340 asylum seekers have been rescued since last Friday. Assuming the going rate per head is US$10,000 as has been well documented, then that's a grand total of US$3.4 million. Not a bad earn for one weekend for the scumbags who organise these risky and sometimes ill fated boat trips. For $10k a head you would think they would throw a life jacket and an EPIRB in.
12,354 have been rescued this year so far. That equates to over US$123 million. And that's only this year.
I'm not sure how much $ we give to Indonesia each year but I do recall many years ago that the figure was around $120 million. Something is not right here and we must be the laughing stock of the world.

High ranked indo army officials were busted recently for organising peope smuggling. In general the country is very corrupt and this was proof that *part* of the operation was directed from high up.

Also proof that Indonesia is doing it's best to catch those at the top as well as the bottom of the food chain.

However - any high up people organising the smuggling are in it for themselves - personal greed. Any foreign aid we give them is a totally separate issue - you can't seriously try to link the two.

Not a bad earner for the companies that are looking after the refugees who land at Christmas Island either. How much do they charge for their services compared to how much it costs? Good on the taxpayer though they never get a say one way or another. People much smarter and wiser than the fools footing the bill decide what to do.

Why not give Christmas Island it Indonesia? It costs the rest of Australia a huge amount of money to maintain the place for no return besides people having a jolly jaunt in a leaky boat from Java a few hundred kilometers away. Its about ten times that distance to Australia.

Or turn it into a prison island and send all the deadsh!ts who can never be reformed there. Let them greet the asylumn seekers.

Edit.
In regards to foreign aid, I'm not sure why we give aid to a country that probably has more millionaires than in Australia. If stuff needs to be done there then perhaps the Indonesian government should put its hand out and ask the rich people in Indonesia to pay the bill. Probably they won't as its easier to get the money off the Australian tax payer.

@10K/head = $3.4mil

So...

If I were to say get some deposits, and organise a chartered cruise ship...

...I wonder. [}:)]

What happened with the knight in shiny armor............ went to Indo to TELL them he would send the boats back........... then just turned his back to Bang Bang and askek him to **** him deep in the bum, Tony........... king of the jelly fish!
Some one was telling that most of the peeps coming are middle class peeps in the country they flee, they sell all they have to get a better life style here, as soon as they have the refugee status they then apply for familly reunion and we end with 4 time more peeps sucking on the welfare!
That was my rant of the day!

Mobydisc said...
Why not give Christmas Island it Indonesia? It costs the rest of Australia a huge amount of money to maintain the place for no return besides people having a jolly jaunt in a leaky boat from Java a few hundred kilometers away. Its about ten times that distance to Australia.

Back when labour was in opposition and John Howard was sitting on the throne, he was smart enough to remove Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef from Australian territory as far as immigration was concerned. That is, if you rocked up on Christmas Island you were not considered to have landed on Australian soil as far demanding your rights to be accepted in Australia as a refugee. You had to actually get a bit further than Christmas Island, which is only 200 miles from Indo and 1000 miles from Australia.
Of course it was shouted down by the then labor oposition, and in particular by Julia as being a "desperate measure by an arrogant government in disarray".
And when maybe once a year a boat did turn up she would proudly trumpet, "Another boat,. another policy failure"
Part of their election platform was to remove all these "unfair" measures and make us a "more compasionate society". So now they don't even need to make it to Christmas Island. We are now so compasionate that when they are only 10 miles off the coast of Indonesia they can phone us up and we send the navy out to pick them up.
Somehow I think we are being taken for total suckers.

I suppose we could always vote for the greens, although their remedy as per what Sarah Hanson Young says, is to accept all the refugees in Indonesia to remove the need for people to use people smugglers and leaky boats.
I suppose that would work for a week until the word got out and another 100,000 new refugees replaced them.

There is something wrong with our system of government that allows such dimwits to get into power. They seem incapable of realising the consequences of their announcements past the initial "feel good warm and fuzzy" feeling that they hope it will bring the hearers.

The fact is, what we had worked well.
It was dismantled and replaced with something that clearly doesn't work, and is in fact less compasionate because it lures people into taking dangerous and sometimes fatal actions to get here by illegal means.
And yet they keep tinkering with it in the hope that some miracle will suddenly make it work.

^^^^ Dave you know I am talking about repeatedly turning a blind eye, and my anology not so simplistic. What Indo is doing is ignoring the rock throwing, and still getting the presents.

You can't tell me there is only a few hundred people involved. Nobody notices when 50 Afghanis or Sri Lankans arrive in a small fishing village?

A guy I know in Adelaide made $30k from marrying a South African.

She got her whole family here, 6 of them including her, so that was only 5 grand each.
Maybe these refos just need better advise

whippingboy said...
A guy I know in Adelaide made $30k from marrying a South African.

She got her whole family here, 6 of them including her, so that was only 5 grand each.
Maybe these refos just need better advise

The problem is that only men are coming on the boats!

kiteboy dave said...

Mark _australia said...
ive Christmas presents to the kids next door, but if they throw rocks at you then no more Christmas presents. Simple

An african once offended me, now I don't talk to africans.
That american guy on tv is annoying, so I dont' talk to yanks.
A pommy backpacker once spilt a beer on me, don't talk to poms anymore.

See where I'm going? A few hundred people involved in people smuggling should not affect your judgement of the other 240 million.

Moby gov't will never never give xmas island away - my fantastic artwork might explain why.

^^^Looks like ET taking a p1ss.

If people smugglers were providing that service for free, or even at cost, that argument might stand up in court.
At $10,000 a head it's hard to believe they are doing it for anything other than personal gain.