One thing the federal government has been very good at is following through on their promise to stop the boatloads of illegal immigrants and customers of people smugglers. Today the good news came to light that there has not been a single illegal boat arrival in Australia for five weeks, which is the first time we have had such a five-week period in five years.
In other words, from late 2009 until this past five weeks, we have had at least one illegal boat arrival in each five week period, and more often than not it was multiple boat arrivals every week and sometimes every day. Those arrivals were due to Kevin Rudd scrapping John Howard’s Pacific Solution and the utter incompetence of his government and Julia Gillard’s government in failing to address the problem when the human costs of their policy became apparent.
Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and the Australian military should be proud of their work in reducing the human suffering caused by the awful people smuggling trade. The vast majority of people who used the boats of the people smugglers were not refugees as they did not stop at the nearest safe port of call and instead paid to continue on to another location, and in many cases they weren’t even refugees to begin with and instead were paying to knowingly illegally enter Australia. The reduction in the false asylum claims which have to be processed will mean that the federal government is able to resettle genuine refugees who are currently living in refugee camps, and will be able to save an awful lot of money as well.
There is more work to do, but for now it is very safe to say to everyone involved in Operation Sovereign Borders “well done, and keep up the good work”.
Samuel