Here is Amanda Vanstone, Immigration Minister in the Howard Government, in January 2007 attacking activists demanding she do more for boat people: At a time when another major refugee crisis is unfolding in Sudan we should be trying to take a broader perspective.
The latest refugee crisis in Sudan is not the first...
Comparatively little is known of this crisis in Australia. This should be a matter of shame to some refugee advocates within Australia...
Vanstone was Immigration Minister for all that time, having taken over from Phillip Ruddock in 2003: In 1984, when Labor held government under Bob Hawke, the intake of Sudanese refugees for resettlement was zero. During the ensuing decade just 34 Sudanese refugees were resettled in Australia. The intake jumped to 354 in 1994-95, heralding a rapidly increasing flow of Sudanese every year, rising to 6147 in 2003-2004.
Experts such as Paris Aristotle from the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture say the influx was prompted in part by requests from the UNHCR for Australia to give priority to Africa in refugee resettlement quotas because of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the long-running civil war in Sudan...
Over the course of this year, Andrews's concerns about the alleged inability of Sudanese refugees to integrate have become more explicit, culminating on Monday when he made plain that integration was to become one of the key criteria for determining refugee resettlement quotas.
"Some groups don't seem to be settling and adjusting to the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope, and therefore it makes sense to ... slow down the rate of intake from countries such as Sudan," he said.
Naturally, moral grand-standers of the Left refused to believe there was a problem: New England independent MP Tony Windsor is not convinced the latest debate does not have an electoral purpose..
"Philip Ruddock for years, when the boatpeople situation was on, used to say, 'We've got to look after the Africans'.
"They seem to have settled in quite well... Kevin Andrews has got a bit of explaining to do, otherwise people will quite rightly say he's playing the race card."