letter to editor - turn backs hasn't stopped the boats 28 November 2018

_{Turn back hasn’t stopped the boats}

_{There is considerable disagreement within the Coalition about turn back. Morrison has always claimed that turn back stopped the boats, or more specifically that he had stopped the boats. Peter Dutton, who followed Morrison as Immigration Minister (IM), never challenged that claim.}

_{But 3 months ago he and Morrison had a bruising tussle for the PM job. And to punish Dutton for running against him, Morrison relieved Dutton of his job as IM. Dutton was vengeful. What better way to hurt Morrison than to burst his bubble about turn back. In parliament he told us that Morrison was lying, that the boats had never stopped. He said that, in the last 4 years, some 33 boats carrying 3300 refugees had taken to the high seas heading for Australia, a rate of 825/year}

_{Which of the two combatants is correct? There is no evidence to support Morrison’s claim. But there are two pieces of evidence to back Dutton’s figures.}

_{First, the Immigration Department (ID) stated that 1500 refugees had been turned back by our Navy in 2014. So a year into turn back, the boats had not stopped.}

_{Second, Matt Broomfield, a journalist who writes for New Arab, was in Indonesia in October 2017. He went to detention camps and found 4700 of Australia’s refugees there. The other refugees in Indonesia were people waiting to board boats. They were not yet Australia’s refugees. He concluded that the 4700 refugees held in the camps were refugees turned back by our Navy. They told Matt they started arriving in the camps in 2014, the year turn back began.  This is about  940/year turned back and dumped into camps, not too different from the 825/year claimed by Dutton.}

_{I conclude that the beastly Dutton is right and once again, Morrison is lying.}

_{In short, the boats never stopped!}

_{Dr  Michael Blockey}