Australia's mandatory detention laws remind me of the Penal Laws the British imposed on the Irish.
Edmund Burke described them as "well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a feeble people and the debasement in them of human nature itself as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man".
That's a perfect description for Australia's Gulag Archipelago of refugee prison camps.
As is this description by Edmund Burke in which I've replaced Catholic with Refugee:
"The law presumed every Refugee to be faithless, disloyal, and untruthful, assumed him to exist only to be punished, and the ingenuity of the Legislature was exhausted in discovering new methods of repression."
When I went ancestor hunting in Ireland with my son we toured Kilmainham Gaol (one of the main instruments of British repression of Irish hopes for liberation from British tyranny) I didn't have a video camera, but I did have a still camera. I took a picture (dunno how it got there) of a butterfly in a cell of one of the 21 Patriots the British lined up - and shot on Easter Sunday (the most holy day to Catholics) which lead to a successful revolution.
I called the photo "Fly Free" which is what I hope all Aussie-caged refugees can soon accomplish:
