Now that the High Court has delivered its finding that the Malaysian Solution is invalid I think it’s time for the Government to embark on more creative and constructive thinking about the refugee issue.
It might not be popular or trendy but a big idea is just the thing to tackle what has become an unnecessarily troubling and divisive hot button topic in our fair land. A small percentage of people are risking their lives hopping on boats and travelling through dangerous waters. A disproportionately large amount of dollars are being spent on housing these people offshore. Politicians are running around, mouthing off and whipping up a frenzy of misinformation and pandering to the ill informed for the basest of reasons. Maturity and intelligent discourse has gone out the window to win popularity. In the meantime good people are having their already troubled lives made ugly and some of us are left to gasp ‘why’ or ‘when will this stop?’
The ludicrous idea that so called people smugglers have a business model and that our government must then break it is just dumb. I prefer to think how do we simply give these opportunists no reason to operate anymore?
A recent report says there are 91,000 people in Malaysia currently awaiting either determination on their refugee claim or have been declared refugees but haven’t been ‘assigned’ a country to reside in.
How about we embark on a real ‘Pacific Solution’? My big idea is first to get all the neighbourhood countries together (we might even be able to influence Canada) and ask them to take 20,000 of these people. This would make a significant difference to the numbers awaiting relocation and hardly affect the overall immigration numbers in the region. There would also be a big dent in potential ‘customers’ for the people smugglers.
Second we get the Pacific/Asian countries to work on a way that we can attack refugee creation in the first place. What do we as a world community need to do so that people do not feel they have to escape their countries and if they do how so we manage that process humanely, efficiently and quickly? What is our best response? Let’s have a minimum response covenant that all nations (especially democracies)sign up to. If they won’t sign up the conversation then becomes one of ‘why would your country not want to provide a decent response to an extreme or horrid scenario’. If there are concerns about the UN then keep it removed from them, just keep the conversation going and asking the question ‘why not’? It is beyond fathomable why a country would not want to care for and about their own citizens and then not want other humans to be afforded the same opportunities.
The money we would say by stopping the laughable off shore processing could actually be pumped back into the community for housing and services which would support the ‘detainees’ in their transition to their new lives. I know there are some who say that you can’t have ‘these people’ released into the community presumably because they are a threat to the rest of ‘us’. Well to my knowledge we haven’t had an increased security threat, let alone identified a terrorist (and lord knows the definition of a terrorist is so wide these days, anyone could be seen as one)from anyone who has arrived here by boat.
How nice if this country at this moment with this Parliament would step up and say ‘enough’ and decide ‘it’s time to change’.
How nice would it be if we stopped focusing on the boats and thought about the PEOPLE.
One day...
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