THE premiers of Victoria and Queensland have said they will provide accommodation and services for boat people brought here from Nauru for medical treatment, so that the boat people don’t have to be sent back there.
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In response, the prime minister says that he will not give one skerrick of encouragement to those who engage in people smuggling.
Too late – he has already given them a dozen metric tonnes of encouragement, by taking in 12,000 boat people from Syria who were smuggled into Europe.
That’s several years’ worth of boat arrivals at Christmas Island, in one go.
So it’s really terrible to smuggle people by boat across the Indian Ocean to Australia, but it’s quite all right to smuggle them across the Mediterranean so that they can then be flown to Australia. This is not stopping the boats, it’s only diverting them.
It’s no excuse for Malcolm Turnbull to say that the utterly mad Syrian hypocrisy is a leftover from the utterly mad Tony Abbott period. Australia’s only hope for a rational movement into the future is for “Abbottism” to be purged from politics and government, not allowed to drag on.
Grant Agnew
Coopers Plains
