Insider Royston Mitchell reports on this deadly and grotesquely expensive farce:
My colleagues advise me that five boatloads of asylum seekers were offloaded on Christmas Island today. As far as I am aware, this is a new record. Not sure what number were onboard.
Christmas Island is the biggest money pit in Australian history. Never before has so much money been squandered, wasted, misdirected and lost in such a short period of time. Asylum seekers arrive almost daily, only to be churned through the system in two months or less, and sent to the mainland. The government couldn’t burn through money any faster if it tried. Two navy boats constantly on patrol; RAAF aircraft on patrol; teams of Customs and AFP officers permanently stationed on the island; empty hospitals manned by dozens of health professionals; SERCO spending millions a week; the list goes on. The waste is appalling, and I have certainly never seen anything like it in my life. When Labor says this year’s asylum seeker expenditure will be $2.2 billion, it should be emphasised that this is just the department of immigration’s costs - I would conservatively estimate Customs, Defence, AFP and the other associated departments costing at least $1 billion more, putting this year’s outlay to service the burgeoning asylum seeker industry at more than $3 billion.
The true (economic) cost of Christmas Island may never be known. So Wayne Swan wants a post-election audit of election policies? Good. Let’s start with Labor’s decision to dismantle the Pacific Solution in 2007. Perhaps the Treasurer would like to explain, before September, how Labor’s ‘humane’ policy has led to a $10 - $20 billion black hole in just five years.
Five years Labor have had to fix this festering sore. The boats are now what I like to call a ‘United Nations’ of economic opportunists. Europeans, Africans, Asians; dozens of young men in high spirits, thrilled at the prospect of unlimited welfare. When asked why they have travelled to Christmas Island, the answer is almost universally the same: “I lost my job”; “I heard there were jobs in Australia”; “I’m looking for work”, etc, etc.
Intel in the department has it that there are 30,000+ asylum seekers in Indonesia waiting their turn to travel to Christmas Island, and hundreds of boats are in the pipeline waiting to be launched. My estimate this year is for 35,000 - 40,000 arrivals by the time of the federal election.
Oh, by the way, somebody might like to ask the new immigration minister why, in the last few years alone, thousands of ‘asylum seekers’ have returned to their supposed ‘country of persecution’. This is another big secret the department is hoping does not become public: asylum seekers are granted Protection visas, only to travel back to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, marry their arranged brides and lodge applications for large groups of ‘family members’. And curiously, many of these asylum seekers, returning to their country of origin, do not have jobs; that is, their travel is funded by welfare payments, which they continue to collect while overseas
