Live people exports

The Australian, 13 October 2010

Perhaps it’s just me, but navispopulusphobia is so last paradigm. Nevertheless, the ALP is pushing ahead with Julia’s well thought out plan to process Australia’s asylum seekers in East Timor, which is legendary for its boundless plains to share and administrative expertise, not to mention being a very long way from the electorates of Western Sydney.

The plan is that if exporting people to East Timor goes as well as expected (it’s only people smuggling if there’s some sort of virtual queue involved, it’s a bit complicated) we’re going to franchise the concept out to all sorts of Pacific nations that are also better at assessing asylum seeker claims than us, which is pretty much everybody except Nauru who have had their claim for Asylum Seeker Processing Status rejected on the grounds that we’ve paid a lot of money to build a detention centre there already.

Look, I told you it’s all very complicated, which is why it’s probably the humane thing to send asylum seekers overseas at enormous expense to have their claims heard properly rather than subject the poor bastards to our clearly hopeless bureaucracy at home. I’m sure they’ll thank us for it in the long run.