2 November, 2016 12:15
CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Despite the fact that he invented the concept of mandatory and indefinite detention for Asylum Seekers, Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has launched a scathing criticism of the Turnbull Government’s “attempt to appease the mad right” of the Liberal Party.
On Sunday, the Coalition said it would introduce new laws into Parliament that would introduce a lifetime ban on all visas for asylum seekers who have attempted to come to Australia by boat, even if they are genuine refugees and seek to come as tourists decades later.
“It’s bloody pathetic,” said the reborn champion of human rights.
“Sure, I opened the Nauru Detention Centre in the lead up to the 2013 election, but that was just for processing – and poll numbers”
“I had no idea those people would still be sitting there, lighting themselves on fire and going on hunger strikes,”
Although his advice seems hypocritical considering the fact that he ran anti-boat people ads in Newslimited publication leading into his last failed bid at Prime Ministership, this isn’t the first time Kevin Rudd has told offered wisdom from the luxury of his armchair.
In 2007, Rudd came good on a pre-election promise to apologise to The Stolen Generations, only to introduce the Northern Territory Intervention less than a year later – a blanket government approach to closing the gap in Indigenous communities – and one that saw hundreds of kids once again removed from their parents and placed in juvenile detention centres like Don Dale.
“Howard should have been nicer to Aboriginal people” he declares.
“I said that in 2007 and I stand by it. Sure, record numbers of kids were placed in juvenile hall under my Prime Ministership, but at least their parents could visit them.”
Rudd says Turnbull is very close to veering to Howard-era consveratism.
“Turnbull shouldn’t listen to Pauline Hanson. Or the right-wing of the LNP… Or my close supporters in the right-wing of the ALP”
The proposed ban would apply to all adults detained at the Manus Island or Nauru detention centres from July 19, 2013, when Mr Rudd said anyone seeking to come to Australia without a visa would never settle here.
