For your information Marilyn and DLC I’ll have you know I’m a salamander. Turn up the heat.

Last night a programme on would be migrants with mental problems who are being treated by the Australian authorities. Some have been moved to private hospitals in Queensland from Baxter.
In Sydney and most other capitals ,there are soup kitchens for homeless Australians with mental problems.
No private hospitals for them, only where ever they can find shelter for the night.
No lawyers wanting millions of dollars for them, no refugee activists, no television recognition. Just the street and soup kitchens.
They are only Australians so they do not matter.
Now if they were foreigners, they would be entitled to everything.

Hey Mickijo, how many Australians are locked up for 5 years or so without charge, behind electric fences and without genuine recourse to legal rights?

What's that you say? Well Vivian Alvarez was and the government still refuse to compensate her, Cornelia Rau was and the same answer.

It is Baxter that drives people insane, so why make them better and then send them back? They have committed no crime you know, these foreigners.

I'm open for suggestions. How do we decide who is and who isn't a refugee? And, while we are deciding, how do we prevent non-refugees from disappearing in our society? I'm not going to advocate our current system, but I have not yet heard a better idea.

The thing is, we need to process the refugees. If we didn't - if we just accepted everyone's claim of refugee status, then anyone could come here and say they are suffering persecution back home. And while we are processing the refugees, we need to know where they are. Until we find a better way (and I have no doubt there is a better way), locking them up seems to be the most straightforward option. If locking them up subjects them to unnecessary trauma, one should question how traumatic their experiences in their homeland - the experiences that made them leap on a boat and come here - really were.

Historic Factors Leading to the Rise of Fascist States:

1) Massive public investment in the military-industrial complex;

2) Expansion of global influence through military conflict / occupation / acquisition of resources;

3) Ownership and control of the media and information outlets by the ruling elite;

4) Growing disparities between economic classes, with a greater consolidation of wealth among the ruling elite;

5) Suppression of labor movements and workers' rights initiatives;

6) Diminution of individual civil rights (usually under a pre-text of fear) and intolerance for dissenting points of view;

7) Subversion or elimination of democratic election processes.

8) Powerful and continuing Nationalism

9) Disdain for the recognition of Human Rights

10) Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause

11) Obsession with crime and punishment

Be patient.

We're almost there - only a couple left to go...

For heavens sake we don't have to lock up refugees to know where they are, that is just another of Ruddock's spurious bits of rot.

Tens of thousands of asylum seekers have come to Australia and have never been locked up. Do you know that even if they did "disappear" into the community there were only ever 4,000 people in the busiest year.

Would anyone notice apart from the fact that they would be begging.

As for the argument that if they are traumatised in detention life at home couldn't be too bad? What planet do you live on? If people are tortured, then make a hair raising and dangerous escape risking death only to be locked up they would certainly be re-traumatised.

In fact the refugees who managed to get off Nauru and to New Zealand and Australia were found to be 4 times more traumatised than the average case load.

As for how we decide, we have a full set of laws to do that.