The decision by Thai authorities to forcibly remove more than 4000 ethnic Hmong people from the country and send them to Laos shows once again how removed from reality the asylum seeker ‘debate’ in Australia is. Around 300000 people – mostly Hmong – fled Laos into Thailand and other countries in the region in the last three decades. Australia took a very small number of these as refugees.  

Meanwhile, in countries directly to the north of Australia, the numbers of asylum seekers residing officially and unofficially is in the tens or hundreds of thousands. I’ve written before about the dreadful treatment some of these people experience in Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as Thailand.  

It has been demonstrated time and time again than many genuine refugees are not safe trying to survive permanently in most south-east Asian countries, and the numbers of people in these countries dwarf the tiny numbers Australia – with vastly greater resources – has to deal with.  The absurd stand-off involving a boatload of Tamil asylum seekers being kept off the Indonesia port of Merak has now dragged on for months, achieving nothing other than Indonesian authorities getting more and more fed up with Australian government double standards.

This year, Australia has had around 2000 asylum seekers arrive by boat – mostly people originally from Afghanistan or Sri Lanka. In the same period, over half a million people arrived in Australia on various types of long-term or permanent residency visas. Yet this tiny number of 2000 people – all of whom are fully assessed for health and security risks before being eligible for release into the community – is talked about in political and media circles as if they are a threat to the security and borders of Australia.