Why Australia should abandon the 1951 UN Refugee Convention...

We live in a dynamic, ever-changing world, so it seems incredibly odd to me that Australia in 2011 is bound by 60 year old UN convention on refugees that was designed to deal with post-World War 2/Cold War Europe. It is absurd - ludicrous even - that the people of Australia must adhere to a policy that was built to solve a problem that existed before many of us were even born. At the heart of my distaste for this convention is how the term 'refugee' is defined, and how this must change to recognise the difficulties governments face now, as opposed to 60 years ago.

The convention defines a 'refugee' as a person who has a "well founded fear of being persecuted" should they be returned to their country of origin. This made sense in Cold War Europe, with the KGB willing to take care of any traitors to the great socialist cause. Those brave few who managed to escape over the Berlin Wall and break free of the Soviet Bloc would have without a doubt faced persecution and death if they had been returned to the Red Side of the Iron Curtain. That is in stark contrast to the so-called 'refugees' that we have piling up on our shores today.

While those fleeing communism faced the very real threat of death upon their return, do those who Bob Brown and Sarah Hanson-Young roll out the red carpet for face their untimely end should the boats be turned around? Of course not! These are not people fleeing death and destruction, these are not wartime refugees, they are economic refugees. It is not push factors leading them to our shores, but pull factors, such as Australia's economy, our work, our opportunities, our indoor plumbing. If these people can afford to spend over AUS$30,000 to a people smuggler in order to jump the queue, for the sole purpose of economic gain, then they are not genuine refugees. They are opportunists taking advantage of an inept government that leaks more than the boats carrying these people here and which fails at everything it attempts. These are people too lazy to work to improve their own country that they travel to, and exploit, ours!

Do these people look like genuine refugees?

Australia must swiftly abandon this 1951 UN convention, an out-dated relic of history, and put the interest of its own people ahead of those who seek to steal our jobs and our opportunities. If we continue down this destructive path that the Greens and Gillard have set us on, whereby any and all have the red carpet rolled out for them at the expense of the Australia tax-payer, we are going to be over-run with every third world opportunist who can point their raft in the direction of Christmas Island and cry persecution. The truly sad thing is that while these leeches con their way into this great nation there are genuine people in need, with the very real threat of death hanging over them, doing the right thing and waiting in the UN Refugee Camps. These true refugees are having their place in our quota stolen by selfish opportunists who are exploiting this stupid, incompetent government.