Panic mentality consuming Australians

18 November 2009 | 04:04:27 PM | Source: AAP

asylum_seekers_Srilanka_091013_B_aap_1982799329

Amnesty International say too much panic over asylum seekers AAP.

Amnesty International says Australia has a panic mentality about asylum seekers which is out of proportion with the problem.
 
Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan noted that boat arrivals in Australia were relatively few compared with 30,000 in Europe.

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"There's a lot of panic here when you think there are 3000 asylum seekers arriving in Australia," she said.
 
She praised the Rudd government for getting rid of the "Pacific solution" for asylum seekers and urged it to close down Christmas Island detention centre too.
 
"We don't believe ... (that) deters asylum seekers from coming," Ms Khan said.
 
"They come when there are problems in the world, they're pushed out by serious ... war and conflict.

It is not so much the attraction of Australia but the push factors from the countries of origin."
 
Ms Khan suggested a multilateral approach to deal with the problem, which had worked with the Cambodian and Vietnamese asylum seekers.
 
Australia has been looking to Indonesia for help to keep asylum seekers away as the number of boat arrivals increases.
 
Negative attitudes to asylum seekers weren't limited to Australia, however.
 
"There is a retraction on protection of refugees and asylum seekers across the western world," the head of the international human rights organisation told the National Press Club on Wednesday.
 
In Europe the navy had been used to keep asylum seekers coming from Africa from reaching European shores.
 
"We know that hundreds of thousands of asylum actually die in their efforts to get to Europe," she said.

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Your Comments

19 Nov 2009 0:42 AEST

Fei Yuehan

From: Rockhampton

illusions

The real problem with the Christmas Island detention centre is that it simply provides an illusion to assuage the xenophobia of a small minority who feel that we are being relentlessly invaded; where in fact the numbers are small and 97% of those are eventually admitted to Australia as genuine refugees because they are... genuine refugees.
We thus invest a lot in making the suffering suffer more on a crowded little island, so a few people feel more secure on a big and pretty empty island.

Agree (3 people agree)
Disagree (1 people disagree)
 

18 Nov 2009 16:58 AEST

Ali Bakr

From: Melbourne (formerly Iraq)

Amnesty International is a lobby group

They would like to see open borders everywhere so what you can expect them to say? The lobby groups for refugees do not believe in incentives or disincentives. The facts are that Western countries have institutions that make corruption less common and create opportunity so many people want to come there from countries where are problems. The informal immigrant numbers starts small but gets big fast aand so does the news about which countries are more easy to settle

Agree (5 people agree)
Disagree (4 people disagree)
 

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