Yesterday a journalist sidled up to me at the latest Melbourne Federal Circuit Court matter relating to the Biloela family and said “Morrison has just spoken out; he’s not going to intervene”.
After a short pause they lowered their voice even further and said, “Dutton won’t stop lashing out now, I wonder if…”
They trailed off but the tone was familiar; as was the resigned posture, the ashen face, the fear.
It took a second before it clicked: what I was seeing, what I was hearing, what I was recognising. This is how people who live with bullies behave. This is the endless guesswork and magical thinking that goes into avoiding a thrashing. The hyper-vigilance and the pointless internal bargaining.
Moments later a member of the public approached me and asked a question I’ve heard a lot in the last few days: “Do you think New Zealand could take them? Could you ask?”
Last week I would have made a joke if a stranger asked me to pull strings to shelter asylum seeker families from the Australian government, but that was before last Thursday night when I saw two little girls screaming on a plane at Melbourne airport.
We hear about deportation and the threat asylum seekers face all the time. Usually it’s in reference to nameless, faceless people. But these are those people. And this is exactly what deportation looks like. #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/VsWCasH8BJ
— The Project (@theprojecttv) August 30, 2019
This week it seems an entirely reasonable gambit that I give old mate NZ deputy PM Winston Peters a call and ask him to do me a solid and save some little girls I know.
That’s how you start thinking when you try to do a deal with a bully.
Of course, it didn’t need to go this way. The Australian government had many options on how to handle the Biloela family starting in March last year — most of which did not involve institutional child abuse.
Instead of a pre-dawn raid that ripped infants from their beds, the government could have left the family in their home while all legal avenues were explored. This would have saved taxpayers the more than $2 million that detaining them in Melbourne has cost (jet fuel and private plane charter costs not included).
If the family had been left in their Biloela home while legal matters were on foot then their father Nades could have continued working and paying taxes, two-year-old Tharunicaa would have healthy baby teeth, and Priya would have had the surgery she required. All four of them would have incurred 100% less trauma from being removed from their community and held in internationally condemned detention facilities.
When the government decided that this family were in fact a risk to Australia’s border security, they could have been shifted to a community detention facility. Nades would have lost his job, but at least the family wouldn’t have had Serco guards in their house 24/7. The girls would have been allowed to attend play group regularly rather than just the two times they were taken in the last 18 months of their lives.
If they had been left in their home then Tharunicaa would not have sustained a head injury while playing in a room not designed for toddlers, and this week her life-long friend and fellow detained toddler Isabella wouldn’t be crying and constantly asking where her friends have gone.
If Peter Dutton doesn’t feel the government has a duty to act on all that, he should at least feel a duty to his own words: he has previously claimed that all children have been taken out of detention.
Maintaining strong borders shouldn’t mean we have no boundaries.
If only they’d been Pentecostals or au pairs… This is thinly veiled bigotry, discrimination and racism deliberately clouded by an imperfect bureaucracy and a feigned shrug of the shoulders. All of which white male religious types, are the masters. Soooo many different options but nah, let’s just fuckem over ’cause we can.
Too right. Where all the Coal-ition donors that sponsor this government?
Any one of them could be approaching a member of the government (Dutton for a start) to ‘sponsor’ the family? That’s been done before.
One would think one could never have too many (white & Christian?) gardeners, ostlers, au pairs, down-stairs scullery maids, or even Grooms of the Stool?
Couldn’t they make an exception too?
[And just in passing, does this “Tamil family” have a family name? If they do, no one (in the media) seems to use it – what’s the go there?]
Even were New Zealand to agree to take this family (and I am certain Ardern would) Morrison and Dutton and Coleman would not be able to find it in within themselves to agree – that after all would be opening the back door to these dreadful criminal, terrorists with all the resultant problems that would bring! This government is foul and does not have any means left to clean itself
Didn’t I read somewhere that Dutton ‘s wife said he wasn’t a monster. What planet is she from. As a mother how can she condone his behaviour?
It’s bastardry, pure and simple.
Ah! The intoxicating electoral allure of the heady mixture of incompetence and evil.