trap, and people do die both on the boats, and under the waves when they inevitably sink. The people arguing for a relaxing of our border protection laws are arguing for more people crammed on more boats and more suffering and more death.
This is NOT the kind of moving forward I vote for.