"Showboat"

Jack Marx writes this about the claims of the Government having blood on its hands for bring "soft" on refugees:

There are few postures quite as serpentine as that of the bully who disguises his cruelty as some kind of love. Sadistic teachers of old were fond of it - the furrowed brow and fraudulent look of regret as they caned you “for your own good” - and the history of xenophobia is rich with creeps who dolled up their barbarism as a humane sympathy for the very people they sought to oppress. The asylum seekers who drowned off Christmas Island last night had barely taken their last breaths when such ghouls began riding their waterlogged bones, boastfully declaring the tragedy a vindication of their own contemptuous beliefs, their allergy to foreigners camouflaged behind a sick exhibition of concern for the very lives they couldn’t give two $#@&s about.

The argument - which you’ll find all over this very news portal - is that our Government today has the blood of the dead on its hands, Australia’s relaxation of its policy towards asylum seekers having lured such wretches here in the first place. The more “compassionate” policy, they say - one that would allegedly have prevented this tragedy - would be to make life more difficult for such unfortunates, to turn their boats around while at sea, to harass and intimidate them with such rigour as to make travelling to Australia by boat an entirely unattractive proposal.

This argument is lanced by the very incident such frauds are opportunistically using to mount it, for there is no greater deterrent to illegal immigration than death at sea. If deterring asylum seekers is what it’s all about, then last night’s sinking - engineered, apparently, by our Government’s soft hand - will be a far more foreboding advertisement than the prospect of simply having one’s time and money wasted by being turned around. Those who believe in tough love should be applauding the tragedy, if they can work out how to clap with iron fists in velvet gloves.

But the truth is that there’s no love in those voices at all. It’s a pretence

Full article here