For The Byron Echo, June, 2005

Can Indonesia now pre-emptively bomb us, as we did Afghanistan, for harbouring a terrorist we won't give up? Just asking. So it's all right, John Anderson says, to have as baggage handlers two men who served nine years for drug pushing because 'they've paid their debt to society'. No doubt it's also okay to employ in a kindergarten men who served nine years for pederasty.

Let's follow the thread, if we can. Men who push drugs are sometimes interested in money and always careless of the numbers of people drugs kill. Such men might well take money from 'terrorists' to put bombs on planes, money they then spend on drugs, drugs they can use or sell. This doesn't worry Anderson much because, like most politicians, he doesn't take 'terror' seriously, except at election time.

I don't either. At the Sydney Writers' Festival I entered with a big yellow cloth bag, big enough to hold a nuclear device, a crowded theatre addressed by Lewis Lapham, the dissident American editor of Harper's. No-one searched the bag. A day later I entered with the same bag a crowded, milling Sydney airport, and no-one searched it there either. War on terror, you say, John? It's barely even a skirmish.

Children in Detention

It's good Petro Georgiou and others may now succeed in saving children born in detention from spending their lives there. If they do, it'll be a major defeat for Howard, Ruddock and Vanstone. Children are always the hard part when you're selling, or spinning, tyranny. You can't say they're villains themselves but you have to stain them, somehow, with adjoining villainy.

So you say they've been thrown overboard by parents who do that sort of thing. Or they've been 'irresponsibly exposed to danger' by queue-jumping parents on stormy seas. Or by 'parents' who aren't their parents at all. Unscrupulous people who kidnap them and force them somehow to tell the cops they're their captors' children, so as to win approval for the 'criminal elements' coming here in leaky boats to blow up Australians in future acts of heinous, motiveless terror.

Or they're 'being manipulated by older malcontents in Woomera', as Russell Skelton said of Alamdar Bakhtiyari, a friend of mine. Or manipulated by 'people with radical political agendas', as Ruddock said of Alamdar and his brother Montezar when they asked the British Consul, as well they might, for sanctuary from Australia's tyranny. Or if they're locked up it's their parents' fault. They could go home to Afghanistan, Iraq or Gaza any time, where their uncles have lately been killed, because they're not 'true refugees'; the same experts who arrested Cornelia Rau have said so.

None of it ever quite works. Which is why the publication of the children's photographs has always been forbidden. If the public see the little faces, Howard loses the game. This is why the Bakhtiyari boys could not be seen hugging their weeping father when he found out they were alive, why they weren't let near him. And why, when they were living normally in Adelaide Amanda Vanstone, whose house was about four blocks away, refused to meet them. The photo of that encounter would have been game, set and match.

Which is why they had to be whisked at midnight out of the country two days after the tsunami. Journalists photographing them sleeping rough in Islamabad (the mother pregnant, the baby shrieking, the children shivering) and going tearfully by taxi to Afghanistan --- and into clear and mounting danger in terror-smashed Kabul --- would have been politically unuseful to Howard and Vanstone. So the journalists had to be otherwise engaged, with the tsunami, and the six bright, blameless children and their broken, sorrowing parents airbrushed that week, and forever, from history. And why do they say the publication of the photos is forbidden? Because it 'might endanger their relatives back home'. Though they are 'not true refugees', their relatives 'back home' could be killed if their photos are published. You work that one out.

And it's the children's remembered photos and their lively faces on film that have brought the entire detention policy unstuck once Rau and Leong -- and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- showed how wrong our experts can be. And how two of our Ministers, Ruddock and Vanstone, are guilty, legally, ask any lawyer, of child abuse. And why this government will be reviled by history.

A Question Without Notice to the Minister for Immigration

A question without notice to the Minister for Immigration. If Father Greg O'Kelly sets up two scholarships to allow Alamdar and Montezar Bakhtiyari to come back to St Ignatius and complete their schooling, will she still, as she once asserted, charge them a million dollars to re-enter the country? Or does she now admit that since they went home to Afghanistan they might be well be Afghanistanis, and it is she in fact that owes them money for their wrongful imprisonment, the wrecking of their childhoods, and the slandering of their family name? Perhaps she'll write a letter to the editor, or to me. Or, as an old acquaintance, phone me.