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Even the skeptics are accepting that climate change is with us. Yet the impact of climate change on the movement of people around the world – usually the poorest – is almost entirely absent from public debate.
David Corlett is a freelance writer and author of Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers (Black Inc. 2005).
Rather than the fate of the millions of Iraqis now living in desperate insecurity, and the destablising repercussions for the whole Middle East, the debate in Australia continues to revolve around when Australian troops should return.
What matters is not where the 83 Sri Lankan asylum seekers will be processed – Christmas Island or Nauru – but the nature of their reception and processing.
Pacifist and radical Christian Ammon Hennessy said that courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness. The longer the war in Iraq continues, the more the decision to invade looks to have been made on the basis of this sort of courage.
With the unlinking of the politics of asylum from the debate over national identity, Australia is now within reach of an opportunity to engage in much-needed policy reform.