Senator Milne said both parties had forgotten that asylum seekers were people.
''We need to change our attitude here, deterrence does not work.''
She said a regional agreement worked out through diplomacy was needed to find safer pathways to Australia for asylum seekers in Indonesia.
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/federal ... z2a747JmUY
Regional solutions offer the best hope for legitimate, sustainable outcomes for refugees and refuge-providers. Tub-thumping populism within individual countries works for nobody, and looking wistfully to one international agreement while disdaining others is ridiculous.
Crusty old sailors are belittled when their training and equipment is diverted by politicians to beat up hapless asylum-seekers as invading armies, as threats to our border security and our social security more broadly. The Royal Australian Navy is already finding it difficult to crew submarines and other ships. This task will become harder as the perception grows that being in today's Navy basically involves confronting hundreds of wretched people and being able to do very little for them. . . .
Operation Sovereign Borders takes one of the greatest prizes in politics - the benefit of the doubt - and denies it to Scott Morrison, to Tony Abbott, and to the Liberal/National/LNP/CLP candidate in your electorate. It gives the benefit of the doubt to Kevin Rudd. His PNG solution agreement thing was as hastily slapped-together as the Howard-Downer Nauru solution shower, and the Gillard-Bowen brainwaves over East Timor and Malaysia. It's appalling in its conception and no doubt ill-considered in its execution. But by comparison with OpSoB . . . it stands as a mighty rock before the riven agencies and flaky planning Abbott has dished up. . . .
We saw what happened when Rudd abandoned "the greatest moral challenge of our time" and when Gillard gave into a fixed-price carbon tax. Rudd's PNG deal cannot and will not be sustained, even though much appears to depend on it. In that deal is his best hope for re-election but also the seeds of his final political demise.
Like Nixon in 1972, Rudd will easily account for an opponent who's the darling of his base but who can't see or reach beyond it, even when it matters and everything's at stake. Like Nixon in and after 1972, Rudd will be busy over the next two years or so meeting with both triumph and disaster, and treating those impostors just the same. Those who follow Rudd and Abbott as leaders of their respective parties will come to distance themselves from them, but for now the contest between these two awful, complicated and inadequate men remains compelling.
However, she said Australia's spending on foreign aid in dollar amounts, and as a percentage of its gross national income, would continue to grow despite the cuts, and the aid budget would reach $5.7 billion in 2013-14, the country's largest aid budget in history.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/ ... z2aqmigoFs
Kevin Rudd may have had more influence in shaping US policies in Asia than any foreigner since Singapore's founder Lee Kuan Yew during the Vietnam War era, a US government official says.
Kurt Campbell, who was the State Department's top official on East Asia during Barack Obama's first term, says the former prime minister left "almost ocean-vessel-size shoes to be filled" in helping the United States think strategically.
"Despite personal foibles and a complex relationship in Australia, I think in many respects Kevin Rudd has been the most important strategic thinker in Asia in the last generation," said Campbell, a key force in Obama's "pivot" of putting a greater US focus on Asia.
"He helped us join the East Asia Summit, he helped us think about the fact that the defining feature of modern international relations is China's arrival on the global scene and every aspect of our diplomacy has to be recreated and re-crafted with that in mind," Campbell said.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politi ... z2euaIUA29
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