Every Departing Aircraft to Nauru Or Manus Island Shames Us

Every Departing Aircraft to Nauru Or Manus Island Makes Us More Bankrupt

Media Release
Tuesday April 30, 2013 8:00am WST

"Australia's hideous bipartisan offshore dumping of asylum seekers has once again been exposed by Four Corners, and if there is anything constructive to be said following the program, then it surely must start by pointing the finger at the moral and financial bankruptcy of Gillard's failed offshore processing experiment," WA Human Rights group Project SafeCom said today.

"Right now, while the entire country busies itself with nervously ramping up the sensational news about the enormous and still growing financial hole in the budget, by either blaming the Gillard government, Europe's financial crisis or falling and failing government revenue, we continue to squander, as Four Corners revealed, billions of dollars to punish and torture asylum seekers who arrive at our shores to seek our help - a stupidly misdirected hideous squander of taxpayer funds equivalent to half of the United Nations' Global Human Rights Budget," spokesman Jack H Smit said.

"If there is any guide in the intense applause during the ABC's QandA session following the Four Corners program whenever the panel members or audience questions condemned Australia's asylum seeker treatment, then Australians are sick to death of the political platitudes, sick to death of the manipulative diversions, sick to death of opportunistic blame shifting and sick to death of the heinously constructed rhetoric that underpin our gross detention policies that breach multiple human rights conventions and that brazenly ignore minimum human decency standards, and the thunderous applause during the program tells us something about QandA's (carefully politically weighted) audience response about the way we treat asylum seekers."

"Not only has offshore processing or dumping run its course after the Howard and then the Gillard government have had the brazen callousness to establish camps on Nauru and Manus Island to let people rot away; we now simply cannot afford spending billions of dollars anymore to deal with the relative trickle of asylum seekers in a time where a gaping financial chasm is opening up before Australian taxpayers."

"We need to stop our moral idiocy and start acting like an intelligent country that does its bit in the world community. Boats, also boats organised by smugglers, arrive in many countries, and asylum seeker journeys organised by escrow services are taking place everywhere around the planet. No other country in the world reacts with such disgusting and morally bankrupt policies as Australia does."

"It's time to end the nonsense."

ENDS

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