Asylum seekers week 2

For another week asylum seekers who arrive by boat have been front and centre of the political talk this week.

The more I read and engage with the issues, the more complex and difficult it seems. The intricacy of the "problem" (for want of a better word) actually makes me dislike our main media news outlets even more as they seem to paint the problem as black and white. The propaganda is quite unbearable.

Thanks to a friend who works in international policy, I see there are three main issues working in tension that make the "problem" of boat people hard.
1) The need to deter human traffickers;
2) The need to maintain border security; and
3) The need to have compassion for people desperate enough to try to come to Australia by boat.

The stories from the people on these boats are heart breaking. As a mother particularly, I find the stories about the children and the babies drowning just plain awful. Yet, the solution is not to just let everyone come to Australia if they want. This article opened my eyes to see the current asylum seeker policy in a positive light. I still do not think it's ideal but it is trying to find a happy medium between the three tensions that pull at this issue.

Any solution that has a strong emphasis on compassion for the boat people needs to also appeal to the residents in Australia and (selfishly or sadly) needs to appear as a benefit to Australia (not a negative). Stories like this are heart-warming and exciting but we need larger figures of the benefits of increase immigration (including asylum seekers that come by boat).

One piece of writing that challenged me this week is this article about the "why" of Australian's aversion to boat people particularly (not asylum seekers in general). It is easy to use the compassion card to get away from racism but to be challenged about why we need to "defend" our lifestyle when we have actually not done much to deserve it is confronting in a good way. It aligns with how I feel that as Australians we have a life and a lifestyle that is the envy of probably at least 75% of the world's 7 billion population. Us lucky 20 million who live in the land down under.

Lucky Country, Austinmer Jan 2013