NEWS today that all asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat will be banned — for life — from setting foot on the mainland should be applauded. The toughest clampdown in years on illegal arrivals will strike fear into unscrupulous people smugglers. It will save lives. And it will return control of Australia’s borders to where it belongs — the hands of Australians.
In an exclusive story in today’s Sunday Herald Sun, the Turnbull Government has announced the strict new laws will be rushed into Parliament on November 7.
Under the proposed legislation, which would amend the 1958 Migration Act, any asylum seeker who has arrived here by boat since July 19, 2013, will not be allowed to apply for an Australian visa. Ever.
It makes good on a largely empty promise made, on that date, by then Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd: “As of today, asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia.”
And it follows on in the tradition of what has become a spectacularly successful border protection policy for the Coalition, preventing countless drownings since John Howard put his foot down in 2001.
In August that year, Mr Howard attracted international condemnation from the bleeding hearts when he refused to allow the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying 438 rescued refugees, into Australian waters. Shortly after, his government introduced the Border Protection Bill and the refugees were sent to Nauru for formal processing.
“We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” Mr Howard famously said at the Coalition’s election campaign launch two months later.
