Asylum seekers

The word Asylum seekers is not an unknown topic to Australia. The Asylum seekers or ‘boat people’ have been contentious issue in Australian politics for many years. According to Google dictionary an Asylum seeker is: â€Å"a person who has left their home country as a political refugee and is seeking asylum in another.†The big debate surrounding the area of asylum seekers is how to moderate the amount of boat people coming into Australia. The Malaysian Solution was one of the approaches to reduce the amount of asylum seekers arriving to Australia by boat. The Solution was this: If Malaysia accepted 800 of Australia’s next ‘boat people’ then Australia would accept 4000 of Malaysia’s ‘genuine refugees’ and integrate them into Australia. This so called solution from the Labour government however was ruled against by the high court of Australia due to legal and ethical issues The High court ruled that the scheme was unlawful. One of the reasons is because Australia could not send asylum seekers to Malaysia because it is not legally bound by international or domestic law to provide access for asylum seekers to effective procedures for assessing their need for protection (Alison Rourke, 2010). It would be unethical to send asylum seekers to a country in which their basic human rights were to be at risk. Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention as well so there is no guarantee that the asylum seekers processed there would be safe. Many Australian governments are trying to introduce offshore processing as a deterrent to the ‘boat people’. By introducing the offshore processing ‘boat people’ will be faced with having to be processed as a ‘genuine refugee’ in another country rather than within Australia. With introducing Offshore processing it decreases moderation of the amount of people risking their lives by traveling by boat into Australian waters. Australians are also known to be against the idea of granting citizenship to refugees. By keeping the flow of refugees into Australia at a minimum it is less likely to cause a big uprising and attention to the area. Offshore processing however also has its flaws such as the excessive expense costs of transporting the asylum seekers to the offshore locations. It can be  estimated that to process 1 person in Malaysia would cost the government and tax payers up to $500 000 dollars per person. The Rejection of the governments Malaysian Solution by the High Court of Australia was for numerous reasons. The Scheme in many ways was illegal and did not improve the safety and human rights of the asylum seekers. Head of the Department of Immigration, Andrew Metcalfe, holds a firm view that offshore processing was ineffective and should not be reintroduced to process asylum seekers