Oh Australia, my dear birth country, what on earth has happened to you? As a kid I remember you being a country that welcomed immigrants, cause come on, with the exception of the Aboriginals, we were all immigrants, some had just been here a bit longer than others. However, as I got older you gradually became more and more, well, racist. You started to lock up refugees and asylum seekers, some for years on end, including kids and then pretended to act all shocked when they dared to protest about it. Then under the Howard government, we started to export our asylum seekers to a tiny island in the Pacific for what was called Off-Shore Processing but it was just a solution to deny them access to the Australian legal system. I really thought with the Labor party gaining power back in 2007 that we would start to see more humanity being shown. I cheered when the processing station at Naru was closed down and there became a real effort to process refugees more quickly and you started to refuse to lock up kids.
However, then something changed. Things got dark again. When I left your fair shores in 2010 I saw two immigrants one from Wales and one from England from the opposite sides of parliament trying to outdo each other in making the treatment of refugees worse. The Welsh woman won. The woman from the supposedly liberal political party.
Now when I read the news, I’m glad I no longer live in Australia. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I’m ashamed of you. Your policies towards refugees are inhumane. So inhumane in fact that even the conservative party, the guys who invented off-shore processing, are protesting against it. Gillard, when it become okay to show cruelty towards people who want what your parents wanted – a better life for their children in Australia? These people have lost everything, but instead of processing their asylum claims fairly and quickly, you are rewriting Australian law to make it legal to export them to Malaysia which has a terrible human rights record. These people will not receive fair treatment there in massively overpopulated refugee camps and you are well aware of this. You simply do not care. Is this is what Australia has become now? A nation that simply does not care about anyone but themselves? If this is the case, perhaps it’s best that I never return.
Related articles
- Australia refugee deal ‘illegal’ – BBC News (news.google.com)
- High Court rules Australia cannot send asylum seekers to Malaysia (cnn.com)
- Govt blasts Abbott over asylum seekers (news.theage.com.au)
- Left takes on PM over asylum seekers (news.theage.com.au)
