The Australian way

 Sydney

Most ordinary Australians are shocked that our immensely civilised country is reviled in polite society here and abroad, when the world has so many blatant human rights abusers. The latest accusation comes from a New York Times article complaining that our policies on asylum-seekers are harsh, insensitive, callous and even brutal, and urges European nations not to copy them. Yet the policies on border protection of Tony Abbott and John Howard before him should be a lesson to Britain.

At the heart of the matter is a firm but fair post-war policy that mass migration is conditional on government control over ‘who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’, as Mr Howard famously put it. Our population has grown from 7 million in 1945 to about 23 million, largely because of influxes from abroad, especially Asia in recent decades.