SBS

This article comments on the Australian war propaganda that was used in a recent episode, involving Jaqui Lambi, of "Go back to where you came from" on SBS. It responds to a recent article (republished here) by Vanessa Beeley about very recent massacres conducted by IS, close to a US Army base, which has allowed IS convoys to pass through open desert, unhindered. On 2 October 2018, Mrs Thoraya Um Ammaar was executed on video by IS over two months after she and about 25 other women and children were kidnapped from the Sweida countryside, south of Damascus on July 25th 2018. US Coalition forces remain camped in Al Tanf, 330km to the East. It is simply intolerable that IS can occupy that part of Syrian territory while aggressively threatening anyone who comes near it.
Report by Vanessa Beeley

What makes me particularly angry about this, and the killing of the hostage on October 2nd, is that this week in Australia there has been a huge fuss about a live TV program called “Go Back to Where you Came From” – where numbers of celebrities have gone to “some of the most dangerous places in the world” to see what it feels like for refugees (those ones who try to escape to Australia) https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/jacqui-lambie-and-sbs-crew-caught-in-isis-attack-in-syria-20181002-p5079s.html

So where in Syria do you think that two women, one a former anti-Muslim immigration independent Senator, – would be taken? Raqqa. And in an event which I begin to think was staged, two days before the program started, an “IS sleeper cell” started shooting in the area near to where the TV crew was, so they had to be evacuated to Kobane - in Syria!(just under the Turkish border).

This sleeper cell purportedly raised the IS flag from a building not far from the centre of Raqqa, in mid afternoon. How likely is that, or even possible? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/raqqas_dirty_secret

At no point in the introduction – where we saw the identities being rushed under cover, was the fact that US soldiers were assisting them even thought worthy of mention!

And of course Lambie and Marina would have no idea that they are just as much victims in this god-awful propaganda war as the rest of us. It may make you a bit sick to read that Lambie ( who has a better side as down to earth, and once in the army) found it thrilling to be “on the front line” and “to feel how our troops must have felt”. Never mind that Australia doesn’t admit to having any troops in Syria, only Afghanistan.

I’ve long thought that Jackie Lambie would be moved to know that upwards of 85,000 regular Syrian soldiers have been killed by the terrorist invaders, defending their countrymen.

This program began as a series about five years ago, as apparently a genuine attempt to make prejudiced Australians aware of just what refugees were going through. But now it seems that this message is not so important, while it is used to put the case for the US coalition staying in Syria because otherwise “IS could come back”. The threat of Islamist terrorism is constantly beaten up here in OZ, to suit the agenda of the powers that be; the threat that they present, along with their US and UK allies, is infinitely greater.

And of course this week we’ve also had the Nobel Peace Prize to the Yazidi woman – with some blurb about “fighting the use of rape as a weapon of war”. What about the use of the threat of rape as a weapon of war, for which the US would instantly qualify?

The hypocrisy is enough to make you go mad I think.

I will look at the pink hollyhocks that grow in front of our house with Syrians in mind now...

The absurdity of Australian news reporting on Syria would be funny if it were not for the disastrous consequences of such reporting for the people of Syria. I happened to see the end of a report from Matt Brown on 7.30 Report on the subject of chemical weapons in Syria. If it depresses me, think how the Syrians feel about our mindless repetition of war-crimes propaganda against Syria's army when that army is the only thing protecting most Syrians from foreign-backed terrorists.

"Diplomatic battle over Syria's chemical weapons program", Matt Brown, 7.30 Report, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 21 October 2016.

There was hardly a second in Brown’s dramatic production that was true or real. Even the supposed results of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation into Ghouta were misrepresented.

I’ve been shocked recently by the failure of the ABC, on radio at least, to even mention Syria other than briefly in news bulletins. I only watch SBS world news, which is of course just as bad. Instead of Sophie McNeill and Matt Brown, and Anne Barker, SBS has Nastasya Tay, whose propaganda wrap-ups are just stunning.

On October 23, for instance, reporting about the humanitarian pause in Aleppo, she showed the buses waiting to take residents from East Aleppo, but said, with what seemed like a sort of pleasure, that no-one took them, and that the Syrian army had fired on people trying to leave! Yet what happened was that the ‘rebels’ refused to give in, and fired on the relief route, forcing the buses to drive off at speed. Meanwhile they showed photos of people in the streets dancing and holding up Free Syrian Army (FSA) flags, and shopping at stalls of vegetables.

At the same time, over in Mosul, in Iraq, the boot is on the other foot, while the US claims to do just the same thing the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is doing in Aleppo, with a slight difference. To be clear, in Iraq the US claims to be fighting terrorists in order to defend the Iraqi government, but in Syria it is defending terrorists (which it calls 'moderate rebels') in order to fight the Syrian government. Meanwhile, it isn't stopping ISIL from fleeing Mosul into Syria.

It’s the silence on what is really happening that drives me crazy! Did you hear any interviews with politicians about whether Australia supports more sanctions against Russia, or supports the Turkish army killing Kurds, or supports the Iranians fighting to liberate Mosul for Iraq – or anything!

Even when it was happening it wasn’t happening...

Once upon a time I would have tried to have put the ABC right, but to be honest, I think it has gone past the point of thoughtful analysis, with Brown’s propaganda, and that of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the ‘doctors’ in Istanbul (!)

The fact is that the stories about ‘barrel bombs’ with chlorine are total fabrications, not because the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) didn’t use them, but because they would have absolutely no reason to use such a stupid weapon as ‘Chlorine’. After all, there is almost no evidence that Sarin was actually present and used in Ghouta, and I know of no evidence at all of Chlorine use other than some silly photos showing a cloud of Nitrogen oxides from a fertiliser bomb.

Note that in all such footage there are White Helmets present – so we may assume that these films are not true. President Bashar al Assad noted that the White Helmets are ‘Al Qaeda with a facelift’ in his interview on Swiss TV on the 19th of October, 2016..

Today, (22 October 2016) as the UNHRC report is released that claims proof Syria used Chlorine in March last year, the abandonment of any impartiality in this conflict by the UN is now complete.

Not only was the supposed use of Chlorine in an attack on Sarmin south of Idlib never established as fact with any real evidence, but its timing was completely suspect. It occurred just before or just after the launching by Saudi Arabia and Turkey of a force of thousands of militant jihadists, under the banner of the Army of Conquest – Jaish al Fatah – who swept south towards Lattakia and Hama and killed thousands of soldiers and civilians before they were finally fought all the way back by the Syrian Arab Army and Russian forces six months later.

So while our media carried on about this stupid story, in which supposedly a ‘grandmother’ and three children died, they completely ignored the rampages of the army of terrorists, for instance in their truck bomb assault on Jisr al Shughour hospital. This is just a pre-echo of what is happening now with Aleppo – that while the UN and Western leaders talk about the ‘slaughterhouse of Aleppo’ in the most extreme terms, the terrorists are on the rampage south of Idlib with their US supplied weapons, fighting the Syrian army and its allies.
If Matt Brown wants to see what ‘our allies’ are doing in Syria, like he does in Mosul, why doesn’t he get embedded with ‘Jabat Fatah al Sham’ – al Qaeda, south of Idlib?

And if Sophie McNeill is interested in the problems for children’s schooling in refugee camps in Erbil (reported on last night’s Lateline), why doesn’t she go to visit some suburbs of Lattakia or Damascus and see how all the refugees from the terrorists are managing there?

Not that the Syrian government would ever give her a visa...

I don’t know what to do about the ABC. When I hear their reports I get furious and think of phoning, but then I remember the last time and the time before, and how they have only got worse...

On 10 January 2016 SBS (Australian multicultural television) screened Martin Smith's Inside Assad’s Syria. Australia is blatantly aligned with US-NATO forces that seek to remove the Syrian Government and Australian media propaganda means that we don't usually hear from the other side. Surprisingly Smith interviewed many supporters of the Assad Government and the Syrian Arab Army. But it was as if, to get this other view onto SBS the [almost theatrically grim-faced, suspicious and disapproving] journalist had to use some standard anti-Assad techniques:

Standard anti-Syrian government techniques

These were:

Continuous use of the word 'regime' instead of government, although Bashar al Assad was legally reelected in June 2014 by an overwhelming majority, despite opposition alternatives. See /taxonomy/term/6173

Early mention of the 'notorious barrel bombs' (showed footage of bombs dropping from aircraft). No views or analysis countering these dubious claims were given. The President's own exhaustive responses to these explanations were not referred to. The video below is of an interview by Sixty Minutes with Bashar al Assad on accusations about the use of barrel bombs and of chlorine as a poisonous gas (although I don't think Martin Smith's doco mentioned chlorine.)

Although Smith interviewed people who had lost relatives to the 'rebels', the use of bloody footage seemed confined to illustrating the effects of bombing designated as carried out by the Government. There was no equivalent criticism of the 'rebels' techniques and casualties. Smith's allocated Syrian journalist, however, was killed by rebels a couple of days into the doco, which also meant that the journo was unable to complete his original itinerary. There was no sensible reflection on the killing of his journo by so-called 'rebels', although Smith did describe himself as shaken by the death.

The handling of an invitation by the government to a cultural event in Syria, a performance by the Syrian Symphony Orchestra, seemed insensitive and manipulative. Rather than appreciating that the people of Damascus are heroically maintaining cultural and state institutions, there seemed to be an implication that something else might be going on.

Visit to the famous coastal resort of Latakia, in Syria

Smith's film characterised this resort more or less as a rich Alawite stronghold. This is in line with the mainstream propaganda that Alawites in Syria are oppressing a Sunni majority. As Assad says himself, if this were true, then surely the armed forces would have got rid of him long ago, since they are 60 - 65% Sunni, and Sunnis form the majority of the population. Many Syrians will tell you, however, that they are not Sunnis or Alawites or Christians; they are Syrians. In this they are emphasising the non-sectarian nature of Syria. Smith did disclose that more than a million refugees are now living in Latakia resort.

This effect of presenting the resort as the exclusive preserve of Alawite hippocrites works to create cognitive dissonance against the information about the refugees that contradicts that first impression. A friend who is well informed on Syria told me that an acquaintance of hers seemed to derive from the Latakia part of this documentary that the Syrian wealthy, despite the war, were living high on the hog whilst the poor suffered, and entirely overlooked the part of the report that noted the presence of the refugees who now live in this 'exclusive' Alawite resort.

Sophie Shepnardze interview: Assad asks how, if most of Syria is against him, they have not got rid of him.

Despite Smith's biasing presentation, nonetheless, we did hear almost exclusively the pro-government side. We also heard the story of someone who defected from the Syrian Arab Army to the rebels then back again, although somehow the punchline escaped me. The journo's comment seemed gratuitous, that he suspected that the government had wanted him to hear about this.

Does SBS accept non-propaganda items?

Conclusion. Is it actually possible to get the other side onto SBS (or the ABC)? If you wanted to, would you have to present it within those trophes of barrel bombs and 'regime' and wear an exaggeratedly sceptical expression when interviewing pro syrian government people? In other words, should we give this journo, Martin Smith, credit for getting the other side onto SBS? Or might we assume, unfortunately, that many people would respond to Smith's propaganda techniques and his stagey suspicion by assuming that the many Syrians who openly prefer Assad leading Syria to the prospect of the country being divided up among a bunch of religious gangs, are poor brainwashed idiots in need of western intervention.This was a PBS funded documentary and they are leaders in western propaganda.

Zahran Alloush, the leader and founder of Jaish al Islam Alloush, an extremist Salafi group supported by Saudi Arabia, was killed by an airstrike whilst attending a meeting with other armed Syrian groups on Friday. The group's ideology is similar to that of ISIS, and they have planned to overthrow the secular Syrian government and replace it with an Islamic dictatorship. Bizarrely, SBS, an Australian television station has reported on Alloush as if he were a leader of one of the key opposition groups who ‘would negotiate with the Syrian government’ next month.

Following the UN negotiated settlement in Yarmouk yesterday, there was a report on Australia’s SBS World News which presented the whole situation from the opposition’s point of view.

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.

This article includes links to evidence which proves that claims made by Tony Abott, Petro Poroshenko and SBS that East Ukrainian rebels killed the 298 crew and passengers aboard MH17, including 38 Australians, were untrue.

On the SBS news service of 11 December 2014 it was reported uncritically that visiting Ukrainian President President Petro Poroshenko and his host Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott had urged Russia to withdraw the troops they claim had invaded Ukraine. SBS also urged that those guilty of murdering 38 Australians amongst the 298 who were aboard flight MH17 be brought to justice. They said that pro-Russian rebels had fired the alleged surface-to-air missile that had allegedly shot down Flight MH17. ABC Australia has recently apologised for similar prejudiced reporting, admitting it had no evidence, see: ABC Australia apologises for bias against Russia in reporting MH17 crash. Neither Poroshenko, Abbott, or the SBS 'reporter' however, acknowledge that no evidence has been produced to confirm this claim. Furthermore, there is much forensic and eyewitness testimony that strongly indicates that flight MH17 was shot down by a pair of Ukraine Air Force Sukhoi 25 fighters.

Claims that Russian soldiers have invaded Ukraine have been parroted by the Western newsmedia, including SBS news, for months, but evidence of this has never been produced.

The implicit assumption is that the East Ukrainians self-defence forces could not have defeated the Ukrainian army without help from armed forces from elsewhere.

The alternative explanation which is consistent with the evidence is that the Ukraine army has been defeated because
(1) the self-defence forces have a more intimate knowledge of the land which they are defending and (2) they enjoy the support of the local people. This has never been considered on SBS news.

Biased SBS reports about this development in the Ukraine conflict include:

• PM talks uranium sales to Ukraine (11 Dec 14)
• Aust looks to sell uranium to Ukraine (11 Dec 14)
• MH17 on agenda for Ukraine president visit (10 Dec 14)
• Ukraine's Poroshenko to visit Australia (3 Dec 14)

In the aforementioned "ABC Australia apologises for bias against Russia in reporting MH17 crash", the ABC 7.30 report wrote this in response to a complaint:

"7.30 has acknowledged your concern and agrees it was inaccurate for the program to state as fact that flight MH17 was shot down by “Pro-Russian militia” and “Russian backed rebels”. The program understands the cause of that incident remains unresolved and is the subject of ongoing investigation."

Appendix: Factually wrong 'reporting' from the above stories.

From MH17 on agenda for Ukraine president visit

The passenger jet was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July by pro-Russian rebels who are waging a war against government forces.

...

Mr Abbott has pointed the finger at Russia, accusing it of providing the missile and military support to the rebels, threatening Ukraine's territorial integrity.

Update, 23 June 2013 : Israeli Intelligence News: Syria Rebels Possess Chemical Weapons, US-NATO Delivering Heavy Weapons to the Terrorists on Global Research by Prof Michel Chossudovsky. (This article originally published 8 May 2013.)

See also: The Forbidden Truth: The U.S. is Channeling Chemical Weapons to Al Qaeda in Syria, Obama is a Liar and a Terrorist of 14 June 2013 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky on Global Research.

The mainstream media, including the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) no longer disputes that the pretexts used to justify the United States' wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 were lies. Yet, in spite of the appalling consequences, including as many as 3.3 million Iraqi deaths according to one recent estimate, the SBS has shown itself willing to echo a new series of lies, which have been contrived by the same people responsible for the Iraq War. This time the target is Syria.

The new set of lies are to justify their ongoing proxy terrorist war against Syria and, if they see it necessary, escalation to an all-out conventional invasion. That war has so far claimed 70,000 Syrian lives. In spite of this terrible human cost, the Syrian Governemnt and the Syrian Arab Army have still shown themselves to be capable of defending their country and of infliciting crushing defeats upon the terrorist killers.

Chemical warfare claims blamed on wrong side

The latest of many examples of lies used by the SBS against Syria are their reporting of claims by the United States that the Syrian Government has used chemical warfare against its own people. For many weeks now, the truth of from where the real threat of chemical attack has been understood by people prepared to look at the evidence. This includes alternative news services such as Global Research, Tony Caretalucci's landdestroyer.blogspot.com and the Corbett Report. That threat was not from the Syrian Government, which has nothing to gain by killing the same people who support it and have stood with it against the terrorists for more than two years. The threat of chemical warfare came from the terrorists.

Independent commission interviews many but finds no chemical weapons evidence against Syrian government

It was more recently confirmed by the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria. As reported on PressTV and elsewhere:

The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria could not find any evidence that Syrian government forces used chemical weapons against militants, commission member Carla Del Ponte has said.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in television interview.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," said Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Undue prominence given to statements of disbelief from Whitehouse

In its news report of 6 May, the SBS gave prominence to the unfounded claims of US White House spokesman Jay Carney that the Syrian Government, and not its terrorist opponents, has used Chemical weapons. The effect of this report was to diminish the impact the more credible story of Carla Del Ponte's report, which was founded upon evidence, that the perpetrators of the chemical attack were the US-backed terrorists.

The following two interviews, in addition to the interview embedded here from PressTV below and the Sunday Times interview of 3 March 2013 are only four of many interviews of President al-Assad available on YouTube. It is perplexing that a national leader, who is so prepared to be critically scrutinised in the media, is held, even by some active and outspoken opponents of the terrorist war against Syria, to be 'corrupt' and a 'dictator'. In comparison to the way many of the West's formally democratic politicians have mis-ruled their constituencies, for example, Australia's Foreign Minister Bob Car (pictured), who mis-ruled the State of NSW from 1995 until 2005, President al-Assad appears remarkably able.

All the evidence seems to suggest that, to the contrary, President al-Assad is a courageous and humane national leader who has capably led his country against the foreign terrorist proxy invasion since March 2001. Had Syria been less capably led, the cost to the Syrian people by now would have been even greater than the already terrible death toll, put at more than 70,000 by most estimates. In all probability, the Syrian government would have been overthrown, Syria would have been partitioned and bloody sectarian strife similar to what occurred in Iraq after the United States and its allies invaded in 2003, would now be under way.

President al-Assad, in charge of a nation threatened with invasion, has repeatedly faced close media scrutiny

Above video of 33 minutes, 36 seconds duration can also be viewed here.

Video of 4 minutes, 13 seconds duration can also be viewed here.

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr echoes media lies against Syria

Readers may be interested to compare President al-Assad's words with those of Australian Foreign Minister Bob Car 10 months ago in July 2012 in an interview with SBS television's Anton Enus. In that interview, both Bob Carr and Anton Enus predicted the imminent overthrow of the Syrian Government and made claims, contrary to the known evidence of the time, that the Syrian Army and 'pro-government militias' had committed atrocities against the Syrian people.

Video of 5 minutes, 57 seconds duration can also be viewed here.

It is striking that while, on the one hand Russia and China are criticised by Bob Carr and Anton Enus for vetoing motions for military intervention against the Syrian Government on the United Nations Security Council, on the other hand the tragic consequences for the Libyan people of the failure of Russia and China to veto the resolution for a "no-fly zone" in 2011, are not even mentioned.

No mention is made either of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which Australia participated. That invasion was found by the UK Government Chilcot inquiry to have been in breach of international law.

Assad will not willingly allow Syria to suffer fate of Iraq

Many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result and President al-Assad is rightly resolved not to let the likes of Carr and Obama and the governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and other criminal entities on the international arena do the same to his country.

#BobCarr">Bob Carr's misrule of NSW, 1995-2005

Australia's current Foreign Minister, Senator Bob Carr, ruled the state of New South Wales from 1995 until 2005. Unlike President al-Assad, whose country has, faced threatened invasions of Syria for much of the time since he assumed office, he was formally democratically elected Premier of New South Wales in 1995.

However, many of the policies Carr imposed or attempted to impose --- privatisation, the massive expansion of global-warming coal exports, enabling the trashing of bushland in Western Sydney against popular protest, etc. -- were harmful to the public and the environment and benficial to vested wealthy corporate interests. Had President Bashar al-Assad ruled Syria as ineptly and unconscionably as Carr ruled New Sout Wales, he would have been removed from office a long time ago.

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?