In 1992 Paul Keating - he of the Australian Labor Party - established the first concentration camp to hold asylum seekers fleeing conditions in their countries of origin too unspeakable for most of us to be able to contemplate.
20 years later and the demonisation continues apace with most Australians conditioned by their media and politicians to believe that people fleeing terror are somehow criminals come to take their land away from them.
It occurs to some of us that most of the 22 or 23 million people now residing in this country are/were asylum seekers/refugees from somewhere where life was running the gamut of appalling to impossible.
Since white settlement in Australia from 1788 onwards in the country stolen from the original inhabitants who were murdered and enslaved in such significant numbers that there is but a small fraction remaining of the original aboriginal population, the settlers have been involved in wars and campaigns of a military nature in vast numbers of countries.
The wars being fought in countries with which Australia did not have basic problems and from which there were no threats to the sovereignty or security of Australia have been the cause of thousands of desperate people fleeing the murders and rapes of their countries and themselves, and they have attempted to find safe haven in any countries which provided them with shelter, food, employment and the chance of survival.
So here we sit in a land of plenty with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and we are doing our best to ensure drownings at sea of desperate people will continue while we continue wars in their countries.
WILL AUSTRALIANS NEVER LEARN, WAKE UP AND STOP LISTENING TO THEIR POLITICIANS AND MEDIA AND START BEHAVING AS HUMAN BEINGS? WHERE DID THEY ALL COME FROM???
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