QED

Five star interview


The ABC is notoriously mean spirited towards Coalition politicians. A Counterpoint interview with Philip Ruddock allowed, for once, a sensible discussion of our flawed immigration industry to be heard.


Philip Ruddock (extracts): 

Another one of the flawed arguments that you hear frequently is that people have a right to come to Australia. They have no right to come to Australia. The only way in which you can lawfully come to Australia is if you get a grant of a visa. They do have a right if they get here to be able to put in an asylum claim, but the fact that you have a right, if you are here, to put an asylum claim in doesn’t mean that you have a right to avoid our immigration controls and enter the country.

It’s because you’ve got a whole lot of well-meaning advocates who I think have no appreciation of the circumstances of the most vulnerable, the only refugees that they’ve ever seen are those who turn up after they’ve been able to pay a people smuggler. In other words, they are resourced to pay a people smuggler. This is not a convention designed to protect the most vulnerable, this is a cohort that may be refugees, may not, who are able to afford, either because of their own funds or because of relatives here who want to pay for them to get in the gate, and then there is a group of well-meaning people who say ‘we can help you’. And they are very keen, very enthusiastic, they are quite erudite and they are getting those arguments up, amongst some, in our community.

And certainly within our courts…I think the courts establish very, very heavy workloads on themselves, they complain about the number of immigration cases they’ve got to deal with when you talk to the judges, but they won’t allow those measures that might contain the decision-making to go forward if it leads the courts out of the equation. The executive committee of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees determined years ago that you have to have an appeal and it can be either administrative, merits review body, or judicial, magistrates court, it doesn’t have to be all the appeals, but it doesn’t say it has to be both. And yet we’re mug enough to have both.

I have had a strong personal interest in refugees. I don’t come raising these questions about management because I’ve got some hidden agenda, that I am some closet racist, that I am some right-wing hardliner. I am a traditional liberal with a strong social conscience who believes that we need to focus on helping those people who need our assistance most.

I used to have people having a go at me from time to time and saying, you know, remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, and I would say yes, I do. And in that parable Christ never put the Good Samaritan in a situation where he had to judge competing claims. I suspect if there were 10,000 people lying down at the side of the road claiming they needed assistance, Christ would have said there should be a triage system to try and determine who needs help most. And that’s what I think we lost sight of here in Australia. I want to help those who need help most.

Listen to the Counterpoint interview here…

Leave a Reply