It’s an interesting topic, isn’t it? Personally, I think it’s a lot more than interesting, and I’ve certainly been thinking about it a lot recently. I’ve been speaking to a lot of people about this issue recently, in the light of Mr Rudd’s sudden departure. According to a lot of these people, the issue of boat people was a major one in this decision. Rudd was seen as doing the wrong thing regarding Boat People for a number of different reasons; firstly, he wasn’t ‘tough’ enough on ‘queue-jumpers’ and secondly, he’d stopped listening to the electorate – and members of the government on this and other issues.

I think that, at times like this, it is easy to allow emotion to carry the argument; this should be avoided at all costs. I accept that emotion will play some part in the argument, and that is fine, but an argument that solely relies on emotion is deficient; it is more akin to an appeal than an argument. Of course, in my opinion, this is the direction that Tony Abbott seems to be heading – by convincing Australia that every single person on that boat is a terrorist threat waiting to kill your children, or that they are going to take away your job, your house and your Holden. It’s a bit of a truism in politics that, to win elections, fear is a bigger vote-getter than rationality. I’m reminded of the section in ‘The American President’ where the actor playing the president – Michael Douglas, I think – explains that you win elections by making people scared.

So let’s try to introduce a little bit of rationality to the argument:

Point 1: More people are in Australia, illegally, from overstaying their visa  than have arrived via boat. The numbers themselves are limited. The last figures I heard put it at less than 5000 people since 2007. As a percentage of the Australian population, that’s less than a quarter of 1 percent. Hardly unstemmed hordes of boat people flooding the country.

Point 2: Australia is not getting the vast majority of refugees in the world. Countries like Germany take in 80 000 refugees every year.

Point 3: Asylum seekers do not automatically get into Australia – they are subject to stringent security processing (which causes the delays in detention centres) and those that fail testing are returned.

Point 4: It is not a matter of simply ‘turning the boats around’ or, as I’ve heard some conservatives argue, ‘sinking the boats.’ This argument smacks of selfishness; I don’t believe that we have the right to turn away genuine refugees simply because we fear that our way of life might be in danger. In my opinion, it’s danger to human life trumps creature comforts every time.

Point 5: We did sign the UN Declaration about Refugees. Most of the countries that these people might pass through on the way to Australia did not – for example, Indonesia. Therefore, we are obligated to help them. Others are not. The fact that the UN is a toothless tiger and cannot enforce any sanctions due to a failure to uphold the declaration does not matter.

Point 6: Refugees have previously made a significant impact in Australia. And I mean a positive impact. For example, the Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s (again, like those coming from Afghanistan, fleeing a war that Australia was involved in…) are now important members of the Australian community – they haven’t been assimilated (and how I hate that word, and its similarity to ethnic cleansing); instead, they have broadened the scope of Australian society simply by being part of it. For as long as I’ve been at school, we’ve had students that had names like Trinh or Nguyen, who might have eaten sandwiches or noodles, or might have liked cricket or not, who might have spoken Vietnamese or not. The point is that they are genuinely Australian – by any sensible measure – so why do we imagine other refugees might not be able to do the same?

Remember, ‘we’ve boundless plains to share….’