Going soft on asylum?
The details still are sketchy about what caused the explosion on board a boat carrying refugees seeking asylum in Australia that had been intercepted by a naval patrol boat 600km from Broome, but it has brought into sharp focus the ongoing debate about border security - that Australian perennial.
This is the sixth boat carrying asylum seekers to arrive in Australian waters this year, and the 13th since the Rudd government ended the Howard government's controversial Pacific Solution, and softened its policies towards refugees. In the past two weeks, some 200 people have been detained.
So is the opposition right to claim that the Rudd government has gone soft on asylum seekers, and that Australia has let down its guard? Or is the recent surge part of a global phenomenon, as Australia's Foreign Minister Stephen Smith suggested this week when he addressed a people-smuggling conference in Bali. Smith claimed that the increased number of boat people was the result of the ongoing conflicts in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan and the global economic downturn.
Certainly, the latest figures from the UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency, reveal an increase in global refugee numbers: asylum applications to industrialised nations went up by 12% last year. With the number of asylum seekers increasing last year by 19%, Australia was above that global average, but saw nowhere near the influx of countries like Japan (95%), Italy (122%) or Finland (181%). You can
Still, government officials have conceded in private that the end of the Pacific Solution, which was brought in after in the run-up to the 2001 election, is being used as a marketing tool by Indonesian people-smugglers.
No wonder the Australian government is so keen for Indonesia to push through new laws enabling the criminal prosecution of people smugglers. Jakarta has signalled its willingness to do so, but the legislation has yet to be enacted.
Border security has long been a highly-contentious issue, and Mike Steketee of The Australian argues that the public and political response is often hyper-ventilated and disproportionate.
"The debate on refugees in Australia is stuck in a time warp," he claims. "Why are Liberals still talking up the threat of a few boatloads of people wanting to settle in Australia? Presumably because that is how they were conditioned by John Howard and Philip Ruddock [the former immigration minister] in the wake of September 11. Perhaps there is a more venal purpose as well, such as whipping up xenophobia."
But here's a very different take from Andrew Bolt, a columnist at the Melbourne Sun-Herald.
"John Howard's 'inhuman' policies stopped not just the people smugglers but the deaths at sea. If some of these boats lured here by Kevin Rudd now sink, how truly 'kinder' is he?"
In an update on his blog, he asks: Comments please...
On a very different tack, I offer up my economic indicator of the week: that great barometer of the global economic climate - the queue of coal ships waiting outside Newcastle on the New South Wales coast.
I saw it for myself earlier this week, when I visited the world's largest coal export facility, and there were fewer than 10 ships lining up. At the height of the mining boom, there were as many as 70 huge vessels. At night, locals say the lights on the ships made it look like Newcastle had an extra suburb.
Talking of lights and suburbs, Sydney has gone four days without a blackout.
UPDATE: After being accused by the opposition of going soft on asylum seekers, Kevin Rudd has weighed into the border security with some unusually strong rhetoric.
"People smugglers are engaged in the world's most evil trade, and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth," he has said.
"People smugglers are the vilest form of human life. They trade on the tragedy of others and that's why they should rot in jail and in my own view, rot in hell. We see this lowest form of human life at work in what we saw on the high seas yesterday. That's why this government maintains its hardline, tough, targeted approach to maintaining border protection for Australia."
The authentic voice of a prime minister expressing genuine outrage? Or a stab at raw populism as he tries to harden up his border security credentials?..
I'm 
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