just as well that abbott and scotty do not listen to the nay sayers.
from bolts blog, who links to a story from chris kenny
After Labor relaxed the regime, 820 boats arrived carrying 51,870 asylum-seekers and more than 1200 others (that we know of) drowned at sea…
“You know that Tony Abbott’s policy of turning the boats back won’t work,” said soon-to-be immigration minister Chris Bowen before the 2010 election.
Then prime minister Julia Gillard said: “In his own policy document (Tony Abbott) says that the so-called turnaround of boats would only happen, and I quote - ‘where circumstances permit’ - this is an admission that it won’t work.”
Said then defence minister Stephen Smith: “Seven boats were turned back under John Howard and everyone knows it’s not a practical way forward. They are trying to pretend and trick the Australian public into believing that there is a magical solution to these very difficult problems caused by enormous conflict in countries like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.”
Said Bowen in 2012: “All the advice to us, all the evidence to us from navy and other government agencies, is that it’s completely impractical to turn boats around. Indonesia has said very clearly and repeatedly that they will not accept boat turnarounds, they just won’t co-operate with it and so the big problem with Tony Abbott’s plan is it just doesn’t work.”
Former Labor adviser John Menadue picked up the theme on the ABC’s The Drum website: “It is clear to most people who look beyond the one-liners that Nauru, turning the boats back and temporary protection visas are not viable policies.”
In The Age, Michelle Grattan wrote about the clear dangers. “Asking Australian sailors to risk their own lives and the lives of others in this way does not have to be part of a tough border-protection policy,” she wrote, “and, on the evidence that we have, should not be.”
Then attorney-general Nicola Roxon said that it was “fraught” legally. “We have the operational staff saying they couldn’t do it,” she said in 2012. “I really do think that this is a serious problem.”
When Tony Burke took immigration, he derided Abbott’s “slogans” about boat turn-backs. “By the time we came to government, we recognised it wasn’t able to be done,” he told the ABC last year…
Another minister, Brendan O’Connor, refused to consider turn-backs. “The ‘turn back the boats’ policy is an element of the ‘stop the boats’ fraud,” he told parliament in early 2012. “Their ‘turn back the boats’ policy does not exist except in the minds of those opposite.”
Even after losing government, Bill Shorten held the line. In November, he said the Coalition was “in trouble” with its boats policy. “They said before the election they would turn back the boats,” he told the ABC. “Now we are seeing that not only are they not turning back the boats, but they are hiding behind Australia’s military when they do press conferences, they’re not answering questions about what is really happening."…. . . . the naysayers are just upset that abbott has a policy which has been a resounding success - but they keep looking for any feeble argument to try and discredit scotty and abbott.
so what - abbott has been in the firing line all the time - but maybe the lefties better give abbott a bit more credit - because of abbott, the labs had to dump two prime ministers, before abbott finally got rid of the labs at the election - and all the time, the labs made the mistake of assuming that abbott was unelectable - and because of that thinking, they still think that labor did not really lose the last election
