ASYLUM SEEKERS AND THE DEPTHS OF DESPAIR

When I lived in South Africa during the apartheid years I desperately wanted to get myself and my family out of South Africa. I was, in fact, an asylum seeker in the 1970s. The basic difference between my situation and that of current day asylum seekers around the world was that I had a few advantages which were in my favour and so was much luckier than today's hundreds and thousands who are fleeing in desperate circumstances with no advantages other than a desperate desire to get out of their state of persecution and oppression and torture to a country - any country - which will let them in and allow them to have a safe home for themselves and their families.

I was a white, English speaking, qualified professional with other personal advantages in my favour, and therefore able to gain admission into Australia, which, in 1978 seemed such a good place to live after so many years of living in apartheid South Africa with deteriorating circumstances and more political oppression than had ever been seen in that country at that time.

Now we come to apartheid Australia in 2016 where politicians of all sorts forget that modern Australia was forged from "boat people" arriving here very often in desperate circumstances and doing their best to destroy indigenous people and their cultures and take over the country from the dispossessed who are now treated like squatters in their own country.

Then we get the world's horrors where Australians have gone to countries to fight wars which have nothing to do with Australia's security, causing refugees to flee from their countries and try to get to Australia to gain asylum. Those who managed to get close have now been removed to concentration camps set up by Australia in Manus - part of Papua New Guinea - and Nauru - where they are now left with no hope of getting into Australia because the government has determined not to allow them in.

How do you go on living under such circumstances and why is there no outcry from the Australian population?

Man's inhumanity to man or people's inhumanity to people - it is all scandalous and unforgiveable, particularly as the numbers trying to enter Australia are literally miniscule in relation to what is happening with asylum seekers in other countries.

It makes one embarrassed to actually be a citizen of this country with its disgusting behaviour and cruelty to fellow human beings.