High-Fives in Parliament, or were they salutes?
Seeing Liberal Party goons in our parliament congratulating themselves and sharing high-fives following the repeal of the Medevac Laws was not only obscene but also quite worrying. It brought to mind the verse attributed to Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) which I have slightly modified here :
First they came for the asylum seekers, and I did not speak out —
because I was not an asylum seeker.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
It is fitting that we remember that it was the death of 24 year old Hamid Khazaei that gave impetus for a caring nation and their parliament to enact the Medevac Laws in the first place.
Back in September 2014 this young man died in a Brisbane hospital after he had contracted a leg infection on Manus Island where he had been held in detention by Australian immigration authorities. Brisbane Coroner Mr Terry Ryan found his death followed a series of clinical errors and delays, including a lack of antibiotics on Manus Island to treat tropical infections and a failure by Australian immigration officials to urgently grant a doctor’s request for the twenty-four year old asylum seeker to be transferred to Australia for life saving treatment.
The coroner found the Australian Government had not met its responsibility to detainees such as Mr Hamid Khazaei to provide health care that was “broadly comparable” to that available in Australia.
The coroner recommended a systemic overhaul of healthcare responses in offshore detention, including a new policy to allow doctors on the ground, rather than Canberra officials, to approve medical transfers.
That systemic overhaul recommended by the coroner came into being in the form of the Medevac Laws that have now been repealed.
High-Five, Jacqui!
Coroners Report in full here.
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18 comments
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pierre wilkinson -
Ill fares the land -
wam -
New England Cocky -
corvus boreus -
Wobbley -
Peter F -
corvus boreus -
Terence Mills -
corvus boreus -
Arthur Tarry -
Baby Jewels -
RomeoCharlie29 -
Kaye Lee -
LambsFry Simplex. -
DrakeN -
corvus boreus -
Sir Scotchmistery
Return to home pageThe shame our country feels for this, our inaction on climate change, our attitude towards renewables and the fact that we voted in this hopeless rabble in order to secure our franking credits when most of us are not even eligible is testament to the failure of democratic values in a murdoch inspired plutocracy.
Apparently, drowning at sea warrants Lambie’s pathetic tears in the Parliament, but a death on Manus warrants nothing, even when it occurs directly as a result of the actions the Messiah’s band of merry incompetents. I had low expectations for Mr Smirky McSmirkyface when his rabble were re-elected, but in the short space of 6 months they have shown they are more corrupt, more incompetent, more divisive and more incapable of anything resembling good governance than I could possibly have imagined. Do we really have to put up with another two and a half years of this?
Ms Lambe’s tears were surely crocodile? A look at army websites will set your teeth on edge but it will show how easy it will be for the boys to get ‘secret’ deals.from such narrow minded australians.
I laughed and thought the septics deserve trump but the joke is on us. Do we deserve pauline and jacqui??? Thanks boobby you senile twit.
Sadly Jacquie Lambie remains a naive innocent in a pit of seriously poisonous vipers prepared to do anything (remember the Toxic RAbbott offer of $1 BILLION Hobart Hospital to Tony Windsor (Ind, New England) and Oakeshott (Ind, Lyne) for support after the 2010 election?) to achieve their the objectives of their political financial patrons and maintain their personal access to the Parliamentary Allowances Scheme. Certainly Lambie was suckered with the same strategy as Meg “Little Black Hen” Lees (Democrats) was with the GST legislation proposed by Howard.
Lambie has betrayed working Australian voters by endorsing Spud Duddo’s xenophobic policies jailing legal refugees in off shore hell- holes while the much vaunted “people smugglers” fly in “tourists” on QANTAS and other airlines who then quietly vanish into the general Australian population in numbers recently reported as about 65,000 per year.
Lambie might best be compared with Mata Hari from WWI but without the feminine allure.
Sunday morning musing.
Humans have cooked the climate of our planet, and broken the biosphere whose continued function sustains and supports us.
We have passed the point of having any potential chance of effective remediation, and are now facing rapidly self-escalating consequences well beyond any feasable means of human control or adaptation.
As a result, all your children and descendants will live drastically shortened and diminished lives of increasingly desperate violence and squalor, and our species will probably be functionally extinct within the next century.
Have a nice day.
corvus, if there’s a god surely he’d save all the animals, and I don’t mean the fascists.
@Wobbley: Well, that seals our fate. “If” is such a big word.
Wobbley,
Quoth god;
‘it’s all lunchmeat to me.’
corvus boreus
Speaking of sandwiches :
‘What did he say ?
I think it was “Blessed are the cheesemakers.”
Aha, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?
Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.’
Don’t get me started on Life of Brian
Terence,
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth…in 6′ x 3′ allotments.
There is something seriously wrong in my beloved country. There has been an issidious, regrettable and apparently permanent decline in the standards in government, business,and seemingly all facets of life and activity. It’s hackneyed to say but it seems that until it affects ‘me’ then ‘I don’t give a shit’. And our bereft leaders in govt. and business know this and exploit it to satisfy their ideological vision, and/or their pocket. I’m disgusted and ashamed.
Why isn’t someone in jail for causing the unnecessary death/s of refugees? How is it governments can kill people (I’ve read over 2000 robodebt victims) and there’s never a mentioin of accountability, let alone punishment?
One of the few hopes we have of getting rid of this obnoxious government is to get some restoration of journalistic integrity in reporters working for Murdoch. As long as there are reporters like the Oz’s Simon Benson -frequently lambasted by Crikey -, prepared to be the willing dupes of the government as it leaks slanted fabrications to denigrate those who oppose it, we will keep being misled or outright lied to. A serious journalist would look behind the leaks, see he or she was being used to, in effect, trash the democratic processes and instead dig a bit deeper to expose the cynicism behind the leaks. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) is the journalist’s Union and it has a strong code of ethics, but it is not compulsory for journalists to be members. Many decline to join because they do not subscribe to, or do not want to be bound by, that code. Historically some proprietors have actively chosen to weaken the union by employing non-union journalists. All of the worst newspapers in Australia belong to the Murdoch stable and employ the least scrupulous journalists. All of their readerships are declining, I would like to think partly because their readerships are recognising the bullshit they are being fed. One wonders, for example, how long Murdoch can or will continue to support a national newspaper, once respected but which has become a joke to many for its blindly partisan, dishonest, reporting? Not too much longer, I hope. Sadly no Government is willing to legislate against foreign ownership of our media.
Tony Wright, ‘On the Wrong Side of Rupert’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1995.
Murdoch’s overt interference in the 1975 campaign was so bad that reporters on the Australian went on strike in protest and seventy-five of them wrote to their boss calling the newspaper ‘a propaganda sheet’ and saying it had become ‘a laughing stock’.
‘You literally could not get a favourable word about Whitlam in the paper. Copy would be cut, lines would be left out,’ one former Australian journalist told Wright’
How things have changed….
Everything changes and nothing changes at all.
The more that things change, the more they remain the same.
I forget its origin. French?
DrakeN,
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Jean Batiste Alphonse Karr (1840-ish)
I got to the bit which referred to Lambie in tones that have her naive and trustful in a white old man’s world, but that is simple bullshit.
She knew bloody well what she was doing in those discussions. She is becoming the new Morrison in her secret World of ice and power.
She will never understand because she shares the views of Australians who see Arrivals by sea as the only evil when it is patently obvious the greatest threat to Australian democracy is Tasmanian senators.