If the Liberal don't dump Abbott they may lose. If they dump Abbott, and make Turnbull their leader the Libs copy-cat Labor's power junkies, tarnish a Superior Breed of Cat image, and lose.
So the Libs try to tart up the glory days of John Howard. But the glory days of the Howard government were ghastly and divisive. He introduced Work Choices to crush wages and enrich bosses.
He got Australia into two American wars that produced wave after wave of terrified refugees who thought (as we didn't like Saddam and the Taliban and loved democracy) that Howard would accept them. What a ghastly mistake that was. Howard was a white Australia fanatic. He stopped the boats by replicating (in his prison camps) Saddam's and Taliban's hatred of democracy and had secret agents sabotage boats so they would founder, like SIEV-X did and drown hundeds of men, women and children.
Even that didn't deter refugees from seeking asylum. They massed en route and quietly bided their time.
The only way Abbott can stop the boats is by getting the Navy to sink them or by getting secret agents to sabotage them. Nothing less than genocide will work. Why say that? Listen to a smuggler about conditions in our vile prison camps:
This is from a transcript from an ABC-TV interview: "Because those people can at least live there, right? They live there for 10 years, for 20 years, but they will live there. They won't be killed, they won't get bombed. At least they will survive, right?" he said.
Domestic policies of the Australian government could not compete with the threat of death in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan that are the main force driving demand for people smuggling, he added.
"They make the conditions difficult or they make anything like that, the policies like that, but at least they are not going to kill these people."
Yet! Howard had secret agents do that. Only one (non-genocidal) plan will work. Planes would stop the boats and enable safe passage for refugees to a new life far from murder-mad regimes.
Hence my proposal for people smuggling: Legalise it and tax it. That will save lives and convert a huge enforcement cash outflow into a revenue stream that is used on one 737 a day to bring 100 refugees a day to Australia. (that's the number arriving now) vet them for terror or criminal links and resettle them and finance English courses.
We accept 200,000 economic migrants per year now - if refugee numbers rise under my proposal (beyond the current 30,000 a year) reduce the 200,000 so our resources won't be streteched. Stopping boats has priority over economic migrants.
Prohibiting refugees (like prohibiting drugs) puts up the price and makes smuggling more profitable. But legalising people smuggling cuts the cost and provides a revenue stream to the Government, not to foreign smugglers.
