I was actually posting version two of my Bill of Rights with a few other comments. I got a bit involved in "a few other comments" so the Rights will have to wait till the morning.
Cornelia Rau. It seems so easy on the face of it; the system has clearly let her down, catastrophically. And yet…
Leave aside - for the moment - the legitimacy of detaining refugees. If you do not already, for a moment pretend that mandatory detention is justified. With this in mind, consider the following. Rau seems only to have manifested mental illness - at least grossly so - in the last few years. We can probably assume, with some degree of safety, that she is capable of at least simulating normal social interaction. We can probably also assume, with some certainty since it is well documented, that the police are quite used to suspected illegal aliens being unwilling to divulge their identity, as we know Ms Rau was when first detained in Northern Queensland. It is possibly justifiable that the police did not immediately leap to the conclusion that Ms Rau was mentally ill; we cannot justify failing to look her up on the missing persons lists.
Once she was sent to detention, she was examined and her mental illness was not identified. Possibly we can justify this; as above, she may well have been able to simulate normal social interaction. We can probably find some way of justifying refugee welfare groups
not
ignoring her when she refused assistance; there are so many refugees to assist. We can't by any means defend the lack of action when she finally made it to the distraught, incoherent, incapable woman eating dirt that she was at the end of her stay in the camp.
Except you probably picked up on all those suppositions, which is kind of the point, isn't it. Because we don't fucking know. And yet, somehow, it is not a given that the inquiry will be public. The Government and their shills are trying to claim a public inquiry would violate Rau's privacy. The shills trotting out concerns for Ms Rau's privacy are cloaking their reactive defence of a program they approve of with hypocrisy; the same people are invariably - and I am sure there are exceptions - the same people who tell us that there are worse things to worry about than identity cards; that Habib has no claim to privacy from an intrusive government despite a marked lack of conviction; that Ms Rau wouldn't be deserving of privacy if she really had been fresh off the boat from Germany. I am sorry for Ms Rau and I sympathise with her if she would appreciate not having the intimate details of her mental wellbeing discussed in a public inquiry; yet that should not even be the subject of the inquiry. The subject has to be a through examination of a system that allowed this to happen; a system that seems setup in a way that has no safeguards against this.
I can argue that we the public are hardly going to be surprised to discover that Ms Rau is mentally ill, but that is missing the point. The point is that the entire system has failed, a system that is arguably the single most controversial government program in Australia at this time. When it fails, espicially when it fails so spectacularly, so catastrophically and so thoroughly, the Government must
not
be allowed to take an Inquiry behind closed doors. The public has a right to an transparent process. The public must demand a transparent process. Anything less is a disgrace.
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