Let's people smuggle

Buried in the last few paragraphs of Miranda Devine's opinion piece in today's SMH is a great idea from Fred Nile:

If Rudd really wanted to show compassion he would back the audacious plan of the Christian Democrat Fred Nile and go into the people smuggling business.

Hosting a meeting yesterday at NSW Parliament House for Christians from Egypt, Iran and Iraq, the upper house MP said he was worried about the plight of Christians in the Middle East, who were desperate to come here and make good migrants. In Iraq, says the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, there are only 400,000 Christians left, down from 1.4 million in 1987. Australia has a special responsibility for the Iraqi people, and from a self-interested viewpoint, Christians are likely to settle more easily into a Christian country than Muslims.

"It's a desperate situation," said Nile. "They're being told 'convert or die'."

Seeing how free and easy the Government has become with boat people, Nile has hatched a plan to bring a boat of 2000 Christian asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. He wants donations and he dares the Government to stop him.

So how about it?

Immigration under Rudd

Still not better than it was under Ruddock.

This was one of the factors influencing the way I voted at the last election, and it's not good to see how slowly things are going.

Department of Immigration

Will the Federal government deal with dreadful stories like this, caused by the pfaffing around of intractable bureaucrats at the Dept of Immigration, and in no way discouraged by the immigration policies of the previous incumbents?

I sure hope so.

Another immigration bungle

This time, a man was wrongfully detained for five-and-a-half years (The Melbourne Age has a fuller version of the same story here). I saw the story of this on Lateline last night, and it was heartbreaking. The man, Tony Tran, was shunted around four different immigration centres over the period while his marriage broke up and his son was placed into foster care. The immigration department at one stage tried to get the son out of Australia and placed into the Korean welfare system. It was just bungle after bungle.

And Mr Tran still doesn't have permanent residency, so could be deported at any time.

I hear many stories that involve similar bungling and hard-heartedness on the part of Immigration and they make me very angry about our current policy and treatment of asylum seekers. To then see election slogans around like 'A strong economy is the centre of everything' makes me less likely rather than more to support a government that comes up with such a mantra while treating weak people in the way it does.