Election's Over

Now that the election's over, we've heard much less of the mindless "stop the boats".

It would be a good time to stop treating asylum seekers as political collateral, and begin to consider them as human beings.

We actually have a bipartisan approach in that both major parties see the issue simply as a political wedge. 

Wouldn't it be great if they could speed up the processing, shut down the detention centres, and let these people get on with their lives. Given that in this country we take a whole .4% of the world's refugees, I doubt anyone would notice - except perhaps the shock jocks and commentators like Blot and Blur.

That's wishful thinking, of course. There's always 5% of the population paranoid enough to swallow the slogans. And given the balance in the house, both sides will play it for the political advantage they can gouge from this 5%.

This makes interesting reading.