On Wed, 15 Aug 2012, Peter Ross <Peter.Ross@bogen.in-berlin.de> wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Solution#Australian_parliament_to_vote _on_Pacific_Solution_in_August_2012
This is expected to cost $AU2 billion over four years for Nauru and $900 million for Papua New Guinea
There were 6000 boat people and we spend nearly 3 billion dollars to fix the problem: Makes it half a million per head.
The money isn't spent to fix the problem but to pander to the most ignorant people in Australia. A large portion of our legal system is dedicated to that sort of thing. Instead of spending so much money imprisoning people it would be better to spend the money training them so that they can get a job. Then they would be paying tax rather than costing us money. To save even more money we could refrain from sending our armed forces in the service of the US empire. A lot of the refugees are from countries that the US broke with our help. On Wed, 15 Aug 2012, Steve Roylance <roylance@corplink.com.au> wrote:
One good thing to come out of this is that our refugee quota will be increased, though not as much as I would like. (There are about 10,000,000 refugees around the world so it is not realistic to take them all here in Oz).
Tim Josling
actually Tim it is closer to 50M refugees, over twice the population of this already over populated country
However the vast majority of refugees end up somewhere that's not far from home. So no matter what happens we aren't going to get any significant fraction of the world refugee population ending up in Australia. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html According to the CIA World Factbook we have an average of 1.77 children born to each woman which gives us position #158 in the world rankings. For comparison China (with it's "one child policy") is in position #179 with 1.55 children per woman. I've seen it claimed that we would need to have 2.1 births per woman on average to sustain our population (the 0.1 extra to cover deaths and women who don't have children). So we need to have some immigration to maintain the population. As so much of the economy depends on an expanding population (particularly the building and real-estate industries) anything that involves a population freeze isn't viable politically. The total immigration in Australia is 5.93 migrants per 1000 population, that ranks as 17th in the world! For every 2 babies who are born in Australia one migrant arrives! The vast majority of this is people who want to migrate to Australia for work reasons or because they have relatives here. If there was ever a feeling that we should restrict population growth then it would be really easy to restrict work permits... As an aside, some people claim that a university degree does more than just provide a credential for gaining employment. Supposedly a science or engineering degree helps people develop the ability to think logically. Steve and Alex, could you please tell us what your educational qualifications are, I'd like to see if the people on this list support or contradict such claims. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/