FEEL THE GUILT

Why wouldn’t you be touched? Why wouldn’t it tug at your heart strings? There’s a little nine-year-old girl named Brindah pleading on television for Australians to save her. She says ‘ Please take us to your country. Please help us and save our lives. We are your children. Think of us’. It’s touching stuff. Makes you almost want to open your arms and shout ‘Come on down’. And that’s what her parents want you to feel. Guilt.

Brindah is one of the 250 Sri Lankan Tamils on board that boat the Rudd Government had intercepted by the Indonesians and which is now moored in Indonesian waters.

In recent days adults on board that boatload of human cargo, presumably including Brindah’s parents, have threatened to blow up their boat and kill everybody and have now announced a hunger strike.

And in my opinion they are trying to play the Australian people and the Australian Government like mugs. They say they’ll live anywhere –as long as it is not Indonesia. They say they spent a month in the jungles of Malaya. Didn’t stay there.

Australia is their goal. It’s the people smugglers’ prize destination. That’s why they have paid up to $15,000 each to queue jump. To avoid the detention and processing camps in other countries.

And there are several points being smothered  as the illegals exploit little girls like  Brindah.

One of them spelled out in an email overnight from a Sri Lankan woman I know.

She says she’s too nervous to come on air but she writes: ‘The current wave of boat people, are just opportunistic FINANCIAL refugees who want to jump the queue. There is a Consulate in Colombo, by the way, with many Tamils in it. I visited recently, and can assure you that there is no persecution of Tamils (except the minority Tiger Terrorists). Eighty per cent of the shops in Colombo are owned by Tamils, who live peacefully with the Sinhalese majority.

‘Visit & check it out.  Of course there are homeless people, after the trouble. But the Govt. & NGO's are dealing with this problem in the camps. Please Derryn, get the truth out there.’

And in The Australian this week, David Halliday, echoed a lot of people’s thoughts when he wrote that he was supposed to feel compassion for these poor souls trying to reach our Promised Land in old boats.

He wrote: ‘Hang on a tick. These poor souls seem to have had no trouble forking out the equivalent of a first-class return air fare  to London , which is way beyond my means, to jump the queue.’

And another writer points out that some of the Afghan refugees have not lived in that country for more than five years.

The Rudd government can spin all it likes– but Kevin Rudd’s new job as Harbour Master proves the point: The perception is that Australia is a soft touch. Get here, anyway you can, and you can stay here.

No wonder those illegals, who set their own boat alight and killed five of their compatriots, were waving their landing papers and dancing with delight on the TV news this week.

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009