Australias major political parties endeavour to paint Australia as a generous nation beset by a tide of illegal economic migrants and

queue jumpers the facts about the global situation in which millions of people are forced to leave their homes and seek refuge from war, persecution is obfuscated by fear mongering and misinformation. The refusal of politicians to discuss the real issues is exacerbated by the sensationalist and superficial contribution of the popular media to this discourse. The terming of asylums seekers as illegals and the constant talk of security threats fans public fears and effectively equates seeking asylum with lawlessness and potential danger. This view is continually exploited by politicians to intensify a sense of national crisis. The government is now propagating the myth that the majority of people arriving by boat are "economic migrants" and not genuine refugees. In casting doubt on the genuineness of refugees they seek to abnegate our responsibility to assist people who are entitled to support under the Refugee Convention(In truth 90 per cent of people who arrive by boat are granted refugee status). Meanwhile , Tony Abbot has elevated the current increase in the number of asylum seeker boat to the status of a national emergency and calls for a military operation to deal with the problem. In reality however the number of refugees arriving in Australia is small in a global context. Tony Abbot description of increasing boat arrivals as peacetime invasion plays on the irrational fear that Australia is under constant threat of invasion; that our sovereignty is tenuous and our borders fragile. A metaphor of untamed and malevolent natural forces permeates this rhetoric which conjures images of being swamped by unrelenting tides of prospective immigrants who are said to be massing in Indonesia. Apparently not much has changed since as David Walker recounts The Chinese were presented as a vast mass of humanity... who flooded into the colonies. It is hard to imagine that we would subject innocent, men, women and children to indefinite detention in situations which are inhumane if they and on this basis I believe we should not shy from naming Australias treatment of people who seek asylum as racist and a cause for national shame.