Just as the Coalition surges ahead to the lead in this election and Mr. Rudd’s increasing signs of rude ill-health are threatening to burst out from his rapidly expanding jowls, fitness freakoid and PM apparent Tony Abbott, who has been restraining his normally excessive over-the-topness with liberal lashings of straight jacketedness constraint and an uptightedness never before seen in a Catholic boy, has finally chucked the spaz that has always been just an eye twitch away.
In his desire to demonstrate to the Australian people that his boat people pogrom is more pogromatic that Labor’s, Mr Abbott and his team have announced an Indonesian boat buy-back scheme that has Indonesia’s people smuggling industry agog. By introducing a whole new economic incentive into the equation. A new customer for clapped-out coracles. Mr Abbott hopes to divert the people smugger’s attention from the profits to be gained from dropping people off near the Christmas Island foreshore, to the mega millions on offer by supplying the Australian government with a fuck-load of fishing boats.
It’s an imaginative plan. Will it work? Only time will tell. In the meantime – Anybody with a harbour view better get used to the idea that all of that open water will be the ideal place to park this forthcoming flotilla. That it until the great Indonesian fishing vessel fire-sale is required to fund the great paid parental leave scheme dummy spit.
And how many clapped out island traders can be found among a quarter of a million Indonesians? He’s nuts. We couldn’t scratch the surface.
Back when Indonesia was annexing East Timor and West Papua, our defence experts war gamed an Indonesian invasion of our top end. Conclusion: their boat numbers would enable the landing of dispersed forces in huge numbers. We could only interdict a fraction of what they could launch.
If you look into the policy details, the capped budget allocated into this is only a few million dollars. The media went and grabbed it and blew it out of all proportion.
It was never intended to be a wholesale scheme. More along the lines of a small procurement budget available in case our intelligence network in the ground could make use of it.
That makes more sense. How then would it work and be effective? It seems to me that Indonesian fishermen – and I wouldn’t blame them – would go into the refugee transiting business on own their behalf to upgrade their boats. Is this an inspired attempt to replace detention deterrence with economic “incentivation”?
This proposal, along with others, seems to me to be primarily reaction, without understanding the problem of refugees flows in their totality, including reception in Australian society and the push factors of violence and persecution in their home countries. The Rohingas may serve as one case study, among many.
I would presume (as it is with spies) that they buy a boat and find ways to convince some people smugglers to find a crew for it. Then arrest the lot of them just before setting sail. The boat gives them a door into the otherwise closed circle.
Deception, cunning and counter-deception seems to be the way of the world. I guess I don’t like it, mostly because I’m not good at it, but lest people catch me out as a hypocrite I do support the idea that individuals should be allowed to own firearms (for Democratic reasons) and deception is one of the few general purpose weapons open to every individual under even the most repressive regimes, so I guess it is the firearm for people so badly off they can’t have a real firearm (and of course governments will also use deception, but that goes without saying).
The idiot, bastard, lazy, mongrel public deserve him.
Btw, triffic shot of a megalodon jumping over an asylum seeker trawler.
We know it’s photoshopped because the species actually went extinct a couple of million years ago.
Yes the idiot mongrel useless lazy bastards seem intent on giving the ALP the baseball bat treatment .
Darn I thought I might have been up for a Walkley with that image until you picked me up on that anachronism
Megalodon? Nah, that looks more like a reef shark. Lemon Shark, maybe.
BTW, awesome post. More of this please
Grey Nurse.
the money will be gobbled up quickly. Any attempt to buy will set off a bidding war
Yep, that’s it, he’s definitely going to lose now.
Or not :)
As I understand it we currently set fire and scuttle arriving boats which means we have junked some 650 boats to date, mostly off Christmas Island. I don’t know of any attempt to salvage anything which means we are adding to an ocean pollution problem. Is this the best we can do? Of course the latest Abbott boat policy is absurd but it would possibly save further ocean pollution!!