go back to where you came from

Although planned invited economic immigrants are far more numerous in Australia, the fuss about accepting or rejecting asylum seekers is so ridiculous when nothing is said about how the wars we support generate nearly all the refugees NATO shudders at the idea of.

I hadn’t been watching SBS latest 3 day Go Back To Where You Came From series, being put off by the obnoxious nationalism of people in the trailers. But I thought to just look at the final part on July 31, 2015. In fact I recorded it and watched a little the next day. I only saw the first 8 minutes, but that was enough to get the gist.

I don’t know who is responsible for SBS bias – unlike the ABC it pretends to be have no editorial control, so maybe this is just the default position.

So where were they going in the Middle East to see the place refugees came from? A refugee camp on the Turkish border, which looked to be in the zone that Turkey has infested with IS terrorists! And who was the refugee sample?

There was a flash back to their meeting in Melbourne with this refugee, who was a Palestinian! She wasn’t a Palestinian fleeing Israel’s ethnic cleansing though. As she related, "I went to buy groceries and there was a helicopter bombing our house."

So she fled to another place, where she was then hit by ISIS, and came to Australia.

But the party didn’t go to Yarmouk and Damascus – they went to the north west to meet the Kurds, who are battling against ‘the worst terrorist organisation in the world’.

This was yet another puff piece for the freedom and music loving Kurds, made before it looked like the Kurds may soon be joining the Syrian army to fight against Turkey and its proxies. And one of our good Aussies said that ‘I’d love to see 14,000 Kurds coming to take refuge in Australia’!

The voice-over, not by the guy who did the last series but by one who sounded like propaganda central, talked about the dangers from the ‘brutal Assad regime’ and from ISIS terrorists, and how this was the worst humanitarian crisis since WW2.

Syrians don't want to come here as refugees; they want Australia to stop supporting the war against their government

All this got me to thinking about the rift between refugee support and the Syrian crisis, and how it is that the people who are really suffering in Syria have no desire to come to Australia as refugees – all they want is for us to stop attacking their homes so they can live there in peace.

So it seems to me that if we actually want to help refugees – at least the ones from our battlefields, we should be putting the pressure on leaders to start working with the Syrian government and to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Israel and the US to go back to where they came from...!

But of course before ‘we’ do that ‘we’ are going to have to understand who are the bad guys in this conflict. (I’ve noticed incidentally that if ABC reporters find a ‘refugee’ in Europe or elsewhere, most of the time they will be ‘Syrian’. On the day I watched my recording of GBTWYCF, I noticed that when Cameron in Britain had said the ‘swarm’ of migrants should go back to West Africa, the ABC interviewed a random migrant in Calais who was.... Syrian!

Of course there is yet another devious agenda here – that Cameron wouldn’t be saying the migrants were mostly from Syria even if they were, because then it would be impossible to turn them away!

There’s a third problem – that migrants across Europe now all say they are from Syria, even when you can see they are Roma, or North African, or just homeless. It’s the best way to get sympathy and money. It was the same last year when we were in Greece, Lebanon, and France.

During the high immigration Howard era- the fuss about the boats was a smokescreen for the fact that we were getting a lot of extra government induced totally legal non- refugee immigration which was putting pressure on absolutely everything- environment, roads, housing etc. . Howard was a high population PM whist pretending to be jealously protecting Australia’s borders. This hypocrisy and the same game still goes on with Julia Gillard although without “children overboard”.

In their second series of Go back to where you came from SBS Television convey the message that a large section of Australian society are really worried about asylum seekers, notably 'boat people' flooding Australia. It seems that those same Australians do not have a clue as to the real flood, which consists of hundreds of thousands of economic migrants and their families. It appears (from what Mr Reith said on Insight on Friday 31 August 2012) that governments believe that Australians are pacified simply by the being told by governments that immigrants are 'legal' and that the immigration stream is properly managed.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Truth about immigration in Australia

During the high immigration Howard era, the fuss about the boats was a smokescreen for the fact that we were getting a lot of extra government induced totally legal non-refugee immigration which was putting pressure on absolutely everything: environment, roads, housing etc. . Howard was a high population PM whist pretending to be jealously protecting Australia’s borders. This hypocrisy and the same game still goes on with Julia Gillard although without “children overboard”.

Asylum Seekers - Onshore or Offshore Processing; that is the question

The asylum seekers have the right to seek asylum. They are not “illegals” as Tony Abbott calls them. Whether their claims should be processed on or offshore is the main question. The numbers of people who arrive by boat are very low compared with the numbers of people who come in as immigrants under our skilled migrations scheme. The numbers the government plan to admit as permanent entries in the non-refugee "planned" migration stream this coming year is 190,000 up from 185,000 in the year 2011-12.

Think of all the additional houses, roads, cars, schools, teachers, doctors, hospitals needed for this extra population!

Australia brings in about 14,000 people under its humanitarian program and any successful applicants amongst the boat arrivals are included in this quota. I think the government has just recently increased this to 20,000.

Numbers in Australia

The ultimate carrying capacity for Australia is, I believe (from my reading of books and Internet) quite low. The Aborigines numbered less than one million when Europeans arrived. Australia now carries more than 20 times that number of people largely because fossil fuels enable our very infertile and intermittently watered soils to produce far more than they would without this assistance.

Australia is already overpopulated: immigration is now costing more than money

Australia is already overpopulated. This is clear from all the environmental indicators. See for instance, the 2008 State of the Environment Report for Victoria. All indicators are declining because of population pressures. These include waterways coastal areas, biodiversity...

Australia really needs to stabilise its population as soon as possible and then allow it to reduce. With no immigration at all Australia’s population would increase by about 150,000 p.a. for the next few decades due to the number of women of childbearing age in our population. Until there are fewer women in their child bearing years, as the population ages, without high immigration, the growth rate would remain around half what it is now, which would still be quite high.

See the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures for 2011 at http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/3101.0/

In other words- I do not get too worried about asylum seekers as a component of Australia's population growth when governments are significantly undermining our lives, our future and unraveling our environment through huge numbers of invited and economic immigrants, whether asylum seekers come or not.

I find it strange and somewhat alarming that apparently so many viewers of SBS do not have a clue about the problem of the growing numbers in the planned immigration stream. Why didn't SBS even mention this in their four nights of program on the subject of fear of asylum seeker floods?