Please go to the Australian polling web page today to vote on ‘Is the Rudd Labor Govt too soft on border control?’ The poll is currently running at 71% agreeing with the statement, 29 % against. I am praying that the situation will not be a repeat of the awful circumstances of 2001:
Public opinion as measured by polls was overwhelmingly in favour of a tough stance on on-shore asylum seekers. Results of a nation-wide Roy Morgan International Poll conducted September 12-16 2001 showed 68 per cent adamantly opposing refugees arriving by boat and saying ‘put them back to sea’ (Roy Morgan International 2001). Only 20% said ‘accept the refugees’, and most (65 per cent) said the Government was doing a good job of handling the refugee problem.
Pollsters noted that in 1979 the majority of Australians (53 per cent) were in favour of accepting the Vietnamese boat people and attributed this turnaround to the Tampa incident.
In an A.C. Nielsen poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 4 2001, 77 per cent supported the government’s refusal to allow the Tampa to land in Australia, and seventy one per cent supported the policy of keeping asylum seekers in indefinite detention (Burke 2001, 323).
A poll (Newspoll Market Research/ The Australian 2002) conducted for The Australian newspaper found that 56 per cent of respondents agreed that ‘All asylum-seekers should be held in detention centres’.
