BUSINESS AS USUAL

Talk about Back to the Future. Illegal boat people are dominating the headlines again today with Prime Minister Rudd going all the way back to the Tampa crisis and mockingly invoking the words of his predecessor John Howard when he vowed that ‘we will decide who comes into this country’. His pledge that none of the Tampa passengers would set foot on mainland Australia.

The boat people are headlines because at the weekend Kevin Rudd phoned Indonesian President Yudhoyono and asked him to get the Indonesian Navy to intercept a boat carrying another 260 asylum seekers bound for Australia.

I heard a Rudd spin doctor on SKY news explaining how this somehow proved that the Government’s boat people policy was working like a dream. Yeah, right. Like you always call a neighbour for help when things are going great guns.

They can bluster and spin all they like but since Labor took office the perception is that they are going soft on boat people and the tom toms are sounding all the way back to Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East, that it’s business as usual.

Former Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock predicts that the number of illegals coming in through people smugglers could now reach 10,000 a year.

Our supposed tough line was not helped by the announcement yesterday that all 42 survivors of the fire boat off Ashmore Reef in April have been granted permanent protection visas even though Police believe some of them are lying and that some of them deliberately splashed petrol and lit the fire that scuttled their boat killing five people and injuring others after being boarded by the Australian Navy.

In other words some have lied and scoffed at our laws before they even land here. Immigration Minister Chris Evans told me yesterday that if some of those now protected refugees are charged and convicted they could be deported. But, as I pointed out, they would have to have served a jail term of more than 12 months and we have a number of cases of deportees fighting through our courts at taxpayers’ expense.

Evans also keeps repeating the canard that ‘the Northern Territory Police found they had no basis to charge anyone’. They actually said they believed the fire on SIEV 36 was deliberately started but had ‘insufficient evidence’ to charge anybody yet. That supports the comments by West Australian Premier Colin Barnett who from day one said the illegals lit the fire which killed five people and endangered the lives of Australian sailors.

The pre-election behaviour of Howard and Peter Reith and others in the Children Overboard saga was reprehensible and immoral. But it doesn’t change the facts of 2009. More boats are coming because people think Australia is an easy mark. And they are passing through four or five other countries to get here. The word is back out there: It’s business as usual.                                    

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009