Granting any type of permanent residency seems to be an admission that we will never achieve our aim in Afghanistan and are fighting (and dying) for defeat.

I could, however, be looking at something that quacks, waddles, swims and flies and be calling it a rooster.

Warren Feakes, Wanniassa

The fact that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd needs to outdo the Federal Opposition by condemning people smugglers to ''rot in hell''; and the fact that the Government is playing a political waiting game over the release of information relating to the cause of the explosion on board the refugee vessel off Ashmore Reef; and that the Opposition has called on the Government to come clean on the ''dynamite claim'' that the Australian Federal Police had secretly warned it that Australia was an increasingly easier target for asylum-seekers (''Govt hails arrests in Indonesia'', April 19, p3); and the fact that we are now in the midst of another bout of media hysteria over this same issue, points to what is the most important fact of all: our underlying fear is that these refugee boatpeople are Muslims of Middle Eastern origin.

Figures from the Department of Immigration show that of 150,000 new settler arrivals for the year 2007-08, only 6521 were from the Middle East.

This compares with 27,601 from New Zealand and 24,503 from Britain and Ireland.

Clearly, these figures show we are still very much in favour of choosing those whose origins are predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon and Christian.

Australia's immigration policy is, therefore, based on principles that are contrary to the basic moral requirement of meeting human need with equity. It is a policy that has for too long maintained the status quo in a country that prides itself on its many social advances in cultural, religious and racial democratic reform.