vanstone must be sacked!!, page-18

re: vanstone royal commission required Thanks ypres, just checked Margo's site and guess what, lots of goodies such as the one below. Enjoy!!

Government knew where Vivian was all the time: Priest
55 Comments
Add a Comment
Commentary by Margo Kingston
May 11, 2005 10:48 PM

The government told Vivian Alverez where they were taking her before deporting her to the Philippines and delivered her to someone from the convent hospice where she still lives four years later, Catholic priest Father Mike Duffin said tonight.

Mr Duffin realised "our Vivian" was the missing Australian when he watched the ABC News Service in Olongapo. He told Lateline that noone from the Australian government had contacted him or the Mother Theresa Sisters of Charity about Vivian.

Vivian was a quiet woman with a limp who lived in a ward of old people on their death beds, he said. She rarely spoke of having children, although the nuns knew she had one child. (Her two children are in Australia.) He said the news "hasn't really gotten through to her, you know?"

"I asked the sisters. They said, 'No, she's not mentally insane or mentally disturbed or anything.' She's a very quiet woman, very soft spoken, and I think very, very sane."

He said Vivian had told him she'd been deported after a car accident because she didn't have a passport. "They didn't believe that she was an Australian citizen and she sort of was so bashed up and a bit sick that when they said, "Well, we'll give you someone to look after you" well, she thought they were helping her. I think at the time she was pretty well battered, you know. She sort of, she still complains of headaches, but she wasn't really thinking straight."

"She's mainly in a bed all the time within this house, she is with all the old people. She's just been stuck here in this sort of, like a hospice for the dying, for the last four years."

Vivian's sister Cecile Solon told Lateline she would visit her sister tomorrow. "I can tell you that I'm relieved. That's all I can tell you right now because I need to see her and then maybe I can explain how I feel about the whole thing."

She said Father Duffin told her "she can understand and comprehend what we are trying to tell her, except that she's walking with a limp of some kind and she hardly could walk longer, can hardly stand... If she sits down, she cannot stand up immediately and then she walks like an old lady. Her right arm is kind of twisted. She cannot write well, although she can print her name. Aside from that, he told me something like she speaks slowly now and she doesn't walk around that much, just stays in bed most of the time. Father Duffin, if I can recall, told me something like she didn't have any therapy so that's maybe the reason why she cannot walk straight and she had to walk with the aid of a walking stick."

"I was furious at the way Vivian's case was being handled. I just feel that there was no compassion in handling her and if you forgive me of my statement, I just feel there was some kind of racial discrimination because to my understanding she was apprehended and three days after she was deported. I just feel that there was - they were not validating the statement that she made perhaps to the police and trying to find out the records or exerting a more conscious effort in trying to find out exactly the woman that they are trying to deport."

"If you arrange for somebody to meet at the airport for Vivian, the best thing to do and the first thing they would have done, is contact the charitable institution or the person they arrange (and) nothing of this would have happened, like the charade of looking around, the press telling people that she's missing and then the bad press she has a mental illness and so on. I don't know what kind of game they're playing here."

Ms Solon backed the call by her half brother Henry in Sydney today for a public inquiry into the scandal. "Vivian being located or found does not excuse or exonerate anybody from what happened," she said.

"There might be more Vivians to come if this kind of system will not be corrected. I am not attacking anybody, but I guess we just have to straighten these things out."

*

See also Alverez found: Vanstone's statement, Deported woman found in convent and 'I don't want to return to Australia': Alvarez.

For the Senate's censure motion of Vanstone see Vanstone disappears, Brandis reads mag, as ministerial responsibility dies after a long illness