Play Nice Random Chat Thread VI

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B4Bear

Norm Smith Medallist
Jul 6, 2011
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I get what you're saying, but it's not entirely accurate.

One of the key things I worked on personally when I was in the Settlement and Multicultural Affairs portfolio in Canberra was the 'surge' intake of Syrian and Iraqi asylum seekers following the escalation of hostilities there in 2015.

The Commonwealth Government (under Tony Abbott, no less!) announced an additional intake of 12000 Syrian/Iraqi refugees, on top of our existing annual intake of 13,000~.

It worked well because it was funded well. It demonstrated that our intake process are perfectly capable of being fluid instead of rigid.
The Kosovo refugees that were bought here during their war is a good example of national and governmental will in action.

Nothing is impossible for a nation state like Australia, you just have to be willing to pony up the resources to do it.
 
The Kosovo refugees that were bought here during their war is a good example of national and governmental will in action.

Nothing is impossible for a nation state like Australia, you just have to be willing to pony up the resources to do it.

Hawkey letting Chinese students stay after Tiananmen.

Yup.
 
Dec 7, 2011
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Wentz Wagon
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Australia has a long history of migrants and refugees contributing to and improving our country. The only possible reason to have the current policies in place is political point-scoring to certain demographics. We would be a better country if we devoted more resources to getting these people processed and into our country, ready to contribute, as quickly as possible. I suspect the return on investment of what they could contribute would far outweigh the cost of devoting those resources to processing their applications, and that's before you even consider our moral duty to the less-fortunate.
 

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Australia has a long history of migrants and refugees contributing to and improving our country. The only possible reason to have the current policies in place is political point-scoring to certain demographics. We would be a better country if we devoted more resources to getting these people processed and into our country, ready to contribute, as quickly as possible. I suspect the return on investment of what they could contribute would far outweigh the cost of devoting those resources to processing their applications, and that's before you even consider our moral duty to the less-fortunate.

Dare say that Melbourne wouldn't be the city it is today if it wasn't for the influx of Greek migrants during their civil war in the 1940s.
 

koshari

Brownlow Medallist
Mar 24, 2011
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Australia has a long history of migrants and refugees contributing to and improving our country. The only possible reason to have the current policies in place is political point-scoring to certain demographics. We would be a better country if we devoted more resources to getting these people processed and into our country, ready to contribute, as quickly as possible. I suspect the return on investment of what they could contribute would far outweigh the cost of devoting those resources to processing their applications, and that's before you even consider our moral duty to the less-fortunate.
broadly speaking what you say is very true however there also value in the balancing of skilled migration versus humanitarian migration. its when people deviate from this principle for political reasons that the tranparency is lost,

we only have to look back at the au-pairs scenario recently to see visas and immigration rules are not generally applied evenly.
 
Australia has a long history of migrants and refugees contributing to and improving our country. The only possible reason to have the current policies in place is political point-scoring to certain demographics. We would be a better country if we devoted more resources to getting these people processed and into our country, ready to contribute, as quickly as possible. I suspect the return on investment of what they could contribute would far outweigh the cost of devoting those resources to processing their applications, and that's before you even consider our moral duty to the less-fortunate.
It certainly has to do with political demographics in a sense, but I think it is also a problem that plagues many an area the government sticks its nose in. Namely, it is largely unwilling to pay the necessary high costs to fix a very complicated problem and only haphazardly try to fix it on a rare occasion, but then wonder why the half-assed reforms/policies don’t work.
 

travelli

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Mar 4, 2014
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What, and the way to do that is ******* torture children? This is just obfuscating the point, mate, that this government right now put children in indefinite detention. Is that really okay as long as we're 'stopping the boats'? Which don't actually stop by the way. They either go somewhere else or get turned around by Border Security so when they flounder and drown it's not in Australian waters so that scumbag politicians can award themselves trophies and continue to spout nonsense about how we stopped deaths at sea when in fact we didn't do anything of the sort, we just condemned the most vulnerable people in the world to die somewhere else.

And imagine how desperate you need to be to put your family on one of those boats. This idea that continually gets peddled that they have this incredible range of choices is ridiculous. Also, a book I recommend to people about this: read The People Smuggler by Robin de Crespigny.
At peak boat arrival time (around 2010 I think) there was all kinds of reason why people were jumping on boats. The promises peddled by smugglers were out of control. Perpetual detention is ridiculous, particularly now, but at that time, the government was right to do something drastic to reset the expectations of boat arrivals. And it did save lives.
 
I suppose we can just thank all those "patriarchs" who held back the japanese army on the Kokoda trail for not being in a similar position to these folks.

You would have been selling sly grog to Yanks in 1942.
 

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Dec 27, 2017
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Regarding Afghanistan we have a moral culpability there. Acknowledging the terrible history of the last 40 years. But a person doesn't flee in 2016 because of the Soviet invasion in 1979.

I think we broadly agree that the whole thing is just terrible, and that there are no easy solutions.

I kind of agree but you can’t ignore the role the soviets played in the situation that they have today. s**t, that’s not even a lifetime ago. Do you absolve other countries for things they did 40+ years ago?
 
I kind of agree but you can’t ignore the role the soviets played in the situation that they have today. sh*t, that’s not even a lifetime ago. Do you absolve other countries for things they did 40+ years ago?

Interesting thing about the Soviets is the government they left in 1989 was actually relatively stable, it did fairly well as long as the Soviets could provide cash and air suppport.

It was only after the Soviet union collapsed that it really went to s**t and the Muj factions got the upper hand.
 
Am aware, just don't believe they are the primary audience. They're not voters, they don't donate. We can see with Morrison's approach to climate change in recent days that it matters little what the world thinks, the pace of change is slow until these pressures force change.
When word gets out that coming here will mean being locked in a shitful place till you're shipped back to where you came from or somewhere worse and that Australians are a pack of campaigners who hate asylum seekers and will gladly make them suffer they'll stop coming.

Its called "Stopping the boats."
 
And. People don’t jump on dodgy boats anymore and aren’t dying by the hundreds anymore. We are still taking in thousands of refugees every year (should be a lot more).

Look, I’m not defending detention as it is crude and is effectively cold and inhumane, but I’m also glad people aren’t jumping on dodgy boats and dying by the hundreds.
The reason they are jumping on dodgy boats is that we burned all the good ones.
 
I kind of agree but you can’t ignore the role the soviets played in the situation that they have today. sh*t, that’s not even a lifetime ago. Do you absolve other countries for things they did 40+ years ago?
The soviets were invited by the Afghan government because US sponsored islamic militias were causing the Afghan government serious problems.
 
Dec 27, 2017
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Interesting thing about the Soviets is the government they left in 1989 was actually relatively stable, it did fairly well as long as the Soviets could provide cash and air suppport.

It was only after the Soviet union collapsed that it really went to sh*t and the Muj factions got the upper hand.

Like I wrote above, the more I learn the less I know. My only reference pre extreme tension is a story my great aunt told me about traveling through Afghanistan way back in the day (before she became a nun funny enough) about how much fun Afghanistan was. Spose there could also be ties the Saudi’s and Wahhabism extremists and the deal made by the Saudi royal family after the siege of Mecca.

Complicated as *
 
The soviets were invited by the Afghan government because US sponsored islamic militias were causing the Afghan government serious problems.
Pretty much.

The 'Afghan government' was the result of a Soviet-backed coup in 1978 (supported by mostly an urban elite), the new government introduced a bunch of really unpopular collectivist style rural policies leading to the repression/deaths of thousands of mostly rural opponents, protests start and then rebellion (Mujahadeen start flooding in backed by the CIA first). Soviet advisors and equipment slowly came in on the basis of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but they only really intervened after Taraki was killed by Amin (second-in-charge and feared to be pro-US by Moscow), so they killed Amin and put their puppet Karmal in charge after they came in late 1979. The US involvement cannot be understated here either. They were very quick in on the opposition.
 
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Interesting thing about the Soviets is the government they left in 1989 was actually relatively stable, it did fairly well as long as the Soviets could provide cash and air suppport.

It was only after the Soviet union collapsed that it really went to sh*t and the Muj factions got the upper hand.
Yep, the Soviets did a really good job with building the Afghan army, which scored a heap of victories long after the Soviets had pulled out. Strong core support in the urban centres went a long way.
 
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