Come On In, Stay The Hell Out

Is Kevin Rudd's flippy stance on asylum seekers a future-focused strategy to make him more popular? Or less?

Kevin Rudd, October 2006 :

"Another great challenge of our age is asylum seekers. The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst.

"We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust, when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of Germany and the other occupied countries of Europe who sought asylum during the '30s."

Kevin Rudd, October 2009 :

"I make absolutely no apology whatsoever for taking a hard-line on illegal immigration to Australia".

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"...this Government makes no apology whatsoever for the fact that we have a tough line on asylum seekers"

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"(The Liberal Party) is a party without one skerrick of moral compass when it comes to people smuggling", he said.

As Chris Ulhmann, on ABC OffAir, makes clear, in a crystal clear deconstruction of Rudd's religious politicism :

The Opposition's compass at least has the virtue of pointing, roughly, in one direction.

The Government has softened Australia's stance towards asylum seekers and it is determined to maintain strong border protection. These are not mutually exclusive propositions and there are defensible, reasons for doing both.

But confronted with a rising tide of boat people it panicked because it was scared its policy changes would be blamed for the influx and the electorate would punish it.

Rudd's moral compass on asylum seekers now appears to be spinning crazily, searching for the strongest attraction.

But when RuddGov's poll numbers fall five or six points in the next few weeks, and the TurnOpp stages its biggest poll boost this year, will Kevin Rudd be upset?

Or happy?

I'm going with happy.

Rudd doesn't want to go into the 2010 federal elections with 70% of Australians favouring him as prime minister. Where's the challenge in that?

He'll be even happier when the heated protests by die-hard RuddLabor voters, appalled at his fliporama on asylum seekers, begin.

If they begin....

Of Course It Was A Conspiracy

The instant reluctance, almost pathological refusal to consider or even mildly entertain the possibilities of Conspiracy is one of the main reasons why so many of the biggest, most deadly, and most damaging, terror attacks remain unsolved.

ICC referee Chris Broad, who was in a van behind the bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team through Lahore, is not afraid to explain why he fears a conspiracy is behind the horrific terror attacks, carried out by a well-trained, extremely well armed and thoroughly rehearsed team who escaped and remain at large today.

As he tried to make sense of what had happened, Broad said there were several questions he was struggling to answer.

"On the first two days (of the Test) both buses left (the hotel) at the same time with escorts. On this particular day the Pakistan bus left five minutes after the Sri Lankan bus. Why?" he said.

"It went through my mind as we were leaving the hotel - 'Where is the Pakistan bus?' But there were times during the Karachi Test when the Sri Lankans went first and Pakistan went afterwards.

"I thought maybe they were having five or 10 minutes more in the hotel and would turn up later, but after this happened you start to think: 'Did someone know something and they held the Pakistan bus back?'"

Broad said although he had no evidence for a conspiracy, the events he had witnessed had left him perplexed.

"At every junction from the hotel through to where we were attacked and all the way to the ground there were police in light blue uniforms with hand-guns controlling traffic," he said.

"How did the terrorists come to the roundabout and how did they start firing and these guys not do anything about it?

"There were plenty of police there and yet these terrorists came in, did what they had to do and then went again. It is beyond me."

It sounds like an ambush.



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Australia Accused Of Helping Fund And Arm Tamil Tiger "Terrorists"

If it wasn't enough that the Howard government helped keep Saddam Hussein supplied with enough cash to buy more human shredding machines and testicle shock kits - by repeatedly turning many blind eyes to the flood of memos pouring across the desks of the prime minister and foreign minister all but screaming out "Pay attention morons! Your wheat contractor is bribing Saddam with hundreds of millions of dollars!" - now the very same government is accused of not only allowing the Tamil Tigers to raise funds in Australia to fight their insurgency in Sri Lanka, but also stand accused of helping them to arm up and put together their own air force as well (as minor as it is).

If this keeps up, Australia is going to become a prime target of the 'War on Terror'.

After all, it was John Howard's good mate President Bush who has often said that if you hide, feed, supply weapons to, or help fund, terrorists, then you are as bad as the terrorists.

Just like when dump trucks full of cash were backing up to Saddam's palace gates in the late '90s, and early 2000s, Australia's foreign minister Alexander Downer knew all about how the Tamil Tiger sympathisers were raising cash and buying equipment that could be adapted to fight their insurgency in Sri Lanka :

...Downer admitted yesterday the Government had been aware for some time that money raised in Australia was being siphoned to the Tigers' cause in Sri Lanka.

Singapore-based terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna says the Tigers have been procuring aircraft, arms, explosives and other technological devices from Australia for more than a decade.

Dr Gunaratna says Australia's involvement extends beyond just fundraising.

"The failure of Australia and other countries to act in a timely way enabled the Tamil Tigers to procure aircrafts and other capabilities that have enabled them to develop a successful terrorist air wing."

"For Australia, it was never a priority to curb the non-Islamist terrorist groups operating in Australia," he said.

Wait a minute....non-Islamic terrorism?

Could there really be such a thing?

If the regular propaganda stream pouring from the mouths of the prime minister and foreign minister, and their media droogs, is to be believed, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't such a thing as non-terrorist Islam, let alone non-Islamic terrorism.

So Australia has been helping to fund and arm Tamil Tiger "terrorists"?

The 'Axis Of Evil' will clearly have to widened to the 'Quadra Of Nasty', so Australia can be included.

If only Australia had major mining or business interests in the disputed Sri Lankan territories that the Tamil Tigers are claiming as their homeland, we would have put these insurgents out of business a decade ago.