Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Sharman Stone was soft on Asylum Seekers

One of those moments where you wonder where some people will stop. Sharman Stone, apparently, was trying to steer a middle course between moderates and "the Right" on this issue.

....?!?

If she was the voice of moderation, I owe her an apology for streams of vitriol already hurled at my TV set. There I was thinking this woman must eat babies for breakfast, and in fact she was a moderate, possibly even being forced to run a harder line than her own conscience preferred?

Well, apologies to Sharman, I'm sure it's not biologically possible that you are some of the things I called you anyway. But what exactly do The Right want? The Right who are now in the ascendency, apparently responsible for dumping Sharman from her post. What do they want to do to refugees that she wasn't already advocating?

Do they want to kill them? I'm being serious, there's not much left. Do they want us to finally, once and for all, dump the Convention itself and its core rule of non refoulement? Just send people back to war zones, overt oppression, torture, genocide, whatevs?

Go back to picking out the white ones?

Or just burn the boats and shoot them in the water? I mean, Sharman was basically banging on about how Rudd's policy, which still uses offshore detention, is too soft. If she was a pinko by the standards of something called "the Right" that's apparently even further to the right, what exactly do they want?

I can't wait to find out. Race and security politics, the high water mark of Australian civilisation.

1 comment:

Elisabeth said...

I think you're right, Armagnac. 'Eating babies', namely eating the vulnerable, crushing already crushed spirits is about the sum of it and it can't get much worse or much more right than it already is.