Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

Prolonged detention was and is harmful, no matter who the government is. But I think some of the build of concern and outrage was cumulative, rather than solely partisan – it took people a while to really just how serious the harm was that was being caused. In many cases it took the travesty of the Tampa to really make people think the whole thing had gone too far.

Anyway, I won’t go on more about it here. I must get back to stopping people from saying ‘tribe’ (apparently)

You’ll note that my primary post comment concerning Harry’s post specifically noted “leaving aside the Pacific Solution”. However, you’re correct to point out that the Howard government also introduced temporary protection visas and some other discriminatory measures against refugees after they’d been granted visas. However, my main point stands. The Hawke/Keating detention regime was just as harsh as Howard’s. I’m unconvinced that the private American firm was measurably harsher than the previous APS regime, although I’ve not studied the research closely. Certainly however, seeking judicial or merits review of the conduct of the private operators was much harder/impossible (although HREOC found it just as hard to get letters to detention centre inmates under the APS regime under the Keating government). Moreover, the Howard government belatedly liberalised the detention regime for families (something Hawke/Keating never did), albeit only under pressure from Petro Georgiou and other liberal Liberals.

However, I still think it’s unfair to say that Howard’s policies were “essentially indistinguishable” from Hawke/Keating. Firstly, while Labor enabled TPVs, Pacific Solution, etc, they didn’t initiate it. Secondly, the Rudd government has closed down the Pacific Solution (albeit whlie keeping Xmas Island open) and has a clear promise to scrap TPVs. Thirdly, whilst Hawke/Keating initiated mandatory detention (and were no better than Ruddock in some of the rhetoric they used to prime the public for the so-called ‘necessity’ of it), the worst abuses in detention occured in the Howard era – particuarly the extremes the government went to (and the private prison firms who were contracted to run the detention centres) to prevent adequate care being provided to serioulsy ill detainees.

In the same way, the original point Harry attempted to make in the post originally linked to is flawed. He was only trying to score a cheap partisan political point anyway, so being wrong doesn;t matter much in itself, but on an issue as socially and historically signifcant as our migration laws, I think its important not to let misunderstandings get too deeply entrenched.

Most of the braindead Luvvies under 30 are totally clueless about all this because their dopey Culture/Gender Studies classes think Ancient History means 1998 and their “Legal Studies” teachers do not teach Ancient Law BM – Before Mabo.

However, NPOV is certainly wrong if he imagines that the Howard government’s detention regime was somehow harsher and more harmful than that of the Hawke/Keating government. Detaining families for years in remote detention facilities is equally conducive of serious psychological harm whatever the ostensible political orientation of the government presiding over it. In fact Baxter is if anything slightly less unpleasant (and less remote) than the old Port Headland and Woomera centres that preceded it. This study conducted for HREOC surveys international and Australian research into the psychological and other effects on children in detention between 1991 and 2001. It doesn’t suggest that the Howard government’s regime was harsher or more productive of adverse pshcyological effects. Certainly (and at the risk of giving unnecessary encouragement to RWDBs) the mainstream media concentrated on publicising these adverse effects much more intensively under the Howard government than they had under Hawke and Keating, but that may say more about the MSM than about the quality of the respective detention regimes.