Asylum seekers or economic refugees?

These are short-term considerations. For the longer term, government needs to consider how to deal with large scale unlawful attempts to cross our frontiers. At present, its legislation, policies and practices fail to protect our borders against the thousands who arrive by air and sea and ask for asylum. How then will government deal with massive population movement caused by the greatest, unavoidable risk which will become increasingly evident over the next 50 years - global warming?

We know global warming is going to occur and we know roughly when it will begin posing serious problems. We know it will cause drought and famine. We know it will cause rising sea levels and the effects this will have on low lying coastal regions. We know that 70 per cent of the world population live in and depend on food produced in low coastal areas and that those areas will be subject to an increasing incidence of flooding as sea levels rise.

By 2060, not that far off, the world population is likely to have reached 10 billion and 33 per cent of that population will, with increasing severity, be adversely affected and desperate to survive hunger, flooding and loss of human habitat. In other words, the “push factor” now confronting us will be made to look insignificant.

Hundreds of millions, rather than hundreds of thousands, will seek entry to and permanent residence in countries such as Australia, which offer so much more than the desperate circumstances endured by refugees. What kind of response should we now be planning for?