Slow down Clive – you’re sounding weird

MR Palmer says the federal government’s position on not issuing visas to asylum seekers fleeing Indonesia fuelled the people smuggling trade.

The mining tycoon said the government should allow asylum seekers to pay their own plane fare into Australia.

 The government already does this.  After the UN have processed asylum seekers those that are accepted into Australia are issued visas and can fly in.  I know, Clive is talking about the boat people but he shows his confusion here – the boat people, on the whole,  are not asylum seekers.  They are simply people who have decided to migrate to Australia because of our standards of living, not to mention our social security payments, and they have done so without having the manners to ask us if we want them. He waffles on:

“We can say ‘you can buy a ticket if you believe you’re a refugee and you can come to Australia in normal transport at one tenth the cost’,” he told journalists at the Federal Liberal party conference in Melbourne on Saturday.

“The ones that get here, allow them to be processed; the ones that are not legitimate, send them back on the next flight.”

That’s insane!  There would be a rush for airline tickets as hundreds of thousands of potential immigrants booked passage to Australia.  If they can just fly in from Indonesia, why couldn’t they fly in from anywhere.  The message would flash around the world that for the price of an airticket you can get into Australia and when you get there, the country would be so swamped with potential immigrants saying “I feel threatened in my home country of “pick any country and invent horror stories” that the government would lose control. Why is it that people take this man seriously?