Illegals Again!

Yawn!!!! With Stuart Rintoul’s tag on the article it has to be bleeding heart stuff. One of the 14 Kurds pointed at the word “refugee” in an English/Turkish dictionary. I hope one of the locals pointed out the word “illegal” from the same dictionary. I don’t care about semantics or who said what to whom. What I care about is that the elected government are the only people empowered to decide who immigrates to Australia or, indeed, who we accept as refugees. Not the Indonesian Immigration Department, not the people smugglers and definitely not (we’re on a descending values list here) the Greens or Democrats. And don’t you love this? Senator Vanstone denied returning the boat to Indonesia had fuelled tensions with Jakarta, rejecting a claim from Indonesian Immigration Department spokesman Ade Dachlan that Australia was treating its northern neighbour as a “dumping ground”. Hang on, who’s dumping here? Didn’t the boat set sail from an Indonesian port after Indonesian authorities had ignored the illegals presence in their own country after having received the appropriate bribe from the people smuggler? Keep letting them through Indonesia and our wicket keepers will keep sending them back. One day you will get the message. I like Amanda Vanstone. Her comments last week to media reps about how the Immigration Department operations were not set up just to accommodate the media has a certain firmness, some might a say, a ‘get stuffed’ attitude about it. To follow this up with instant return tickets for emotional blackmail/people smuggler run immigration makes me think there is a Santa.