Another reason why wise old heads should not be pushed out of Parliament:
Mr Ruddock said that while he was serving as immigration minister, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees had identified 24 million people as refugees.
“Today they identify 11 million as refugees,” Mr Ruddock told Radio 6PR today.
“What I find absolutely amazing is that people are falling for this line the government is peddling that ‘we have a worse problem to manage than the Howard government’.
Consider the end of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the end of civil war in Sri Lanka….and for the record, as reported by TIME magazine:
In 2001, before Howard’s program was implemented, there were 5,516 arrivals by boat; by 2002, there was just one. The numbers stayed below 60 until 2007, but have been increasing steadily ever since. “When you weaken laws for unauthorized arrivals, you are in fact creating a brilliant marketing scheme for people smugglers,” says Sharman Stone, the immigration spokeswoman the Liberal Party of Australia.