Labor's refugee policies lure more to death

The latest – inevitable – deaths of asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia has left Labor’s hypocritical media cheer squad strangely silent.Had a Coalition government been running the country they would have been as shrill as a shrieking Julia Gillard in Question Time.

Where are the Fairfax team and the ABC’s line-up now as the awful search for the drowned bodies of 30 or more continues in the Java Sea? Their silence is directly related to the unarguable fact that Labor must bear responsibility for these deaths because it was former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his then team who moved to weaken the Howard government’s successful anti-people smuggling strategy three years ago. That was when the leaky boats, which had stopped attempting the risky crossing, began to again venture out to sea with their fragile cargoes. Early today, Indonesian authorities said they had picked up at least eight corpses, including several children, and at least a dozen people were still missing from the boat which seems to have been carrying about 70 passengers and crew. As the tragedy came to light, another people smuggler craft carrying 92 people was brought to Christmas Island. Labor jumped to blame the Coalition for the tragedy because it would not support the government’s flawed Malaysian Solution, the laughable 5-for-1 people swap program Gillard put forward after her East Timor Solution collapsed, followed by the still-birth of her Papua New Guinea plan. Labor couldn’t convince its Green coalition partners to support its plan though they have gorged on the spoils of office like pigs at swill time. How the Coalition, which is not part of the Labor-Green-independent minority government which Gillard relies on to hang onto power could possibly be held responsible for the minority government’s policy failure is an absolute mystery. People smugglers were not deterred by the threat of the Malaysian Solution, they kept their boats busy. More than a 1000 people made the risky crossing while the cockamamie plan was being debated, at least 200 more than would have been sent to join the queue in Malaysia. The Coalition has said it will not play politics at this time but its options were given to Labor months ago – the government has flatly refused to negotiate. The evidence that Labor’s softening of the border protection laws created the environment in which the people smugglers have resumed their business is there. The Labor Party and Rudd and Gillard in particular cannot duck this one. There was no problem when the Rudd government won office in 2007, there was a problem after the laws were changed in 2008, and those problems have not been resolved by this incompetent rabble.