Rudd opens the door for genuine security threats
Piers Akerman
Daily Telegraph
Thursday, January 14, 2010
KEVIN Rudd has shown he has absolutely no credibility on border security and the war on terror by insisting that Tamil refugees deemed to be a security threat be brought to Australia.
He did so to shore up the deal he personally cut with Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. This followed the rescue of undocumented arrivals on their way to Australia who were landed first in Indonesia.
There they were promised speedy processing and resettlement, in a secret agreement that has never been explained to the Australian public.
It is now clear that Rudd has ignored various ministers and security agencies as he engaged in his own simple-minded personal diplomacy.
In this instance, Rudd approved the transfer to Australia of four Tamil refugees, including a woman accompanied by two children, deemed to be a security threat by ASIO while they were in detention in Indonesia after the four-week standoff aboard the Oceanic Viking.
A fifth Tamil, the woman’s husband, who had travelled to Australia aboard an earlier boat in the Rudd refugee fleet, was also refused a visa on security grounds.
Since the Rudd Government watered down border security legislation in August 2008, nearly 70 boatloads of undocumented arrivals have reached Australian waters.
The Rudd Government met this surge with a barrage of propaganda, claiming that the flood was due to “push” factors not “pull” factors and it attempted to smear WA Premier Colin Barnett, who claimed (correctly) that security personnel had been seriously injured when a fire was lit aboard one vessel.
Rudd hysterically attacked then Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and accused him of endorsing Wilson Tuckey’s comment that terrorists were masquerading as asylum seekers in their bid to reach Australia.
Rudd called on Turnbull to withdraw Tuckey’s preselection, claiming the MP’s remarks were “divisive and disgusting”.
Grandstanding, he bellowed to his parliamentary audience that if Turnbull had “one shred of credibility, one shred of decency on the question of asylum seekers, he would stand to his feet (and) repudiate the Member for O’Connor”.
Turnbull wisely and correctly refused to repudiate his backbencher’s remarks. As time has shown, Tuckey was only speaking the truth out of genuine concern at the failure of the Rudd Government’s policies and all Rudd was attempting to do with his ill-mannered and poorly-considered outburst was distract attention from his own calamitous border protection regime. His disastrous personal intervention with the Indonesian President was to follow.
By any measure, the current border protection policy is in crisis.
Far from being a deterrent, routine detention on Christmas Island is regarded as stepping stone to the mainland. Those people smugglers who have not programmed the co-ordinates of the island’s Flying Fish Cove wharf into their GPS units are happy to be ferried there by the navy and customs vessels.
Single men are kept in the overcrowded detention centre, families are held in the island’s converted recreation centre or released into the community.
Immigration Minister Chris Evans says the woman identified as a security risk is not behind a security fence with her children, so it is to be presumed - failing the release of any pertinent information from the Government - that she is living with them in the general community.
The Christmas Islanders have been growing increasingly disgruntled at the presence of hundreds of extra government personnel billeted on the island dealing with the new arrivals. The medical staff, security and education specialists, counsellors and immigration officers and maintenance workers have taken up almost all the spare accommodation and rental cars and scooters and driven up the cost of food and rent.
As a sop to the islanders, the Rudd Government has promised an increased emphasis on tourism but, without accommodation, tourists would be better off arriving via people smuggler boat, so they will at least be guaranteed taxpayer-provided services.
During the Howard years, two Iraqi detainees, Mohammed Yussef Sagar and Muhammad Faisal, were issued negative security assessments after they arrived in Australia. They spent five years in detention before Sagar was accepted by Sweden and Faisal, who underwent psychiatric treatment, was allowed into Australia and later reassessed by ASIO.
Under Rudd, those assessed as risks are being brought to Australia. How long they will remain depends on how soon another country agrees to host them. Rudd might explain why another nation should be as silly as Australia and accept a person reckoned to be a bona fide security risk.
The Labor Party and their Union Financiers will not be happy until there is a Terrorist attack on our soil.
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