Reply #27: thinking of moving there myself actually!

[Djinn]

At our last federal election John "is it still 1954?" Howard was looking very iffy...then along came a boatload of refugees and little john played the race card for all it was worth refusing to allow a Norwegian ship who had rescued the refugees from their leaking boat to transport the people to Australia and insisted they be taken to Indonesia (a non signatory to the Refugee Convention) they intimated that the boat was possibly full of terrorists in disguise which was a ploy helped hugely by the Sept 11 atacks, no-one really questioned why any terrorist would take the leaky fishing boat risk when "illegals" who come by plane (or UK backpackers overstaying their visa's) are not subject to mandatory detention and people on the fishing boats often sink and drown...basically our own right wing shock jocks (think poor man's Limbaugh) whipped up the frenzy "the navy should just shoot them" was one comment I recall from the time (I worked in media monitoring then and each day was a little bit more sickening) and low and behold the midget won the election.

New Zealand has been quietly accepting half the refugees bound for Australia and has issued visa's enabling men who's wives and children came on subsequent boats to be reunited with their families - something they could not do in Australia.

Most Australians (like most Americans I imagine) are OK but a lot of them are pretty ignorant and don't seem to have much desire to change that. As for how Aboriginal Australians are treated ... well I don't want to damn my country too much in one post, suffice to say the Prime Miniature refuses to even offer a public apology for policies (in place up until the mid 70's) that forcibly removed children from their families because "we can't apologise for something "we" didn't do - strangely enough little JOhn was an MP back in the mid 70's! (see Human Right & Equal Op website for info http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/stolen_children/)

See RAC-VIC (on my sig line) if you need any extra info on how we treat refugees in Aust.

And on Ductape Fatwa's comment - Woomera has been shut down they've replaced it with shiny new razor wire encircled camps also in the middle of the fucking dessert and the ingenious "Pacific Solution" (has a nice Nazi ring to it dontcha think?) whereby we bribe piss poor pacific nations into doing our dirty work...also one other point we don't just lock up muslims, we're quite happy to refuse the right to claim asylum of other folks from the middle east and south asia as well, although being muslim certianly helps to whip up the paranoia