Two items of interest have tickled the airwaves and triggered some commentary over the last few days. The first was an ABC Four Corners program covering the fate of refugees in the detention facility on Nauru, known euphemistically as a “processing centre” costing $35.3 million a year to the Australian tax payer.
The Four Corners program was, in turn, informed by a significant Amnesty International report, aptly titled Island of Despair, which was released on Monday night. That report examined the rather ghoulish extent the Australian government, with its Nauru satraps, has been going about the business of “processing” boat arrivals.
In the sobering words of the report, Australia’s government had furthered “a policy to deter people arriving by boat” calculated to inflict “intolerable cruelty and the destruction of the physical and mental integrity of hundreds of children, men and children,” an approach “chosen as a tool of government policy.”
As the author and research director for Amnesty, Anna Neistat, noted attendance by refugee children in local schools was poor for one obvious, abysmal point: “No matter how horrible the detention was – and the conditions in detention were – quite a few families and children themselves told me that now they’re in the community, they feel less safe because they’re subjected to attacks by the local population.”
Material had also been supplied by the contractor, Broadspectrum, formerly of…