Tony Sullivan's List: Asylum seekers

• THE federal government's latest position on asylum seekers might be aimed at  the politics of marginal electorates but it could harm its highest-profile  marginal seat holder.

   

  Lindsay Tanner's seat of Melbourne represents the Greens' best chance of  winning a House of Representatives seat in the federal election.
• ''The number of people expressing extreme disappointment, verging on anger, that  we are having to live through this again but this time under a Labor government  was palpable.

• a campaign about “border protection” by the conservative Liberal-National  opposition, backed by radio “shock jocks” and tabloid journalists, had scored  points in suburban Australia
• the political assumptions behind the Malaysia Solution seem questionable. It has  not made the Gillard government more popular. And an opinion poll on August 16th  found that 53% of Australians believed asylum-seekers arriving by boat should be  allowed to land and be processed in Australia; only 28% wanted them deported.

• RUDD government ministers have wrongly claimed "a number of countries" have  suspended visa applications from Sri Lankan refugees to justify Australia's  unilateral decision to halt processing of Tamil and Afghan asylum-seekers
• The UN, Sri Lankan government sources and Tamil refugees have all contradicted  the Australian government's claims

• The cables reveal that a close adviser to Mr Rudd failed in an attempt to  persuade him to use the government's powers "to calmly and rationally put the  issue in perspective" by acknowledging that only a small number of asylum  seekers were arriving by boat compared with tens of thousands of visa  over-stayers each year.

• According to one cable obtained by WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to  The Age, an unnamed "key Liberal Party strategist" told US diplomats in  November 2009 that the issue of asylum seekers was "fantastic" for the Coalition  and "the more boats that come the better".

• Mr Khalil suggested a better approach was for Mr Rudd "to use the power of  government to calmly and rationally put the issue in perspective", specifically  that there were about 60,000 cases of visa over-stayers per year, while only  1000 asylum seekers entered Australian waters by boat by that stage in 2009.

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