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Carelesness, ruthlessness and arrogance

As Adele Horin writes in the SMH today:

"An out-of-control Department of Immigration is the legacy of John Howard's and Philip Ruddock's ruthlessness and Amanda Vanstone's casualness. Their combined efforts over a decade have created a culture in which at least 247 people, many of them Australian citizens or permanent residents, have been wrongly locked up in Villawood, Curtin or Baxter detention centres, or deported. We know that the Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez Solon cases are the tip of an iceberg."

Horin instances this as an example of a Government department totally out of control:

"We don't know much about the 15-year-old boy known as HS, or his mother. We can only imagine the mother's fears when her son did not come home for two days. Unbeknown to her, Australian immigration officers had carted the boy off to an immigration detention centre in the mistaken belief he was an illegal immigrant. They apparently did not contact the mother. It turned out the boy had a perfectly valid visa, and had lived here for seven years.

The personal details are scant in the Commonwealth Ombudsman's reports on 20 cases of wrongful immigration detention released this week. But they are chilling: a child is locked up by government officials because of a computer glitch. Wrong data is on the files. No charge or court order is required to put him away, and no parent need be notified. Criminals are treated better, with more respect for their rights and due process."

Where is the accountability? - let alone the outrcry the actions of the Howard Government and its Ministers and Departments each deserve. Is it that we are all so callous and concerned about out hip pocket nerve that we really don't care?

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