Our nation has a black and shrivelled soul
TWO nannies working illegally are saved, but a suicidal child gets no such special treatment, writes Paul Syvret. That says it all about Peter Dutton and his Home Affairs department.
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WHEN Peter Dutton intervened directly to prevent the deportation of two young women intending to work in Australia as au pairs (in breach of their tourist visas), presumably our all powerful Home Affairs Minister was thinking of the children.
These would be the children of wealthy families who can afford to provide the room and board, plus a bit of spending money, for a live-in domestic servant who helps with child care duties and other housework. “Polish the Pimms glasses will you dear, and when you’ve put young Archibald Beaumont-Smythe junior to bed, be a pet and see if there’s any of that rather delightful smoked trout left in the main kitchen.”
They certainly wouldn’t be the children of refugee families that our immigration overlord has left rotting in the detention camp in Nauru, or the children of a Sri Lankan family ripped from their beds by Border Force officers, one day after their mother’s protection visa expired.
No. The brand of intervention Dutton and his department apply in such cases is one of brutality and dehumanisation. It is the sort of inhumanity that saw the Home Affairs office fight tooth and nail in the Federal Court this month to prevent the transfer of a suicidal 10- year-old boy — referred to in court documents as AYX18 — from Nauru to Australia for psychiatric care.
The child also has physical issues that his mother does not believe can be dealt with in the hospital on Nauru — a facility that the Government’s own health contractor has ruled as unsafe for surgery.
A psychiatrist’s evidence concluded that the child was “deteriorating significantly with the current care provided on Nauru by (International Health and Medical Services) and the local hospital. I strongly recommend that (AYX18) and his mother are taken to the mainland for reunification with his father and surgical and psychiatric treatment by clinicians specialising in child psychiatry.” (The boy’s father is in immigration detention in Australia.)
This is a child who arrived with his parents as an Iranian asylum seeker in 2013, and was granted refugee status in 2014. He has spent half his life in detention. Suffice to say the judge rejected the Home Affairs argument for a further delay to the case, and ordered the boy be transferred to Australia saying the Government had a “duty of care”.
This would be the same government that raided the family home of Tamil asylum seekers Nadesalingam and Priya and their daughters Dharuniga and Kopiga in Biloela earlier this month. Nadesalingam had been getting ready for his job at the local meatworks, and Priya was warming a baby’s bottle. The parents were handcuffed and loaded into a van for transport to the Broadmeadows detention centre in Melbourne, while the daughters were bundled into another van. They spent a week under guard, and were refused outside contact until they had signed deportation papers.
Only a petition started by local Biloela residents and ultimately signed by tens of thousands of people, and last minute legal intervention, saw them removed from a plane bound for Sri Lanka just minutes before take off. These are the children that Dutton and the increasingly punitive policies of successive governments cast aside as mere collateral damage in the wider war of politics. They are the families, charged with no crime, who are used as human shields to deter other desperate and dispossessed people from seeking asylum on our shores.
This is the “civilised country” that Dutton believes should be giving “special attention” to white South African farmers because of violence in rural communities (affecting both black and whites) in that country.
This is the Minister who says that “it concerns me that people are being persecuted at the moment” ... but only in the context of white residents of a nation that for years suffered under a brutal apartheid regime.
No such public compassion for the countless thousands of Rohingya refugees who have been displaced from their homelands in Myanmar, and certainly no such compassion for the hundreds of asylum seekers — most of whom have been determined to be genuine refugees — left abandoned in Australia’s gulags.
No. And don’t dare to call Dutton out for his racist dog whistling and White Australia policy fantasies, because that just means you are a “crazy lefty” who is peddling “fake news”. In fact these critics, Dutton says, “don’t realise how completely dead they are to me.”
Not, though, as dead as the men who have died from lack of care, or taken their own lives in despair on Manus Island or Nauru.
And certainly not as dead as the black and shrivelled soul of a nation that allows this abuse and degradation to continue.
Bring them here.
Paul Syvret is an assistant editor of The Courier-Mail.
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Originally published as Our nation has a black and shrivelled soul
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