more on the Australian government and immigration

got a couple of articles here from the Melbourne Age

first one's about the Immigration Minister's decision to not accept African refugee applicants until July 2008:

"We have detected that there have been additional challenges in relation to some of the people that have come from Africa over the last few years," he told reporters in Melbourne.

"We know that there is a large number of people who are young.

"We know that they have on average low levels of education, lower levels of education than almost any other group of refugees that have come to Australia. We know that many of them, if not most of them, have spent up to a decade in refugee camps and they've spent much of their lives in very much a war-torn, conflicted situation.

Gee, do you think that might be why they're refugees?

"And on top of that they have the challenges of resettling in a culture which is vastly different from the one which they came from," he said.

And that is different to what other (non anglo-celtic) immigrant groups face . . . how?

The other article is an opinion piece by Ray Cassin on the Australian Citizenship Test: It seems I'm not the only one that thinks its main (and possibly only) purpose is to keep out . . . foreigners!

He says that the "Becoming an Australian Citizen" booklet

includes the information that might be expected in an elementary civics course: the basic structures of Australian government, the rights and freedoms that sustain liberal democracy, an outline history of the nation, and so on. But there is much more, such as the facts about Bradman and the laureates, and Phar Lap and Evonne Goolagong, too. We are not just asking new citizens to demonstrate their capacity for participation in a democratic process, we're asking them to soak up all of the wider culture. The message is not "this is how you become one of us", but "to become one of us, you must become just like us".

How is knowing about a dead horse going to make someone a better citizen? Why not ask them to list the ten last winners of the Melbourne Cup?

Maybe the whole strategy is to give people like me (who are [WARNING! UNDERSTATEMENT ALERT!] not likely to vote Liberal/National) some kind of a brain embolism from hearing about rubbish like this. Infuriated to death. Nice way to go.