MALCOLM TURNBULL AND ALL HIS POLITICAL ALLIES ARE EXTREMIST WHITE RACISTS WHO SHOULD BY NOW HAVE HEARD OF APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, THE POLICE STATE

The longer I live in Australia, already 40 years, after living in the South African apartheid police state for 50 years, the longer I have to despair at the racism so inherent in the country I am confined to living in to the end of my days.

At 91 those days can't be far off but the longer I live the more I despair of any sign of democracy and increasing signs of authoritarian racist police state behaviour.

Most Australian politicians seem to have inherited the British racism which has existed for so long and is still in evidence in the UK of today, 2018.

The expression of racism to help win elections at all costs is an ugliness which seems to get worse as the years roll by.

Malcolm Turnbull and his cronies are determined to make race an issue in the 2018 Victorian state election by attacking "black gangs who make the streets of Melbourne unsafe and a danger to its citizens."

The trouble is that people remain gullible and believe the crap that pours out of the mouths of so many of Australia's politicians.

It is an agony for those of us who can see through the nonsense and can do nothing about it except write protest blogs to get it off our chests and know we are powerless to be able to effect change.

Racism has always been inherent in Australian society, but with Abbott and Turnbull and Dutton and several others in parliament in Canberra as well as in most of the states, the white Australian male diktat is rearing its ugly head more and more.

Poor Malcolm, my partner is 95 and I am 91 and we would be happy to go out for dinner anywhere if we were still able to, and the fact that the federal government is doing its best to support the racist opposition in Victoria to help it get elected in November 2018 is probably going to have the opposite effect.

APARTHEID AUSTRALIA - FROM 26 JANUARY 1788 ONWARDS, INCLUDING GENOCIDE AND OTHER EVILS

When white people set foot in Australia on 26 January 1788, the end game for the indigenous population began and as the time progressed, genocide proceeded apace and, although the end is in sight, Australian governments have some way to go to complete the job.

The difference between South African apartheid and Australian apartheid is the numbers involved with both countries' populations.

South African whites were always outnumbered by black populations but in Australia the genocidal activities of successive governments has assured that the indigenous population has been reduced to a fraction of all other population groups.

Fast forward to the 21st century and what do we have?

Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody - late 1980s

Federal Government Intervention in the Northern Territories - 2000 onwards - accepted by successive governments from the right and extreme right

Royal Commission into the incarceration practices of teenagers in the Northern Territory.

No progress - in fact moving backwards all the time - and why?

Ongoing genocide deliberately practised and supported by successive governments to ensure that human rights are denied the indigenous population of Australia. Follow the examples of the USA and Canada.

The programme that was put to air on the ABC programme on the night of Monday 24 July 2016 by 4 Corners with scenes of the incarceration and treatment of young teenagers in a notorious Northern Territory prison for juvenile offenders shocked Australians, many of whom have been aware for a long time about the mistreatment of Aboriginal people in our society, but has also shocked the world who are now able to see such horrors instantaneously due to modern technology -  and what will change after a new Royal Commission?

After the Deaths in Custody Royal Commission the incarceration rate of Aboriginal people incarcerated  has not only grown alarmingly but the deaths in custody have increased alarmingly.

One case that has not yet seen justice done was the frying to death of an Aboriginal in the back of a police van who was locked in the back of the van in 50 degree heat and not checked on a long drive from one place to another.

What was different about this death and one in South Africa in 1977 was that Steve Biko was beaten up and thrown into the back of a police van naked and driven from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria, a distance of some 800 km, so one froze to death the other fried to death.

Now we have the images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo replicated in Australia in the  Northern Territory - with teenagers!

AUSTRALIA'S RACIST ASSAULT ON ABORIGINAL PEOPLE

 Weekend edition 240415 CounterPunch :Australia's Racist Assault on Aboriginal People

The Secret Country Again Wages War on Its Own People

by JOHN PILGER

Australia has again declared war on its Indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa.  Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years. In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to “support” the homelands.
Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Yet again, Aboriginal leaders have warned of “a new generation of displaced people” and “cultural genocide”.
Genocide is a word Australians hate to hear. Genocide happens in other countries, not the “lucky” society that per capita is the second richest on earth. When “act of genocide” was used in the 1997 landmark report Bringing Them Home, which revealed that thousands of Indigenous children had been stolen from their communities by white institutions and systematically abused, a campaign of denial was launched by a far-right clique around the then prime minister John Howard. It included those who called themselves the Galatians Group, then Quadrant, then the Bennelong Society; the Murdoch press was their voice.
The Stolen Generation was exaggerated, they said, if it had happened at all. Colonial Australia was a benign place; there were no massacres. The First Australians were victims of their own cultural inferiority, or they were noble savages. Suitable euphemisms were deployed.
The government of the current prime minister, Tony Abbott, a conservative zealot, has revived this assault on a people who represent Australia’s singular uniqueness. Soon after coming to office, Abbott’s government cut $534 million in indigenous social programmes, including $160 million from the indigenous health budget and $13.4 million from indigenous legal aid.
In the 2014 report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Key Indicators, the devastation is clear. The number of Aboriginal people hospitalised for self-harm has leapt, as have suicides among those as young as eleven. The indicators show a people impoverished, traumatised and abandoned. Read the classic expose of apartheid South Africa, The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond, who told me he could write a similar account of Australia.
Having insulted indigenous Australians by declaring (at a G20 breakfast for David Cameron) that there was “nothing but bush” before the white man, Abbott announced that his government would no longer honour the longstanding commitment to Aboriginal homelands. He sneered, “It’s not the job of the taxpayers to subsidise lifestyle choices.”
The weapon used by Abbott and his redneck state and territorial counterparts is dispossession by abuse and propaganda, coercion and blackmail, such as his demand for a 99-year leasehold of Indigenous land in the Northern Territory in return for basic services: a land grab in all but name. The Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion, refutes this, claiming “this is about communities and what communities want”. In fact, there has been no real consultation, only the co-option of a few.
Both conservative and Labor governments have already withdrawn the national jobs programme, CDEP, from the homelands, ending opportunities for employment, and prohibited investment in infrastructure: housing, generators, sanitation. The saving is peanuts.
The reason is an extreme doctrine that evokes the punitive campaigns of the early 20th century “chief protector of Aborigines”, such as the fanatic A.O. Neville who decreed that the first Australians “assimilate” to extinction. Influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis, Queensland’s “protection acts” were a model for South African apartheid. Today, the same dogma and racism are threaded through anthropology, politics, the bureaucracy and the media.  “We are civilised, they are not,” wrote the acclaimed Australian historian Russel Ward two generations ago.  The spirit is unchanged.
Having reported on Aboriginal communities since the 1960s, I have watched a seasonal routine whereby the Australian elite interrupts its “normal” mistreatment and neglect of the people of the First Nations, and attacks them outright. This happens when an election approaches, or a prime minister’s ratings are low. Kicking the blackfella is deemed popular, although grabbing minerals-rich land by stealth serves a more prosaic purpose. Driving people into the fringe slums of “economic hub towns” satisfies the social engineering urges of racists.
The last frontal attack was in 2007 when Prime Minister Howard sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, said his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, were being abused by paedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers”.
Known as “the intervention”, the media played a vital role. In 2006, the national TV current affairs programme, the ABC’s Lateline, broadcast a sensational interview with a man whose face was concealed. Described as a “youth worker” who had lived in the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu, he made a series of lurid allegations. Subsequently exposed as a senior government official who reported directly to the minister, his claims were discredited by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists. The community received no apology.
The 2007 “intervention” allowed the federal government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands in ways with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40 per cent lower mortality rate.
It is this “traditional life” that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on Indigenous organisations. The homelands are seen as a threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia. It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.
The current political attack was launched in the richest state, Western Australia. Last October, the state premier, Colin Barnett, announced that his government could not afford the $90 million budget for basic municipal services to 282 homelands: water, power, sanitation, schools, road maintenance, rubbish collection. It was the equivalent of informing the white suburbs of Perth that their lawn sprinklers would no longer sprinkle and their toilets no longer flush; and they had to move; and if they refused, the police would evict them.
Where would the dispossessed go? Where would they live? In six years, Barnett’s government has built few houses for Indigenous people in remote areas. In the Kimberley region, Indigenous homelessness — aside from natural disaster and civil strife — is one of the highest anywhere, in a state renowned for its conspicuous wealth, golf courses and prisons overflowing with impoverished black people. Western Australia jails Aboriginal males at more than eight times the rate of apartheid South Africa. It has one of the highest incarceration rates of juveniles in the world, almost all of them indigenous, including children kept in solitary confinement in adult prisons, with their mothers keeping vigil outside.
In 2013, the former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me that the state was “racking and stacking” Aboriginal prisoners. When I asked what she meant, she said, “It’s warehousing.”
In March, Barnett changed his story.  There was “emerging evidence”, he said, “of appalling mistreatment of little kids” in the homelands.  What evidence? Barnett claimed that   gonorrhoea had been found in children younger than 14, then conceded he did not know if these were in the homelands.  His police commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, chimed in that child sexual abuse was “rife”. He quoted a 15-year-old study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. What he failed to say was that the report highlighted poverty as the overwhelming cause of “neglect” and that sexual abuse accounted for less than 10 per cent.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a federal agency, recently released a report on what it calls the “Fatal Burden” of Third World disease and trauma borne by Indigenous people “resulting in almost 100,000 years of life lost due to premature death”. This “fatal burden” is the product of extreme poverty imposed in Western Australia, as in the rest of Australia, by the denial of human rights.
In Barnett’s vast rich Western Australia, barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited communities for which his government has a duty of care. In the town of Roeburne, in the midst of the booming minerals-rich Pilbara, 80 per cent of the indigenous children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media that causes deafness.
In 2011, the Barnett government displayed a brutality in the community of Oombulgurri the other homelands can expect. “First, the government closed the services,” wrote Tammy Solonec of Amnesty International, “It closed the shop, so people could not buy food and essentials. It closed the clinic, so the sick and the elderly had to move, and the school, so families with children had to leave, or face having their children taken away from them. The police station was the last service to close, then eventually the electricity and water were turned off. Finally, the ten residents who resolutely stayed to the end were forcibly evicted [leaving behind] personal possessions. [Then] the bulldozers rolled into Oombulgurri. The WA government has literally dug a hole and in it buried the rubble of people’s homes and personal belongings.”
In South Australia, the state and federal governments launched a similar attack on the 60 remote Indigenous communities. South Australia has a long-established Aboriginal Lands Trust, so people were able to defend their rights — up to a point. On 12 April, the federal government offered $15 million over five years. That such a miserly sum is considered enough to fund proper services in the great expanse of the state’s homelands is a measure of the value placed on Indigenous lives by white politicians who unhesitatingly spend $28 billion annually on armaments and the military. Haydn Bromley, chair of the Aboriginal Lands Trust told me, “The $15 million doesn’t include most of the homelands, and it will only cover bare essentials — power, water. Community development? Infrastructure? Forget it.”
The current distraction from these national dirty secrets is the approaching “celebrations” of the centenary of an Edwardian military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 when 8,709 Australian and 2,779 New Zealand troops — the Anzacs — were sent to their death in a futile assault on a beach in Turkey. In recent years, governments in Canberra have promoted this imperial waste of life as an historical deity to mask the militarism that underpins Australia’s role as America’s “deputy sheriff” in the Pacific.
In bookshops, “Australian non-fiction” shelves are full of opportunistic tomes about wartime derring-do, heroes and jingoism. Suddenly, Aboriginal people who fought for the white man are fashionable, whereas those who fought against the white man in defence of their own country, Australia, are unfashionable. Indeed, they are officially non-people. The Australian War Memorial refuses to recognise their remarkable resistance to the British invasion. In a country littered with Anzac memorials, not one official memorial stands for the thousands of native Australians who fought and fell defending their homeland.
This is part of the “great Australian silence”, as W.E.H. Stanner in 1968 called his lecture in which he described a “cult of forgetfulness on a national scale”. He was referring to the Indigenous people. Today, the silence is ubiquitous. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales currently has an exhibition, The Photograph and Australia, in which the timeline of this ancient country begins, incredibly, with Captain Cook.
The same silence covers another enduring, epic resistance. Extraordinary demonstrations of Indigenous women protesting the removal of their children and grandchildren by he state, some of them at gunpoint, are ignored by journalists and patronised by politicians.  More Indigenous children are being wrenched from their homes and communities today than during the worst years of the Stolen Generation. A record 15,000 are presently detained “in care”; many are given to white families and will never return to their communities.
Last year, the West Australian Police Minister, Liza Harvey, attended a screening in Perth of my film, Utopia, which docmented the racism and thuggery of police towards black Australians, and the multiple deaths of young Aboriginal men in custody. The minister cried.
On her watch, 50 City of Perth armed police raided an Indigenous homeless camp at Matagarup, and drove off mostly elderly women and young mothers with children.  The people in the camp described themselves as “refugees … seeking safety in our own country”. They called for the help of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.
Australian politicians are nervous of the United Nations. Abbott’s response has been abuse. When Professor James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, described the racism of the “intervention” , Abbott told him to, “get a life” and “not listen to the old victim brigade”.
The planned closure of Indigenous homelands breaches Article 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). Australia is committed to “provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for … any action which has the aim of dispossessing [Indigenous people] of their lands, territories or resources”. The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is blunt. “Forced evictions” are against the law.
An international  momentum is building. In 2013, Pope Francis urged the world to act against racism and on behalf of “indigenous people who are increasingly isolated and abandoned”. It was South Africa’s defiance of such a basic principle of human rights that ignited the international opprobrium and campaign that brought down apartheid. Australia beware.
John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

APARTHEID AUSTRALIA - PART 2

Young Muslim Australians are being monitored and stopped from leaving Australia to fight with Muslim states in the Middle East.

Young Jewish Australians are not even mentioned as they take off from Australia to go and fight for apartheid Israel in Palestine.

Spot the difference?

One good apartheid state deserves another.

Anyway ultimately, by supporting the zionists in Australia and helping Jews to go to Israel and out of Australia means the christian zionists hope to eventually empty Australia of Jews altogether. No doubt apartheid Australia ultimately hopes to incarcerate all Muslims who arrive here in Australia's concentration camps house in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

And a good time was had by all...................!!!!

APARTHEID AUSTRALIA - PART 1

When I left South Africa in 1978 to escape from the apartheid regime and police state in which we were living at the time, I knew that there were many problems in Australia, knew that the Aborigines had been treated like 3rd class citizens since invasion day on 26 January 1788, knew that there were all sorts of problems making Australian society far from ideal.

What I didn't know was that in 2015 Australia would have turned the indigenous communities into non-people and the prime minister of the day would say that "these people live where they are because it is their life choice!".

Australia is a racist society which almost leaves apartheid South Africa in the shade. Even apartheid Israel is doing well on the racist stakes and is leaving other countries for dead - mainly the Palestinians - who hopefully will be able to fight back better than Australia's indigenous population because there are so many more Palestinians than there are Aboriginal Australians.

After Ferguson and New York and much else going on in the USA, and after all sorts of savage events around the world in every continent, one despairs of human beings every learning to live together in harmony. Greed, the need for power, to dominate others, to bully, treat with contempt, all sorts of other considerations relating to the human condition - bode ill for the future.

I will be long gone by then!

CHILDREN LOCKED UP IN AUSTRALIA'S FOREIGN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Content warning: this email mentions incidents of self-harm, suicide attempts and sexual assault.~



Dear Mannie,

Imagine if you heard about a government that was locking up children up in a place where they were being exposed to violence and assault,and suffering from significant mental health distress.

A place where children were detained out of sight and locked up for prolonged periods of time – in many cases, more than a year. Kept in conditions so inhumane and hopeless, that they were wetting their beds at night for fear of being assaulted on the way to the bathroom, subject to such mental distress that they were biting their nails down to the knuckle. Imagine if you heard kids as young as 12 were so mentally distraught that they were ready to give up on their young lives, and were resorting to acts of self-harm.

Would you intervene and ask that country to free those children? Welcome to your Australia.

We're said to live in a lucky country, which prides itself on providing a "fair go for all". Yet, Australia is being called out around the world – by the United Nations, international personalities like Russell Brand and human rights watchdogs – for its barbaric policy of indefinitely detaining children.

Today's long-awaited release of the Human Rights Commission's report on children in detention, titled "The Forgotten Children", paints a sobering picture of Australia's immigration policies – which could only be described as government sanctioned child abuse. But while these children have remained forgotten by our leaders for far too long, it's not too late to make a difference – starting right now.

Many of us are all too aware of the harmful effects of detaining children, but there are many more who aren't even aware it's happening. This is why it's so important for us to speak up. We've produced a video with a message from those who worked directly with children in detention. Our plan is to put it on the air to reach as many Australians as possible, for as long as possible. There's no time to waste. Will you speak up for all children, who remain locked in detention, and get the word out now? 

LET THE CHILDREN GO!

Click here: https://www.getup.org.au/kids-out

It will come as no surprise to most that the Human Rights Commission's inquiry found "detention was inherently dangerous for children". These are just some of the more disturbing findings uncovered by the Human Rights Commission's inquiry that show why it's so dangerous:

• There are still 221 children being held in mainland detention centres, and a further 119 children in detention on Nauru.¹
• More than 300 children in detention committed or threatened self-harm in a 15 month period.² This includes incidents of self-inflected cuts, repeated head banging, and ingesting harmful substances such as insect repellent.
• In the same 15 month period, there were three attempted hangings and five incidents of self-stranglulation.
• "Children are exposed to danger by their close confinement with adults who suffer high levels of mental illness. Thirty per cent of adults detained with children have moderate to severe mental illnesses."³

Now we've heard the evidence, it's up to us to ensure others hear it too. If we're to have any hope of changing government policy, we first need to change the way Australians think about the issue. We need to encourage as many people as possible to add their voice and speak up on behalf of all children in detention. Because no matter your position on this issue, or your politics – there aren't many Australians who would agree with locking up children.

The public outrage has definitely been there – at a simmer that heats up from time to time – but we need to reach boiling point, fast. Now is when our movement, our country, needs to band together to show we have a conscience that will not be silenced. It's time to free all children from detention and show them they're not forgotten.

Speak up. Get the kids out. Chip in to help us get the word out: https://www.getup.org.au/kids-out

Now is the time for renewed hope. The GetUp community is partnering with Amnesty International, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, ChilOut, Save the Children, the Human Rights Law Centre, Welcome to Australia and Children's Rights International, who are supporting the call for all children to be immediately released from all Australian immigration detention facilities, including Nauru where 119 children still remain.

Our movement and its many friends are still lighting the dark, and our light is growing stronger by the day. We can provide hope for all the children still being detained in our name, and together we will make sure Australia returns to the right side of history.

Thank you for speaking up,
Alycia and Erin for the GetUp team

PS. It's worth noting that this report was tabled at literally the last possible minute in Parliament this evening, in order to meet the deadline for its release. But we won't let this strategic timing, which coincidentally is the time when the media are less likely pick up on stories, prevent the plight of these children from reaching as many Australians as possible. Can you help ensure it does? https://www.getup.org.au/kids-out

~ References ~

[1] Immigration Detention and Community Statistics Summary, 31 January 2015
[2] Children in detention exposed to danger, Human Rights Commission finds, The Guardian, 11 February 2015
[3] The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 2014, The Australian Human Rights Commission

---

GetUp is an independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group. We use new technology to empower Australians to have their say on important national issues. We receive no political party or government funding, and every campaign we run is entirely supported by voluntary donations. If you'd like to contribute to help fund GetUp's work, please donate now! To unsubscribe from GetUp, please click here. Our team acknowledges that we meet and work on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We wish to pay respect to their Elders - past, present and future - and acknowledge the important role all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to play within Australia and the GetUp community.
Authorised by Sam Mclean, Level 2, 104 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010.

AUSTRALIA - APARTHEID STATE

When I left South Africa and came to Australia in 1978, I knew I was leaving behind one of the most repressive and reactionary states one could be living in and hoped I would be going to one which had become liberalised over time and had less restrictive policies applied to its citizens. It was a police state and had a murderous government which was out of control.

How naive can one be?

That was then - 1978 - this is now - 2014 - and what do we have? The indigenous people of Australia are treated worse than South Africa's indigenous populations in 300 years of white occupation and laws regulating them in the parts of the country where they should be living with land rights and able to build societies for themselves where they have education, health, employment, hosing and other aspects of modern societies are denied them and their rates of incarceration and deaths in custody are worse than South Africa in any period of white domination.

The vast majority of Australians are racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, bigoted, ignorant about the indigenous peoples living - largely hidden from view and denied basic human rights which are considered the norm in such affluent societies as this - and incarcerated with the brutality of police states.

Australian treatment of asylum seekers by both major parties in the federal parliament is human rights abuse writ large and is based to a certain extent on racist values - them and us! Imagine fleeing in terror from your country of origin because of horrors being perpetrated in them with wars being nurtured by the United States of America and those countries supporting this most powerful country in the world - at the moment - and then, after exposing yourself and you family and friends to unspeakable suffering in your attempts to find asylum in a country where you will find safety and security, you end up in Manus or Nauru in concentration camps which are living hells and no better - and in some respects - worse than - where you fled from in the first instance! Ou tof the frying pan and into the furnace of hell might be an apt sort of description!

Now think of where it all started - the zionist movement and its fight for somewhere for Jews to be safe from anti-semitism after the appalling events of 19th and 20 century Europe, and you find the most anti-semitic of countries - the USA and the UK - working hard to establish and maintain a zionist homeland at the expense of the homeland of other peoples whose land it is, and they become the equivalent Jews of the 21st century to be ruthlessly oppressed and subjected to genocidal treatment by the zionists and the USA and allies. In the mean time, most Jews in the world live in other countries rather than in Israel! A complete irony!

ASYLUM SEEKERS: APARTHEID AUSTRALIA

Australia became an apartheid state on 26 January 1788.

White people from England invaded Australia and the war with the indigenous population - who were black, "savage and heathen" - began.

That war has continued into the 21st century, and despite having reduced the number of indigenous people to now number only about 2 per cent of the population, the numbers incarcerated at any given time exceed those of the "white" populations by thousands.

From 1788 onwards the people arriving in Australia to settle here and build Britain's colonial empire arrived mostly by boat, until in the mid-20th century, air travel became more and more popular and ultimately became the norm.

As Australia continued to be a lackey of the main imperial powers - the UK and the USA - wars which those countries were involved in also became Australia's wars, and this continues today into 2014 and onwards.

Because of these wars, more and more people around the world have become displaced and have been forced to flee from their countries of origin and residence due to various factors leading to their oppression, persecution and murder.

Thousands of people around the world have been seeking refuge and asylum in whatever country they have been able to get to, and to plead for refuge.

Mostly, these refugees arrive at countries which have been involved in imperial wars and caused the exit of terrified people who only want to try and live their lives as they always have, but greed and tyranny and related causes have forced them into decisions which have meant they need havens of refuge which in many cases has been denied them, causing untold misery and deaths on the way to their destinations which are difficult to get to in most cases.

Australia has been the destination of thousands fleeing desperate situations, and many of these have found homes here and managed to build lives for themselves under difficult situations. Most of them have come from countries in which Australia has been involved with imperial wars of various sorts.

In 1992, Australia's then prime minister, Paul Keating, decided that there were many people trying to arrive here for asylum who, in his opinion, were not worthy of becoming "citizens" of this "great" country, so he instituted concentration camps, similar to those which were built by the British in South Africa during the imperial wars being fought there by the British and the South African "white" occupiers who were mainly of Dutch, English and French extraction. These wars were known as the "Boer" Wars.

In 1996 John Howard became prime minister and we were then treated to the hysteria of the "Children Overboard" episode in which minsters of the crown lied through their teeth about the fact that desperate asylum seekers were throwing their children off the disintegrating Indonesian fishing boats as they were sinking, in order to save themselves.

The Australian population, including those who themselves had been "boat people" over the decades, and influenced by the main stream media who have behaved appallingly over the last 30 years in relation to desperate asylum seekers, became politically shrill voices to "stop the boats" because they were sinking and people were drowning, so we had to "stop the boats" to save lives!!!!!

From 2007 onwards we then had Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard trying to outdo each other in their demonising of the desperate people trying to get into Australia away from the countries where Australia troops were fighting the US/UK wars aided and abetted by the rest of the imperialist powers.

So we had to plan for offshore concentration camps to lock these traumatised people where the Australian population would be saved from "terrorist" threats from people who were already unable to say boo to a goose!

Manus Island was re-opened and Nauru became "viable" once more as centres for concentration camp operation.

Lock them up, out of sight, out of mind and - the boats have stopped coming!!! Objective achieved, until the Papua New Guineans had other ideas about the new prisons in their country and attacked the "inmates", killing one and injuring dozens of others. Of course the privatised companies running these concentration camps had nothing to do with any of this, did they???

The scandalous behaviour of the Australian government and many Australian citizens over the business of incarcerating innocent people in camps reminiscent of some of the world's worst prison regimes leaves those of us opposed to the carnage absolutely horrified by this behaviour.

I come from the country (South Africa) where the first concentration camps were established between 1899 and 1902, and in the last few years, post apartheid, some incarceration regimes in South Africa remind us very much of those early camps. South Africa has been flooded with refugees fleeing the brutal regimes in Zimbabwe and other neighbouring countries and the numbers involved are tens of hundreds of time greater than the numbers trying to enter Australia.

Time for the peoples of the world to unite and not allow the bosses to rule the roost which they are damaging more and more on a daily basis.