MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: Australia is clearly being asked to take a regional role in this ongoing crisis. What role should we take?
PHILIP FREIER: Well, I think there’s a couple of things we could do. One is to look at these countries where many people are wanting to leave for a manifest number of reasons and seek some of the long term solutions that might stabilise those.
But I think that plainly we need to do all we can in association with our regional neighbours in making sure that there are not people simply left starving on boats with nowhere to go.
So the breakthrough that we’ve had are people being able to come onshore, seems to be the initiative of some fishermen in Indonesia, seems very welcome.
This is the same Archbishop Freier who has been almost entirely silent on the issue of anti-Christian violence in many parts of the world, yet he has time to pontificate about one of the Left’s favourite issues in a very one-sided manner.
Christians (including his own flock, Anglican Christians) are being persecuted, raped, tortured, killed in many parts of the world. Even the secular press can see the scandal, and yet this is all that he has time for.