Trevor Cook on public relations, social media and politics

Tag Archives: asylum seekers

Asylum seekers: too tough or too humane

Rudd’s ‘tough but humane’ bob each way rhetoric on asylum seekers was always a crock but hey worth a try and great if you can get away with it. Today’s newspoll shows that he hasn’t got away with it.
Of course, Rudd could hope that this newspoll is an outlier and the damage is not [...]

We need the genes of illegal immigrants

Immigration can improve the national gene pool:
Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion. Even when famine, warfare, or [...]

Asylum seekers are people

And many of them are good people. Australians are great compassionate people in crises like the recent Victorian bushfires and the 2004 Tsunami. But when the xenophobia is out on show, as it has been on radio talkback today, then it is pretty ugly. Who among us, faced with the same horrors, wouldn’t do everyhting [...]