Can Australia Afford Asylum-Seekers?

The Gillard government's immigration budget will blow out by $1.9 billion over the next four years, despite a $290 million boost to funding today, the Coalition claims.
Special Minister of State Gary Gray yesterday announced that the funding for irregular maritime arrivals would be boosted from $471m for 2010-11.



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 "The Department of Immigration and Citizenship will receive $290m in supplementary funding for operational costs associated with the management of offshore asylum-seekers," Mr Gray said.
It brings the total budget this year for offshore asylum-seeker management to $761m, $457m more than last year's original budgeted $304m.


Mr Morrison said Mr Bowen needed to immediately move to overhaul budget processes due to the continuing large number of arrivals. The Australian

This is just getting ridiculous now, how on earth are the taxpayers of Australia going to pay for all this. We are after all a Country of only 22million, I'm not sure on the number of workers. No wonder the Government wants to bring in a flood tax levy, carbon tax, miners tax, and who else knows what new taxes they are trying to think up.

The number of boat arrivals under the Labor Government 10,016 and 3,464 since PM Gillard took office.
That number alone should send shock waves through the Government, and this is still growing. I really think something has to be done, if Australia cannot afford to even fix up infrastructure that was destroyed by the floods, how on earth can we keep on putting money into all the arrivals by boats? $1.9 billion over the next four years, that's the blow out figure, that is beyond a joke.

Julia Gillard Debating the Flood Levy (Australia)

Well here in OZ we have a real battle going on about a flood tax levy that our PM (Julia Gillard) wants to introduce, and it really is turning into a battle. Most polls on the flood levy are showing that a lot of Australian people are not in favour of it, and neither am I.

Of course this has to be passed in Parliament for the tax levy to come in. There seems to be a fair bit of opposition to this at the moment, some MP's are waiting to see what the public reaction will be, they didn't have to wait long, it all started to hit home yesterday, as I said most are against. To make matters worse our PM didn't brief any ministers until a few hours before they met in Canberra.

There was a lot of people that donated to these floods, not only money, but a lot of people also put in the time to help with the big clean up, and are still at it, this also involved a lot of businesses pitching in as well. Just in Brisbane (the Capitol of Queensland) alone there were over 20,000 people signed up to help with the clean up, and I can tell you these people are not happy, there are a few swear words being spoken out amongst the mud.

On a radio station yesterday, 3AW, our PM was interviewed by Neil Mitchell, and all hell broke lose, e-mails and phone calls started, so they put the interview up as soon as it was over onto their web site, and they received well over 100 comments, I put my 2 cents worth in as well. If you would like to listen to the interview here is the link:- Radio 3AW Interview. You can also comment on that page as well if you like.

Andrew Bolt from the Herald Sun had a good piece on our PM as well, there is a video of an interview with our PM on Sunrise with David Koch, of course this interview was very mild, Kochy is a big fan of Julia's, so she is usually safe when appearing on the show. No comments at the moment on Andrew's site until the moderates come back from holidays. Anyway here is the link if you would like to have a look. Andrew Bolt Herald Sun.

On top of this tax levy, the Government has now decided to put up taxes on smokes, beer and spirits. As well most food items are skyrocketing because of the floods, we are also going to get another increase in our water and power bills again this year, power already went up on the 1st of January. Trust me interest rates will rise because of the inflation all this will cause, so we have that to look forward to as well. Thousands of people are without jobs at the moment because of the floods, a lot of smaller businesses said that they will not reopen, mainly because their insurance company won't pay out, so they just can't afford to reopen, which means of course all those people that were working for these small businesses no longer have a job at all. It's not looking good for us in OZ I'm afraid.