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Keywords: Boat People

  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia falls for a fistful of fibs

    • Elenie Poulos
    • 17 July 2013
    52 Comments

    If there's one thing Bob Carr's recent comments on asylum seekers demonstrated it was that our politicians think they can say anything they want about 'boat people' and not be held to account. As a society we have been captured by the lies and easy phrases; our view of the world bears too little resemblance to the truth of it, and in this we are doomed to live small and impoverished lives.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Facts alone won't save Australia's fatuous political agenda

    • Michael Mullins
    • 15 July 2013
    12 Comments

    It is pleasing that PolitiFact is able to demonstrate that foreign minister Bob Carr's claim that boat people 'are not people fleeing persecution ... they are coming here as economic migrants' is 'mostly false'. But even if Carr's claim was mostly true, how does discussion of the comparatively small number of economic migrants justify its place on the agenda, compared with issues such as the mental health of Australia's youth? 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Notes from a boat tragedy inquest

    • Tony Kevin
    • 02 July 2013
    4 Comments

    The WA Coroner's inquest into the sinking of SIEV 358 is shaping up to be the most thorough public examination ever of Australian rescue-at-sea protocols and practice in respect of assisting people on Suspected Irregular Entry Vessels. The Counsel Assisting the Coroner suggested that Australian Maritime Safety Authority's major focus for the first 11 hours of the incident had been to transfer the operation to Indonesia.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pragmatic answers to the asylum seeker question

    • Frank Brennan
    • 27 June 2013
    10 Comments

    'I want to outline the contours for a better approach — better than forcibly turning around boats, better than transporting people to Nauru and Manus Island or to Malaysia to join an asylum queue of 100,000 or permitting people to reside in the Australian community but without work rights and with inadequate welfare provision.' Frank Brennan speaks at the Australian Catholic University National Asylum Summit 2013.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    More asylum seeker deaths, more unanswered questions

    • Tony Kevin
    • 11 June 2013
    34 Comments

    The fact that the boat was seen as stationary on Wednesday should have alerted Border Protection Command to the risk of likely engine failure. Had they reacted more quickly, the 55 or 60 drowned people may have been rescued. Instead, their boat drifted helplessly westwards, away from Christmas Island, and at some stage capsized and began to sink.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Christmas Island capsize demands coronial inquest

    • Tony Kevin
    • 28 March 2013
    39 Comments

    The details of the event as so far publicly known suggest seriously life-threatening negligent process. No one would have died if this unnecessary and, on the face if it, unprofessional halt and boarding had not taken place. No amount of blaming the asylum seekers' poor seamanship can get around that fact.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'No advantage' policy more harmful than leaky boats

    • Michael Mullins
    • 26 November 2012
    20 Comments

    The Federal Government is treating asylum seekers harshly as a deterrent. If you treat people harshly, you will diminish them as human beings, and they will cease to value their own lives, and possibly even self-harm. This undermines the justification for the initial harsh treatment, which is to protect them from risky sea voyages.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Human lives Australia could have saved

    • Tony Kevin
    • 05 September 2012
    14 Comments

    Australian maritime safety and border protection authorities could have saved the lives of most of the people on the boat that made two distress calls by telephone to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority early last Wednesday. Instead they passed the responsibility to Indonesia, which has none of the sophisticated resources and technologies that Australia uses - when it wants to - to locate and intercept incoming unauthorised boats.

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  • RELIGION

    There is an ethical way to stop the boats

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 August 2012
    11 Comments

    Behind all the legal technicalities and political argument about boat people, there is room for deeper ethical reflection and a more principled proposal. But first, to clear away some of the debris.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Houston report's significance for deaths at sea

    • Tony Kevin
    • 16 August 2012
    8 Comments

    A boat disappeared on 28 June, the 67 people on board presumed dead. The usual dysfunctional patterns of official behaviour followed: tardy response to families, insensitive language, political exploitation. Hopefully the Houston report's quiet hints that all is not well might lead to a more compassionate and timely response in future.

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  • CARTOON

    Putting the boot to boat people

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 15 August 2012

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott's asylum seeker turn-back policy is a bad joke

    • Tony Kevin
    • 27 July 2012
    15 Comments

    Can Abbott and Morrison be serious about turning back the boats? Do they really want to expose the Navy to the fear, the rage, the encouragement to self-harm and lethal criminality, the emotional damage, the risks to Australian-Indonesian relations that have beset past turn-back policies?

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