This is the line in the Australian national anthem that I’ve always loved.
Australia is a highly multicultural nation. From our earliest days of white settlement and gold rush, Australia has been a melting pot of different nationalities.
The English, Irish, Scottish were the first to make their new home here. As history tells us, they were the original boat people, and the people who were already here were treated most unjustly by them. Since then, French, German, Maltese, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Kiwi and countless others have made Australia their home. More recently, there have been significant numbers from South Africa, Sudan, Timor, Afghanistan, and Iran.
All have come to Australia to make a new start. It’s a land of hope, opportunity, temperate weather, and good natured people. It’s a fantastic place to live.
However, it seems that we’re just not that welcoming anymore… officially, at least. Recently, the Australian government excised the whole of the continent – that’s right, the entire nation – from the migration zone, in an effort to deter people from going into enormous debt to get on a leaky boat and sail here from Indonesia as asylum seekers.
What that means is that nobody who sails here, flies here, or swims here fuelled by sheer determination can actually ask for asylum from whatever messed up, conflict-ravaged nation that they’ve come from.
That’s right. The Australian Government hung out the virtual “NO VACANCY” sign. If they could find a way to fill it with neon and make it flash, they would.
Horrific.
Yesterday, the Australian Government sank even lower.
Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced yesterday afternoon that anyone who actually does make it here, having risked their lives on a leaky boat from Indonesia or anywhere else, will never be allowed to settle in Australia. Instead, they will be sent to Papua New Guinea.
Papua New Guinea is one of Australia’s nearest neighbours. While many of its people are peace-loving and friendly, it’s sad to acknowledge that it is a nation that is conflicted and suffering significant poverty.
It’s hard to imagine how sending thousands of refugees there to be settled is going to help anyone, especially when they are already fleeing from other war-torn nations. It’s certainly hard to see how that’s going to improve anything in PNG.
Australia signed the UN Refugee Convention. Australia is currently a member of the UN Security Council.
And yet, Australia is avoiding her responsibilities to the rest of the world because those in leadership can’t think of any other way to put the people smugglers out of business.
My suggestion? Open an agency in Indonesia, in refugee camps, wherever there are people who want to come to Australia. Let them register and apply, have their identity and bona fides confirmed, and bring them over. That will put the people smugglers out of business, without question.
Let every asylum seeker be judged on their individual circumstances. If they genuinely need a new home, let them come to Australia. Let them settle in the community, learn the language, get jobs, become Australian citizens, and help Australia to prosper and flourish like the majority of migrants who have come here before have done. They may be asylum seekers, but their children will be Australian, just like all the children of all the migrants and refugees that have come before them.
This latest policy is morally bankrupt.
It makes me angry at the Australian government and ashamed that they are so lacking in compassion and understanding, and it makes me so incredibly sad for the people who just want to come here and live in peace. Haven’t they been through enough already?
It’s ironic that the Prime Minister who apologised to the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the way the white settlers treated them for two hundred years is also the same one who has introduced this dreadful policy. I wonder if there will ever be an official apology for that, or if the heartfelt apologies of the Australians who disagree with it will have to suffice.
Until we get some national leaders who can do something more positive and compassionate, I guess we’ll just have to sing the anthem differently:
“For those who’ve come across the seas,
Our leaders just don’t care.
It’s time to hang our heads in shame;
Advance Australia… where?”
WordyNerdBird 
As of the 1911 census, 98% of Australia was White Anglo and Christian, with the overwhelming majority coming from just 3 nations in the British Isles.
That Australia is a Multicultural and always has been a Multicultural nation is a LIE. The Chinese gold miners you spoke of – half the reason for the Eureka stock-aid was because as soon as they made their fortune, they left. Chinese were never into nation building.
The other LIE is that Australia is a nation of immigrants – although unfortunately that is starting to become true as our nation is being stolen away from us. Australia was built by Colonial Australians, who carved the nation out of the dust, built nearly all our towns and cities and established the laws and deep cultural values that made our nation the envy of the world.
Every subsequent wave of immigration has added progressively less, until we are now at the point where we are scrapping the absolute bottom of the immigration barrel, pulling in African’s like the Sudanese, who actually actively detract from what has already been built here.
The majority of immigrants arriving in Australia today have no interest in building the nation – IT IS ALREADY BUILT. What they are doing is coming to take a piece of the social capital that previous generations worked and sacrificed in order to build a better life for themselves and their children. Immigrants of today are looking for a short cut to a better life – great nations and strong societies are not built by people looking for short cuts.
The nonsense you are spewing is little more than recycled garbage from wealthy businessmen “think tanks” like the Lowy foundation and Peter Scanlons, Scanlon Foundation. These are not people who are interested in Australia or Australian society, both are property developers who are using their tax deductible ‘charities’ to spruik for as many people to be crammed into Australia as possible – for the most obvious reason, to support Asset prices and increase their wealth. Take a look at the effects, our institutions and social capital are being privatised and sold off to try and fund the necessary infrastructure to cope with the fire hose rates of immigration that are being sprayed into our major cities and scrubbing away our Australian identity.
These cities should the the social and cultural focal points of the underlying society that supports them, regional Australia and Colonial Australian identity. Instead they’re being flooded with people from competing societies and cultures, who are under no obligation to shed whatever shitty cultural values that caused their own societies to fail to launch. Many of the arrivals actively hate Anglo-Christian societies and culture, yet we are cramming them in simply to satisfy the GDP growth lobby who grow exponentially richer, with every new arrival who they can shear like the consumers sheep they are becoming.
Ignorant Oikaphobes like yourself are doing the work of elites who saw a strong united society, with a strong common narrative and saw it as a threat to their ability to repoint the Australian economy in their favour. You and people like you are not only the agents of your own demise, but actively participating and taking part in the Cultural Genocide of the people and society who founded Australia and made it the envy of the world.
Stop celebrating and hang your head in shame.
PS: “For those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share…” was NOT part of the original anthem, which read as:
“For loyal sons beyond the seas, We’ve boundless plains to share.”
That is who Australia was meant to be for – fellow sons from the countries that founded our nation, not pissant economic refugees from failed to launch nations coming to grab a piece of what we built.