Thursday, October 20, 2005

The Unknown Story of Cornelia Rau: Robert Manne

A friend has brought an excellent article by Robert Manne to my attention. Click on the September Edition of The Monthly for the full article. Following is an excerpt:

"In the history of the Australian Commonwealth, there has never been a more devastating assessment of the work of a major department of state than the one contained in the Palmer report.

Only two elements were odd. The responsibility in this mess of the immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, was not discussed. For the department’s failings only its secretary Bill Farmer, before being moved sideways to the Indonesian ambassadorship, formally shouldered blame. Upon the release of the Palmer report, the prime minister rejected calls for the replacement of Vanstone. Apparently, in our system of government, a minister does not have to resign even when systemic and disastrous failings in the department for which they are responsible are revealed. In the constitutional history of Australia, the Howard government’s behaviour following the Palmer inquiry will be seen to mark the formal end of the Westminster principle of ministerial responsibility.

An even odder feature of the Palmer report was its failure to discuss the relationship between the diseased culture of the immigration department and the policy which had given rise to the disease – mandatory, unreviewable and indefinite detention of asylum seekers, whose only crime was to have appealed to Australia for help. It was as if, to deploy an admittedly extreme analogy, an independent inquiry into the Gulag Archipelago should have criticised fiercely the “culture” of the Ministry of the Interior without mentioning that this same culture had some connection with the policy of turning supposed class enemies of the revolution into slave labourers of the Soviet state."

I recommend this article to anyone interested in why some of us are get so 'worked up' over mandatory detention.

1 comment:

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