Another revelation

It’s only so often I have a revelatory experience.

The last big one was some time after the Stolen Generations report when I realised the horror of a government’s self-defence in the face of the report. I had recently become a parent so I knew the intensity of parenthood. No longer could I accept so easily that parents were so careless of their children. I could perhaps accept a few, but not whole generations of parents. I remain dubious of bureaucracy interposing itself in the place of parents who reportedly don’t care for their kids. I just feel the bonds of parenthood are likely to be far stronger than those of social workers or bureaucrats or especially politicians. To argue that generations of aboriginal parents cared so little for their kids is unbelievable. Similarly, to argue that parents throw kids overboard in the middle of the ocean is dubious. And we saw how that story turned out to be a furphy in the end.

Today I had another revelatory experience when I heard on the news that two kids were incorrectly taken into immigration custody 4 months ago. The scene was out of fascist textbooks. Government agents come to a school unexpectedly, and remove 2 kids, aged about 10 or 11, from the classroom, and take them to a detention camp. The mother is also taken into custody at the airport, as I remember. It was a ghastly and difficult story to take at the time, and even then I was uncomfortable. Now, after 4 months of detention, and today’s release, the revelation of inhumanity of all this immigration control business hits me square in the forehead. A strange coincidence it is, too, that it follows a report into immigration botch-ups (which is damning despite its limited terms of reference). And I understand there are still 199 cases to be investigated. Would this release have happened without this report, or the threat of more investigations? I may be slow, but the coin has flipped now. Rationalise all you like. I’m a lost soul on this one, as I am on so many other emotive stories of this government.