Richard Flanagan writes
Australia's treatment of asylum seekers was bound to lead to something like Border Force
With such actions as Friday’s aborted exercise in police state intimidation, the Abbott government also begins to look in its desperation to cling to power the most dangerous. Perhaps knowingly, perhaps not, they are summoning into existence forces with powers they do not understand and no democracy should allow. These excesses will be a very long time being forgotten ...
... The Liberal party can look forward to decades of living such ignominy down. For the highest purpose of a democratic government is to bring a society together and hold it together, not to divide it with fears, with rumours of wars, with acts of belligerence against other and then against its own. It is not to instil fear on our streets with a paramilitary force run by politicians ...
... Much as the prime minister wishes to distance himself from Friday’s fiasco, he cannot. It is he who created the climate of division, promoted the hysteria and cultivated the hate; who sanctioned the offshore crimes and the lies and legal ruses to hide them; who passed the laws that protected the guilty and punished the innocent and sanctioned the creation of a state paramiltary force to enforce it all. As he said on the day of the inauguration of Border Force: “God bless you, God bless your work.” ...
The forces that for two centuries held nations together are now in eclipse, and new ideas that make a murderous cult in the Middle East more attractive to young Australians than their own society can only be battled by finding new ways of bringing us together, not further dividing us and weakening our sense of ourselves as a society.
A political party needs reminding that they are only that, that it’s our Australia, not theirs, and certainly not their goons. And it’s time we took it back.
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