The Deportation Thing

There’s a certain tone creeping in here again.

You hear it in the numbers they are spouting. Sixty five thousand. Not explained. Just… dropped there. Large enough to sound decisive. Vague enough that no one asks what it actually means.

Federal opposition leader Angus Taylor, says we’re going to deport that many visa overstayers. 65000…

It’s interesting how quickly people turn into numbers when it suits.

We’ve seen this before. In the US, under Donald Trump, agencies like ICE stopped sounding like government departments and started sounding like alarms.

Not laws. Not process. Just… heavy enforcement. With guns!

That tone sticks.

Australia likes to think it doesn’t do that sort of thing. We’re practical. Measured. Not dramatic. Except we already built an entire offshore detention system and told ourselves it was temporary. Necessary. Controlled.

It never is.

Deporting people at that scale isn’t a policy tweak. It’s infrastructure. It’s surveillance. Its people being processed in bulk until they stop looking like people.

Most overstayers aren’t criminals. They stayed too long. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes because life is fucking horrendous where they come from and systems are worse.

You can say they should go. Fine.

But once you start talking about them as a number to be “cleared,” something shifts. It gets easier to ignore what that actually looks like.

And it always looks worse up close.

What’s odd isn’t even the idea. It’s how normal it sounds now. No one really flinches. Big number, tough language, move on.

Same script. Different country. Just a lot quieter about it.

I don’t know about you guys, but I for one, don’t want this… If they are “overstayers” they haven’t done anything wrong; it’s not like they are going to blow up anything or shoot anyone! Why not let them stay?

I pretty much think we are all fucked anyhow. We are living “The Terminator”. Just no one with any clout has the brains to see it. We’ve given them the power to do it with AI. Hell, I use AI for a lot of stuff. The difference is I don’t have my own island to retreat to!!!