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Many of the increased number of boat arrivals are families with children, driven to travel together because of the long delay in processing. To save children from dying at sea we drive more children to risk dying at sea, then inflict more indignities on them when they arrive. It is not a policy to be proud of.
It is time for each side of politics to stop blaming the other for the increasing wave of boats and for Gillard to cease invoking the unreal prospect of a revised Malaysia Solution. A revised arrangement consistent with the recommendations of the Expert Panel is an impossibility before the election.
While the Government deserves some credit for its decision to transfer pregnant women from the PNG detention centre to Australia, and for refraining from sending children under the age of seven to the facility, the fact remains that it has embraced and entrenched many of the Coalition cruelties that in 2007 it promised to end.
The ad hoc nature of arrangements for asylum seekers in Nauru and PNG reveal that priorities are being determined by election dates rather than respect for human dignity and international human rights laws. The latest Coalition idea to interdict boats from Sri Lanka outside our territorial waters and send them back is particularly ill-considered.
Many Catholic preachers groan when it comes to preaching on Jesus' strong judgment on divorce. But this text is not primarily about sex but about justice in relationships. It calls into question the use of power and law on Nauru and Manus Island as much as in the family home.
You can tell bad policy making by the trail of broken human lives it leaves behind it. The image of asylum seekers held in tents on Nauru, many on hunger strike and at least one now in risk of death, will surely be followed by images of people withering from depression and resentment and needing medical care.
'Even without the political static which is drowning us all out down there in Canberra, there is real doubt whether the Gillard bluff 'Don't get on a boat because you might end up in Nauru' can do what the Howard bluff could not deliver.' Full text from Fr Frank Brennan SJ's Law and Justice Oration at the Law and Justice Foundation 2012 Justice Awards Dinner, Parliament House, Sydney.
In politics, hypocrisy is a natural condition. On Tuesday, it became evident that refugee policy is the last thing that should be made by the Australian government. Gillard has now achieved something Howard could only dream of, and shown Labor can play the game of hypocrisy as well as any.
193-200 out of 200 results.