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@lind9650 wrote:

Year      Number of boats        Number of people
                                                     (excludes crew)

1996      19                                    660      Paul Keating – Labor   

1996                                                         John Howard - Liberal
1997      11                                    339   
1998      17                                   200           
1999      86                                   3721
2000      51                                   2939
2001      43                                   5516   
2002      1                                     1
2003      1                                     58
2004      1                                     15
2005      4                                     11
2006      6                                     60
2007      5                                    148     John Howard –Liberal

2007                                                       Kevin Rudd  - Labor
2008      7                                    161
2009      60                                  2726
2010      134                               6555

2010                                                       Julia Gillard  - Labor
2011      69                                 4564   
2012      278                              17202
2013      196                              13108    Julia Gillard  - Labor

2013                                                        Kevin Rudd  - Labor

2013                                                        Tony Abbott  - Liberal   

 

 

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2002      1                                     1 ??????????????????????????????????????

One boat and one person?  Are they counting some lone yachtsman?

All these figures are quite irrelevant; people leave their homeland because they cannot stay there any longer.  

Then it takes months, sometimes years (from distant countries - like Syria in this moment) to actually make it here.  So there are many factors why there were more boats in some times than others.  When for instance there is a crack down on refugees in some of the countries where they are staying while trying to find a country that would take them, they will move on.  In the time of the year when the sea tends to be rough people are more likely to wait.

And, in a sign the policy is working, The Weekend Australian understands 30 asylum-seekers from Iran who arrived after the

PNG Solution was unveiled on July 19 are on their way back to Tehran.

Data provided by the Department of Immigration reveals that over the seven weeks following the Prime Minister's announcement that no boat arrival would be settled in Australia, 3175 asylum-seekers have challenged Labor's resolve.

More than 1300 of those, however, were intercepted in the first week of the PNG Solution, and some were already at sea when Mr Rudd unveiled the hardline approach alongside his PNG counterpart Peter O'Neil.

The number of people risking their lives on boats is now down 44 per cent on the 5636 arrivals who made the journey to Australia in the seven weeks prior to the PNG Solution.

Authorities late yesterday confirmed the arrival of a vessel carrying 90 asylum-seekers, which takes to 149 the number who have arrived in the final week of the campaign.

It is well short of the 1297 asylum-seekers who arrived the week before the PNG Solution.

A charter plane carrying some 30 Iranian asylum-seekers yesterday left Australia for Tehran. It is the largest group of Iranians to request to return home.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/election-2013/hardline-sees-number-of-asylum-seeker...

Voltaire is quite interesting  MM

François-Marie Arouet (1694 - 1778), better known by his "trade" name Voltaire, was a poet, playwright, novelist, historian, and philosopher who embodied theEnlightenment in eighteenth-century absolutist France. Voltaire was an Anglophile, and was instrumental in bringing the works of Newton and Locke fromEngland to French intellectual circles.

  Views and ideas

As self-proclaimed deist, Voltaire loathed organized religion and intolerance between creeds. Strong anti-clericalism pervades most of Voltaire's writings. He believed that all religions attempt to teach morality and that all are based on just precepts—it is only the particulars of religious beliefs that are "absurd." As a deist, he was a supporter of the "clockmaker" argument for the existence of God. Voltaire despised superstition and optimism, themes that surface in the novelCandide, his most widely-known work. Voltaire subscribed to the revolutionary Enlightenment notion that "custom is a greater decider of difference than nature," a principle that still holds for today's anthropologists and all who attempt to practice multiculturalism.

It is also worth noting that Voltaire was an infamous anti-Semite,[2][3] and referred to Jews as "calculating animals," "plagiarists in everything," and "the biggest tramps who have ever spoiled the face of the earth."[4] He was also a Eurocentric racist, and derided Africans as "less intelligent than apes." Jeez, Volty. Everyone today would have loved you if it wasn't for that.[5]

Famous quotes

• "Man is free at the moment he wishes to be."
• "Love truth, but pardon error."
• "To hold a pen is to be at war."
• "It is dangerous to be right in matters where established authorities are wrong."
• "A witty saying proves nothing."
• "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
• "Christianity is without a doubt the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and the most bloody religion that has ever infected the world."[6][7]
• "It is a serious question among them whether [Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything."

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Voltaire

Plus many seem to conveniently forget to recall that the figures during the Howard years were rubbery to say the least as they only counted those people that actually made it ashore in Australia. If they were intercepted and taken elsewhere, they didn't form part of the stats.

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@just_me_karen wrote:
I'm back, Clair...and I had to scroll heaps to let you know 😄

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IS,  interesting graph, however it is in weekly time slots and yes after Rudd announced, in 2012,  the immediate reopening of immigration detention facilities on Manus Island and Nauru, which the government implemented with bipartisan support, the weekly arrivals declined, but did you notice my figures were for yearly arrivals, NOT weekly. Taking the lowest weekly figure provided (143) would extrapolate to 7436 annually,  which still calls into question JMK's somewhat amazing comments:

JMK: "achievements of the previous govt. Here are some: - successfully reduced the number of asylum seeker boats"
"it shows how boat numbers have steadily declined since Labor's Kevin Rudd introduced his policy"

Like time periods need to be compared for  a meaningful comparison, so I will play the game:
In Howard's last year (2006) every week 0.12 of a boat arrived carrying a total of  1.2 people

"declined", "reduced"  ?????????

Refs: 1989–2008: DIAC advice provided to the Parliamentary Library on 22 June 2009
           2009–2013: Customs and Border Protection advice provided to the Parliamentary Library on 1 July 2013.

PS

I do agree with your comment IS: " Voltaire is quite interesting  MM"

JMK "mm, wrong graph and dodgy numbers."

Hardly JMK,  they come from the government of the time (ALP), and just writing it does not make it so, without valid references.

However,  provide the right graph and correct numbers and enlighten me.

Who is John Barron?