How we treat child refugees says a lot about us as a nation. We’re on a downhill slide, says Graham Macafee, and the prospects are we’ll end up with unthinkable cruelty to children, whereas now we’re just plain cruel, inflicting on children the type of tyranny that refugees are fleeing.
Refugee policy: long march into tyranny
By Graham Macafee *
On Australia’s long march from democracy into tyranny, paradoxes abound.
Prime Minister Rudd apologised for what he didn’t do: Kidnap and mistreat Aboriginal children. Nor did he kidnap and transport British children (like convicted felons) to cruel Australian institutions. But he apologised for it.
Prime Minister Gillard apologised for what she didn’t do – steal children from single mothers and give them to married women.
But Rudd and Gillard have not apologised for what they did do: kidnap refugee children on the high seas and imprison them. Robbers and rapists get a judge, jury, bail, trial and sentence length, but kidnapped children don’t. The children get the most feared sentence in colonial Australia: an indefinite governor’s pleasure sentence.
Read my lips Gillard and Abbott: There is no such thing as an illegal or illegitimate child. Those terms were coined by warped minds to justify crimes against humanity.
It gets worse:
Like a Bristol or Memphis slave-trader of yore, Gillard wants to trade the children she kidnaps for the children that Malaysia kidnaps. To deter refugees, Labor will excise Australia from Australia leaving what: ocean waves and a sign that says Terra Aqueous?
Will Gillard or Abbott apologise for their respective party’s crimes against humanity? Why should they when opinion polls reveal that a majority of voters are racists, rednecks or bigots.
All that’s missing for Australia to be Nazi Germany circa 1942 (for asylum seekers) is starvation and gas chambers. If Labor and Liberal polling said most voters wanted gas chambers, Gillard and Abbott are so poll-mad, they could do it. If opinion polls said ‘flog refugees’ (like Malaysia does) they could risk it rather than risk losing racist votes.
The British call mandatory detention ‘internment’, which also means ‘being buried alive’. Whatever you may think of America’s Guantanamo Bay offshore prison, they don’t bury children alive in it. We do, in our offshore and onshore prisons.
The Bible says about child abusers: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he was cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”
What happened to Fair Go Australia? It died of shame. The Anzacs died in vain. Canberra’s new ASIO building rivals Stalin’s Lubyanka.
We’re a police state driven by racism, fear and hate. Only a miracle can save us from the tyranny that refugees fled.
ENDS
* Graham Macafee is a retired journalist and government public relations officer. A member of Civil Liberties Australia, he blogs and produces videos at: http://www.radiograham.info