I get quite depressed as well reading all this red-neck stuff
the General thread is almost as bad as the Politics
it appears to be mostly people who get their information from commercial TV
A background to the boat crisis
How many boat people are found to be refugees? In 2011-12, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship found 71.1 per cent of asylum seekers arriving by boat to be genuine refugees. After those who failed their initial claims took their cases to the Refugee Review Tribunal, that figure rose to 91 per cent.
How many Iranian boat people are found to be refugees? DIAC gave 61 per cent of Iranians refugee status in their initial assessments in 2011-12 - with 87.6 per cent gaining refugee status after review. In 2012-13, DIAC granted asylum to 66.5 per cent of Iranian boat people, with 84.7 per cent recognised as refugees after review.
What about those who have arrived recently? There are no comparable figures for people who have arrived in the 2012-13 financial year, because none of the 20,000 asylum seekers who have arrived after the government introduced its no-advantage policy on August 13 have had their claims for refugee protection processed.
Australian Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs has called on Senator Carr to back his claim. ''We can readily demonstrate whether or not ... Senator Carr is correct by simply beginning to assess these claims. ''By refusing to assess 20,000 of these claims approximately since last year, we don't really know the answer to the question he's putting,'' she said.
How many DIAC decisions does the Refugee Review Tribunal overturn? In May, RRT principal Kay Ransome told a parliamentary inquiry the tribunal had overturned 72 per cent of the negative refugee assessments brought to it between June 30, 2012, and May 30, 2013. Ms Ransome said one reason the tribunal overturned so many of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship's initial negative refugee status findings was that by the time asylum seekers took their claims to the tribunal they had had more time to prepare them, and they were generally represented by migration agents who presented material the tribunal was required to take into account. Ms Ransome said the tribunal had its own country advice section, separate from the department's; although it relied upon much of the same source material.
