With the re-emergence of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia as a major issue in this country it has led to an accompanying rise in confusing politics.
The average observer can be left lost by the bedazzling display offensive and defensive political tactics and what it all means, so The Punch has put together a users guide of boat people politics.
Tough but humane:
Nobody has quite gotten to the bottom of what this phrase, formulated by the Government to explain its policy, actually means. Scientists in Switzerland have constructed an atomic “tough but humane” collider and are currently clashing the two words up against each other at the speed of light to find the solution. So far the closest they have come to an answer is that you can leave 78 asylum seekers on a boat in the sea off Indonesia for days on end, but give them a good brand of bottled water to drink.
We’re in full control, except when Indonesia is in charge:
The question as to who is in charge of the boat and its human cargo is somewhat unclear. Kevin Rudd is yet to properly answer this question. The Government has been very keen to make it clear that it is fully across and in control of the situation at hand. That is until the Indonesian Governor says that the boat people aren’t welcome, and then it’s the Indonesians’ problem. “Indonesia has an abundance of patience when handling these matters,” Kevin Rudd told question time yesterday, well they’re going to need it.
If you’re the Opposition attack whatever you can, even if you don’t have your own policy:
This is a line that Kevin Rudd was hammering in question time this week, and he’s basically right. Initially the premise of the Opposition’s attack on the Government was that because of softer policies on asylum seekers, abolishing Temporary Protection Visas and softening aspects of mandatory detention, it had “opened the flood gates” to asylum seekers. Now they want guarantees on whether there will be women and children locked up behind bars. And they want to know when these people will be processed. There are even questions about whether the Oceanic Viking is over capacity, which begs the question as to what they do with the left over people. But despite these helpful reminders the Opposition won’t say what it would actually do, it won’t endorse TVPs or a new Pacific Solution preferring the “it’s Kevin Rudd’s problem” line. The closest one can get to a Coalition policy on this issue is that they don’t stand for what the Government does. Maybe that makes them “humane but tough”.
The Greens and Paul Howes will take the boat people:
Both the Greens and Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howes have been vocally making the case for accepting all boat arrivals with open arms - with Howes sticking it to his own side of politics over the last week.
Some may point to the fact that it’s all very well for the Greens and Paul Howes to advocate a first come first serve type of immigration policy given they don’t have to be responsible for it. Then again if Paul Howes and the Greens were running the country it’s likely they wouldn’t have to worry about people wanting to come here anymore.
When all else fails send in the army, or Wilson Tuckey:
Sending in the army worked to some degree during the Tampa crisis and outspoken Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey has been advocating just prying these belligerent asylum seekers from the Oceanic Viking by force. Surprisingly the look of sending in troops to force off 78 rather desperate looking men, women and children from a boat with rifles is not one that Kevin Rudd is keen to foster. Perhaps the Liberals could kill two birds with one stone by sending Wilson Tuckey aboard the Viking to lecture the asylum seekers off the boat, thus getting him out of Canberra and inventing the toughest asylum seeking policy yet: “the Tuckey Solution.”
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