Specifically, he said:
"I don't think it's a very Christian thing to come in by the back door rather than the front door. ... I think the people we accept should be coming the right way and not the wrong way. ... If you pay a people-smuggler, if you jump the queue, if you take yourself and your family on a leaky boat, that's doing the wrong thing, not the right thing, and we shouldn't encourage it."
It is not surprising that Mr Abbott has a view about the moral dimension of refugee issues. It is entirely appropriate that he should consider the matter from the perspective of Christian teaching, given that he trained for the priesthood. I would go so far as to say that more politicians should pay attention to the moral implications of the policies they have to determine.
What is striking is that Mr Abbott could get the matter so spectacularly wrong, both as to the facts and as to the moral equation.
First: the facts. Mr Abbott should know that there is no queue when you run for your life. The recent execution of an Afghan woman by the Taliban (another example of a very well-established pattern) gives some idea of why people seek asylum. A significant proportion of boat-people in the past 15 years have been Afghan Hazaras fleeing the Taliban. If an Afghan were to embrace Mr Abbott's scruples and look for a queue, the obvious place would be the Australian Embassy in Kabul. The Department of Foreign Affairs website informs us:
"The Australian Embassy in Kabul operates from a number of locations that are not publicly disclosed due to security reasons. The Australian Embassy in Kabul has no visa function."
So where is the queue?
Leave aside that the location of the Australian Embassy is a secret, the larger point is that refugee flows are always untidy. The idea that desperate people will conduct themselves as if waiting for a bus to take them to the shops is not only ludicrous, it reveals a complete lack of empathy, or even understanding, of why refugees flee for safety in the first place.
As it happens, more than 90 per cent of boat-people who have arrived in Australia in the past 15 years have been accepted, eventually, as genuine refugees. Mr Abbott should understand this: it means that they are people to whom we owe a duty of protection according to our own laws, and according to the obligations we voluntarily undertook when we signed the Refugees Convention.
