Labor should go for broke on asylum seeker policy

The High Court rejection of the Malaysia Solution is almost certainly the beginning of the end of the Labor Government. Even more likely, the end of Julia Gillard’s ignominious Prime Ministership.

This, folks, is what you get when the order of the day is trimming, compromising, placating and general brown-nosing. It is not a sustainable model of government.

You can’t win over the racists who don’t want any brown and yellow people coming here, no matter how they come, which is the core constituency chanting stop the boats.

Everyone else has long since worked out that any offshore processing solution is both ridiculously expensive and inhumanly cruel.

Labor needs to turn this around with a frank acknowledgement that refugees, however they get here, are Australia’s problem and need to be dealt with by the Australian Government on Australian soil.

Without a truly bold stroke that cuts through all the crap, they’re gone, and Tony Abbott is our new PM.

The ludicrous expense of offshoring probably provides the way to do it. If you can’t sell the notion of processing people onshore, in or near our capital cities, where help and support is readily available to assimilate the influx, on the basis of simple humanity – and that is how low we have sunk – you can at least make a decent fist of selling it on economic grounds. Protect the budget surplus!

Onshore management of refugees is faster and cheaper, and delivers less-damaged people sooner. Provided with language teaching, social integration services, legal support and surrounded by members of their own ethnic community, refugees integrate into Australian society far sooner and better, and become a net economic benefit to the country, rather than a drain.

As it is, we are spending millions of dollars on something which, if truth be told, is nothing more than a vast bribe for the votes of racist rednecks — via redwolf.newsvine.com