Left’s refugee wails are a boatload of lies

MORAL exhibitionists, who went unseen and unheard when hundreds upon hundreds of so-called asylum seekers — men, women and children — were drowning, were gifted the ABC’s airwaves and the gamut of the Fairfax media to parade their virtue after the High Court ruled the government could lawfully ­return those who sought to ­arrive illegally by boat to Manus Island and Nauru.

Around the nation, a host of moist-palmed clerics dusted off a medieval practice to declare their churches “sanctuaries” in which they would shelter some 220-odd people-smuggler clients and 37 children from the authorities. Many are the same clerics who are also fervently in favour of homosexual marriage and opposed to the traditional view that marriage is the blessed union of two people of opposite sex who would hope to bear natural children. Even as church groups made their ludicrous claims about the sanctity of church space, not one volunteered to pay the $1 million cost of the High Court challenge they had supported. Our self-anointed moral guardians will let taxpayers bear that cost while they stand on their soap boxes. Adopting faddish political stances which highlight their absurd hypocrisy will ultimately drive more traditional worshippers from churches that claim to stand for everything but on inspection stand for nothing. Fortunately, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is as determined not to be swayed by the pious bleating of much of the media and the usual suspects as was his predecessor Scott Morrison, and is forthright in his resolve to uphold the law and do everything in his power not to provide people smugglers with any hope that the government is softening its approach. In what amounted to hostile advocacy by Michael Brissenden, the presenter of the ABC’s AM program put to Dutton that there “are the claims, as you know, of sexual assaults every 13 days” — even though the claims were false and the minister had previously dismissed them on the ABC. Not good enough for Brissenden, however, who showed his disbelief, saying: “OK. But can you understand that the public might be a bit sceptical about this because there’s very little information really about what’s going on there.” Frankly, the public is more likely to be sceptical about branches of the media which push their own social engineering agenda, and is more likely to be dubious about the motives of individuals who ­attempt to enter the country ­illegally and who destroy their identification documents in order to make it more difficult for the authorities to establish who they are, than they are of a government which actually managed to achieve what the majority of the commentariat and the ALP and Greens had said was unachievable — stopping the boats. What is doubly embarrassing for the ABC, the workplace of choice for rafts of former Labor staffers, and other advocates for the people-smuggler clients, such as Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs, is that the detention of illegal arrivals was introduced by a Labor government. That fact doesn’t fit the left-wing narrative of Labor being the party of sympathy, empathy and uber-compassion. They also cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the Howard government was the first to actually stem the tide of boat arrivals and reduce the numbers of detainees held in Labor’s detention centres. Further, they would choke rather than admit that Kevin Rudd, one of Labor’s many false messiahs, campaigned in 2007 on a platform of stopping the boats — only to break that promise, along with almost every other of importance — upon his election. The interim prime minister Julia Gillard was just as ineffectual. It was on their combined watch that the numbers in detention skyrocketed, another important fact the luvvies never mention. As Dutton said as he was being interrogated on AM, there were 8000 children in detention when Labor was in power. The number peaked at about 2000 during one period. Today, there may be just 75 on Manus and Nauru. Less than 1 per cent of the number that Labor locked away. Strangely, the church groups and other advocates seem as unable to acknowledge this extraordinary reduction as they are reluctant to repay the taxpayers who have funded their legal follies. Former prime minister Tony Abbott was mocked when he said he would stop the boats but it is obvious that stopping the boats stopped the deaths at sea. Had his government not acted with the determination it did, the scenes of dead men, women and children washed up on beaches in the Mediterranean would be replicated in the waters to our north. As Dutton said: “There were 1200 people who drown­ed at sea, includ­ing women and children, the voices of whom have never been heard. “When I talk about getting children out of detention in Australia and trying to provide medical support in a first-world country like ours, people smugglers in Indonesia are messaging that if you have children, get on a boat now because you will settle in Australia and Dutton will release you out into the community. “So, we have to be compassionate on the one hand but we have to be realistic about the threat from people smugglers and we’re going to continue our vigilance against people smugglers while providing compassion to those that have been traded in this evil people-smuggling organised criminal syndicate.” At least the preachy members of the community would again fall silent.