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Hopefully Australia will take stronger measures against what is effectively a one party state that ruthlessly crushes opposition at home and seeks to intimidate and threaten critics abroad. It is not surprising that after 25 years, I am again seeing Cambodian asylum seekers.
This remarkable policy of what Dr Eve Lester calls 'planned destitution' combines the most extreme instincts of neoliberal, nationalist and authoritarian thinking. Fundamentally, it derives from the Minister for Home Affairs' far reaching powers to determine the rights and entitlements of non-citizens such as people seeking asylum.
Indifference to human life is what made Australia, and it still permeates its approach to crises. As with many things, Indigenous experience provides the lens with which to see things clearly. First Nations people know the fatal measure of our indifference. It manifests in many other areas too.
Australia's healthcare system reflects some of our best values, which surely demands we think about how we can make it work better. We need to ensure care is extended beyond our immediate communities, because we're all interconnected — including asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru.
These changes make political claims to be family-friendly purely rhetorical. Family values do not shape government policies. Often, governments act not to nurture families and protect the traditions of western civilisation but to devastate families and trample on inherited traditions.
It has become clear that the brutal Australian treatment of people who seek protection is part of an international punitive policy. This is sometimes attributed to a failure of political leadership. But it may reflect a deeper cultural change in the Western attitude to strangers, seen in migrant and refugee policy, penal policy, international relations and the scope of the rule of law.
In the 1930s a Jewish Australian was trying to bring to Australia a Jewish family who were in grave danger in Austria. Asked by immigration what made him want to bring the family of his daughter's pen friend, none of whom he had ever met, he replied, 'Common compassion.' The family could not come, and most were later killed.
The first two shipments we sent to Nauru were sent with some assistance from individuals in Immigration who saw what we were doing as a good thing. Well, that's what we thought. By the second shipment, the letters from Australian school children mysteriously disappeared no one was willing to own up on the who and why.
For the good of the refugees who have languished for five years on Nauru and Manus Island, and for the good of the Australian body politic, it's time to put an end to this inhumane chapter in Australian history. Keep the boats stopped. Bring New Zealand into the mix now. Empty the camps. And fight your elections on matters of substance.
These are people living precariously: pregnant women, families with young children, elderly people. They are being 'transitioned out' of Status Resolution Support Services based on 'job-readiness'. The move not only illustrates the arbitrary nature of immigration policy, which sets people up to fail; it is institutionalised sadism.
Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, NITV re-screened Richard Frankland's 1993 documentary Who Killed Malcolm Smith? Watching it, it became totally clear to me about Manus Island and Nauru. Perhaps as a nation this violence, this contempt of the 'other', is in our DNA.
Is it any wonder that when I came to work in the press gallery I was cynical about arts policy? In those lockup hours scouring budget papers it was clear yet again the arts would not see any wins. It wasn't always this way. Prime ministers and arts ministers of yesteryear produced arts policy informed by their personal and political interest.
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