> Russell: Fortunately no-one here has said anything like that. What has been claimed is
that the practice of deliberate ignorance of government inhumanity is a
commonality.
OK....
From the conversations I have had, people are well aware that the refugees are treated fairly harshly (though much less harshly than in many other countries), and they mostly approve of this harsh treatment as a disincentive. (A similar misconception arises around the massive invasions of civil liberties that governments are committing. I assumed that most people were unaware of this and would be outraged if they knew. But when I spoke to people, they knew about it and heartily approved! Damn!).
Perhaps you could also clarify the approving comments about Malcolm Fraser's immigration policy. One interpretation is that we should allow wholesale immigration by people who fought on our side as we lost colonial wars (a common interpretation of Fraser's actions at the time). But I suspect that is not what you meant. He certainly did not support unlimited immigration, although business oriented parties generally support higher immigration as a way to keep wages down and to reduce the power of organized labour.
In any case the Australian boat person issue pales beside a far greater humanitarian disaster for which we share responsibility. Every year tens of millions of people die from hunger and treatable illnesses, yet we pretty well stand idly by. This is Nazi holocaust every few months. Now. How will you plead in the Nairobi human rights trials of 2030? You knew. And you did, what?
>> Tim:But when I see these statements without any actual concrete policy
>> proposal, and without acknowledging the consequences of such a policy, one
>> might begin to suspect that what we are seeing is not much more than moral
>> posturing.
> Russell: But you want direct immoral action instead.
No. I respect the fact that libertarians are honest about their intentions. They say what they want to do, and acknowledge the consequences. Put as simply as I can, this does not mean I agree with their policies.
My ow view is that this is a difficult problem for which there is no simple, appealing solution. I don't think that the main problem is simply that Australians are ignorant racists. Given that there are ~40,000,000 refugees around the world, and at least several hundred million people who would like to move to Australia to live a better life, it is not feasible to take everyone who wants to come here. My proposal would be to increase the refugee quota as high as the voters will accept, at the expense of most other components of immigration. This should allow us to roughly quadruple our refugee intake. At the same time we need to strongly discourage people from setting out on the perilous boat trip to Australia, because any feasible Australian intake will still leave vast numbers who also want to come here. I don't have a good answer for how to do this in a nice way.
The Greens ridiculed the notion that nicer treatment of boat people would result in an increase in the numbers. They were totally wrong about this as shown by Labor's experience. If we have policies which say "everyone who shows up in a boat can stay", then a lot of people are going to show up in boats, and many others will die on the journey. Is that humane?
>> Tim: Further, if you make such comparisons without proposing an alternative
>> policy, and showing what its realistic implications would be, you also lack
>> credibility. What is the alternate policy?> Russell: That's what they always say when advocating a policy that's indefensible.
To my mind if people are not prepared to articulate what their actual proposal is, and to show they have thought about the consequences, they should not expect other people to respect their position.. If you are not prepared to articulate an alternate policy, and show you have thought about (or don't care about) the consequences, then it is just posturing.
Saying that a policy should be "humane" does not tell us what you are proposing. Is it humane to encourage people to risk their lives in boats? Is it humane to change our society in a way that means we cannot look after old people and the unemployed (likely if huge numbers of refugees come here)? Is it humane to implement policies that will greatly increase unemployment and reduce wages for people living here now? You need to be more specific.
If you said <I support the idea that anyone who arrives in Australia can get permanent residency, and you had some analysis that said, say 20,000,000 (applications for the US green card lottery run at around 14,000,000 each year) people would arrive on an annual basis and yes our infrastructure and government services would be overwhelmed, unemployment would rise to 25%, wages would halve, there would be a housing crisis, etc>. And if you said that you accept that as a price for the betterment of humanity, at least we have something to discuss. I suspect that very few Australians would be prepared to make such sacrifices for other people. If they did, they would already be donating 60-80% of their income to the poor.
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It long puzzled me why people would take positions that involve a) Not actually articulating a policy b) Not investigating the consequences of the things they seem to be proposing c) Using emotive, judgmental language towards those who have a different view. Perhaps it has something to do with status displays and displays of group affiliation. But it is frustrating when people refuse to say what they want and refuse to consider the implications of their ideas.
Generally I find that if people are actually interested in solving a problem they will have a view as to what policies they are proposing. They will have thought through the consequences. And they will be open to other ideas about these matters.