Navigating extremes

Tom Canetti’s flippant comment that the Australian Labor Party “hasn’t been much better” than our political opponents on refugee policy is completely wrongheaded ( Prospect online, January).

Refugee policy is among the toughest challenges faced by Australian leaders. Our nearest border with Indonesia is not a river, but a vast stretch of dangerous ocean. Australia therefore faces fewer irregular arrivals by international standards, but anyone who attempts it risks death.

The right, and its so-called Liberal Party, have embraced the immoral policy of indefinitely detaining people, resulting in children growing into adults in custody with limited hopes of freedom. The

far-left Green Party would invite everyone, fuelling the market for asylum seekers to be robbed blind by criminal gangs who would pack them into unseaworthy fishing boats and let them drown.

Between them stands the centre-left Labor Party, which moved to double Australia’s official humanitarian intake through the UN Refugee Agency while working with regional partners to permanently resettle ocean arrivals in third countries like New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. Under a Labor government, those innocents who have been indefinitely detained would have been allowed into Australia for processing and regional resettlement eight years ago.

Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia