Vivian Solon, found weak and ill.
Photo: ABC
Michelle Grattan (good to see the big guns running with this issue) reports in The Age that “Vivian Solon, the Australian wrongly deported four years ago, has been found - alive but weak and ill in a hospice in the Philippines town of Olongapo, north of Manila.
Ms Solon, feared dead by her family, walks with a stick and spends most of her time in bed, according to Father Mike Duffin, who has cared for her.
In an extraordinary development, Father Duffin recognised Ms Solon as the woman he had been looking after when he saw ABC satellite news carrying reports about the search for her in Australia. He described it to the ABC's Lateline last night as "a miracle".
"They mentioned her name... As soon as they said Vivian, I said 'that's our Vivian'." The woman is also known as Vivian Alvarez.
The search began recently after the mother of two's mistaken deportation in 2001 was discovered. Although only in her early 40s, she is in a ward of elderly people, many of them dying, according to Father Duffin.
Father Duffin, an Australian priest based in the Philippines, said he was surprised the Government had not been able to find Ms Solon "because they are the ones who told her before she left Australia that she was coming to the Mother Teresa sisters.
"When they brought her, they left her with the Mother Teresa sisters... I find it very hard (to believe) that the Government don't know where they left her. Do they have no records?"”
Defending the indefensible has fallen to Senator Vanstone, who seemed to have her cage rattled by Tony Eastley this morning on AM.
Tony had the temerity to make the facetious throw way line that DIMIA officials might have dropped Vivian off while the car was still moving. Demonstrating her usual subtlety, Vanstone took immediate offence and no doubt castigated ABC management on her way out of the studio, leaving Tony to apologize that he did not infer DIMIA officials ill-treated Vivian.
Actually, the ill-treatment of Vivian beggars belief if you do not have insight into the mentality of officialdom trying to implement the abusive tactics of the government. It does’nt surprise me at all, and I fully sympathize with Tony’s throw away comment. The real offence is the sense that Vivian was pushed off a precipice without a parachute.
I hope our best political cartoonists are sharpening the quill this morning.
In her Web Diary Margot Kingston reports on the Senate censure motion against Vanstone. It reads like an epitaph for ministerial accountability.
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