Illegal Immigrants Eh?

<div class="IPBDescription">Stolen generations.....</div> Here is an article I recently read by a man who is coming to impress me more and more - one right wing journalist by the name of Andrew Bolt, whose material is not so impressive as it is unique, given the savage anti-war/left wing bias appearing in Australian media. It is basically a defence of the governments policy of imprisioning Illegal Immigrants, and the handling of "reports" into those matters.

Opinions? I'm really hoping to hear from Australians on this one as well (especially if your name happens to start with R and have a hyphen in it) - we have our "evil and racist" past hammered home to us constantly by the media, indeed even the Brits seem to be getting in on the act, so I'm wondering if anyone has any criticism of this article.

<a href='http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,9614412%255E25717,00.html' target='_blank'>Presumed guilty</a>

<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Presumed guilty
By ANDREW BOLT
21may04

First it was the "Stolen Generation", now it's kids in detention -- the assumption we're guilty unless we can prove otherwise.

ONCE again the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has found us guilty of evil in a kangaroo court.
But forget "justice" -- see the splashy results last week of HREOC's inquiry into how the children of illegal immigrants were damaged by our detention centres.

I mean headlines such as "Release children, report says" and "Young detainees suffered mental problems". Or this one, from London's Left-wing Guardian, only too keen to revel in the wickedness of Australians: "Cruelty to child migrants."

Hello? Migrants?

But how can HREOC, our top watchdog, preach to us about justice when it can't even run a fair hearing?

HREOC should have learned from the uproar over its 1997 Bringing Them Home report into the "stolen generations".

Bringing Them Home was the result of a HREOC inquiry which didn't just rewrite history and distort a crucial survey to grossly exaggerate the number of children who were "stolen".

Worse, it let witness after witness stay anonymous as they told of being stolen as children by racist whites, making it impossible to check their allegations against the facts -- not that there was much attempt to do so. Indeed, some eye-witnesses who tried to give the other side of the story were literally shut out.

But the results of this inquiry were also spectacular, with big headlines about our racism and genocide.

The trouble was that whenever the report's lurid anecdotes were tested in a real court, they collapsed. Lorna Cubillo, Joy Williams and Peter Gunner all lost test cases for compensation, once their claims were judged against the facts.

Now even stolen generations propagandist Professor Robert Manne admits the anecdotes presented as fact in Bringing Them Home were "unreliable", and the report contains "greatly exaggerated" claims.

But far from being ashamed of how it ran that inquiry, HREOC made some of the same mistakes all over again in its new inquiry into children in detention.

As it admits (to its credit) in its final report, A Last Resort? some of the most emotional evidence it relied on this time -- allegations of cruelty from children who had been detained -- had "certain weaknesses" and "potential difficulties". The same is true of the evidence of many other witnesses.

Its report concedes that HREOC once more let witnesses, including all the children, give evidence on a "confidential basis". In fact, "the inquiry heard 50 persons in 24 confidential sessions, including former detainees, former detention centre staff and non-government organisations".

So even activists could say what they liked in private, without being held to account. The children in particular "were not subject to cross-examination".

Yes, once again HREOC did little to test the evidence of those accusing this country of cruelty, admitting that "the substance of many of the allegations could not be disclosed to the (Immigration) Department or (the detention centre managers) with sufficient detail to allow them to properly respond ..."

In fact, the way HREOC ran the inquiry seemed guaranteed to produce the wildest of allegations.

Because the children were prompted into telling their stories in focus groups organised by trauma agencies, for example, the inquiry conceded their claims "may have been the result of peer distortion", adding that some "contained limited detail or were based on hearsay or general impressions".

It wasn't just the children who were allowed to make emotive, anonymous and uncheckable allegations. The inquiry admitted that many witnesses and activists who privately gave evidence held "strong views" on our policy of detaining illegal immigrants, and "there was often considerable discrepancy in the various versions of events presented to the inquiry".

But HREOC's cosseting ended when the witnesses from the Government and the detention centre managers turned up. Then the inquiry "employed the services of a barrister in the role of 'inquiry counsel' " to grill them.

So how could HREOC commissioner Sev Ozdowski and his two assistant commissioners sort truth from falsehood when they often relied on anonymous accusations from passionate activists and former detainees against officials often unable to argue back?

Yes, hard, they admitted. Relying on so many anonymous witnesses "had an impact on the extent to which the inquiry is able to transparently reveal the factual foundations underpinning some of its conclusions".

But the bottom line? Trust us. We "carefully assessed all of the evidence".

Maybe they did, and some of the criticisms in this report of 925 pages do seem justified. What's more, it is harsh to lock up children, and it's good there are now few left in our mainland detention centres.

But -- bottom line -- what were the options? Release the children into this strange society without their parents? Or release them with their parents, perhaps to vanish, and so encourage more families of asylum seekers to once more try their luck in the leaky boats of the people smugglers, at whose hands hundreds did drown until the Government got tough?

The choices aren't so easy as HREOC suggests. But its glibness is not the only reason to ask if the inquiry truly has "carefully assessed" the allegations that our detention centres hurt children.

I say that because A Last Resort? discusses four cases at length -- and I know two rather well, and also know what HREOC failed to tell us about them. One turns out to be that of the famous Bakhtiyari family, the Pakistanis who falsely claim to be Afghan refugees and fought 18 legal actions at our expense to avoid being sent back home.

The HREOC report does not identify this family, or tell us they're fake refugees. It doesn't tell us the only reason the Bakhtiyaris have spent three years in detention (costing us more than $500,000) is that they refuse to go back to Pakistan.

Nor does the report make clear that the real reason the Bakhtiyari boys missed their father so badly may well be because he preferred not to visit them in detention when he was free, and refused for months to be transferred to join them at the Woomera centre when he was finally detained himself in Sydney.

And, of course, the report does not ask whether some of the stress the family said it felt may have been another ploy to be allowed to stay. Instead, every bad thing the family feels is blamed on our wicked detention centres.

It's the same story when HREOC talks about Shayan Badraie, the Iranian boy who was said to be almost catatonic with the fear and stress of living in detention.

It does seem that poor Shayan suffered badly, and I'm glad he's out. But A Last Resort? should at least have mentioned that his plight may have been made worse by his father taking him from his natural mother in Iran, and by his stepmother giving birth in this new country to a rival for his family's attention.

HREOC could also have asked whether it was his father, who angrily confronted guards and morbidly clung to the son who was his passport to our sympathy, who so aggravated his son's stress. Untold is that Shayan always bloomed when he was taken from his family for treatment.

Likewise, the report never asks whether the trauma detained children suffered from seeing the adults around them riot, slash themselves, sew their lips and their children's, fight, threaten suicide, burn down buildings or jump into barbed wire could also be blamed at least in part on those adults themselves.

It certainly never asks that rude question that Prime Minister John Howard is so criticised for having once asked: Do we really want such people here?

Again: A Last Resort? does have good lessons for us, and is written by decent people who mean well.

But the way HREOC ran this inquiry -- again using dodgy rules to produce dodgy evidence to support a pet cause -- should alarm anyone who values fairness and the search for truth
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->