The problem with the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees is that it legitimises unregulated entry…
Australia may be approaching a tipping point in its always uneasy relationship with the refugee convention… Last year, more than 17,000 asylum-seekers arrived. More than 30,000 are projected for this year… At least 1000 people have drowned at sea…
A growing number of voters think the refugee convention is past its use-by date. Australians see how European countries struggle to integrate large, unplanned inflows of economic migrants and refugees. Familiar with managed humanitarian migration, they see how the refugee convention advantages people on the basis of their capacity to pay, and to play the system, over refugees in greater need.
Australian voters also see the commonwealth budget has blown out by billions of dollars, trying to keep boatpeople out, rescuing, detaining and processing those who manage to get in…
The opposition, however, offers only a return to measures that seem less likely to succeed the second time around and with larger numbers. It offers the depressing prospect of a lengthy, gruelling period of escalating toughness…
The legacy of the Rudd and Gillard policy failures could be that it is no longer possible to return to the halfway solutions that worked in the past. The costs of pretending to uphold obligations under the refugee convention, at least in the way they presently are interpreted, have become too high…
It is time to rethink dubious international obligations and to argue Australia’s case. Australia should require asylum-seekers wanting to settle in this country to apply for a refugee or humanitarian visa offshore, through our overseas posts or the UNHCR.
