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No Christian charity (Easter or otherwise) from these men.....

Australia's Age newspaper reveals today (see here) that half of the Australia's Federal Government cabinet is of the Catholic faith.   Hard to reconcile brotherly love and charity said to be part of the credo of these cabinet ministers, with what The Age also publishes today in an article about the absolutely scandalous, callous, inhumane and appalling way in which asylum seekers - which the PM and his Ministers continue to call "illegals" - are treated on Christmas Island, and other detention centres.     One would have thougth that Pope Francis would not be supporting his Catholic brethren's policies and conduct Down Under.

"Christmas Island is a remote island, surrounded on all sides by vast expanses of ocean, and is much closer to Indonesia than mainland Australia. Health services are extremely limited. Despairing at who to turn to, many parents showed us their babies’ symptoms and asked for our help to have them treated. At least one family has been told their baby needs surgery, but so far they have had no word about when that will happen.

The facilities on the island are not adequate to protect the families from Christmas Island’s wildlife. Parents complained of mice in the cabins, the children all had scabs up their limbs from mosquito bites and a few had received the excruciatingly painful bite of poisonous centipedes. Gillian Triggs of the Human Rights Commission recently reported on the misery of children who live in these camps.

It is cruel to detain people without a plan to free them. The only thing the detainees have been told is they will never get a visa to Australia. They have no idea what the government has in store for them, or how long they will be in detention. Will it be months, years, decades? This is torturous for parents of newborns, imagining first steps, first words and who knows how many other firsts all taking place behind bars.

The strangest cruelty of the government’s approach is the ever-present threat of removal to Nauru. The parents understand that, however bad Christmas Island is, Nauru is worse. The UN has described Nauru as inhumane and not fit for children.

For inexplicable reasons, the government’s approach to removing people from the island is horrifyingly heavy handed. I was told detainees are woken at 3 or 4am, given 10 minutes to pack their belongings and frog-marched to a van that takes them to the airport. Just imagine the horror felt by young families, especially those recently escaped from persecution in their homeland. Every night, these parents go to bed in fear of that ominous knock on the door."

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