Today seems as good a day as any to remind everyone what Sydney Morning Herald columnist David
Marr had to say about Petro Georgiou and the asylum seeker issue, in a
valedictory piece written on the occasion of Petro’s farewell speech to the
Parliament (see Marr’s original piece, Last
hurrah with a liberal dose of passion, published in the 4 June 2010
edition, here).
On Georgiou’s approach to asylum seekers Marr wrote:
After 35 years in
politics, Georgiou had come to see he was wrong to believe in the inevitability
of progress.
"The reality
has been that many of the things that I believed were embedded parts of our
polity - multiculturalism, inclusive Australian citizenship, the protections of
civil rights - have been rolled back. Also rolled back has been a more decent
treatment of asylum seekers," he said.
…
"This chapter
had seen men, women and children seeking refuge in our country incarcerated;
innocent people imprisoned for periods longer than convicted rapists, robbers
and kidnappers. Escapees from persecution were demonised. Detention centres
traumatised not just detainees but their guards. That chapter has been
reopened. Regression has become the order of the day."
Hasn’t it just.
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