the simplest summary I can give to everyone confused about Australia’s political climate right now is that our leading parties have been playing Wheel of Fortune with who gets to run the country since 2010
the slightly more convoluted version is that in our elections while we’re voting for a particular person as Prime Minister, we’re technically voting for their party as a whole. which means that after that person is elected, their party, with enough votes, can kick that PM out and replace them with a new one without any say from the Australian public. this used to be seen as a very dangerous, dramatic move, but after the Labor party did it in 2010, everyone’s decided it’s the new fun fad.
that being said, this time it’s a little different, because the ‘spill vote’ as it’s called, fractured the Liberal party so badly that they no longer have enough votes within the party to keep our fresh PM – or the party – in power. so this time the public will be voting about whether or not we still want these people in charge, at an unannounced future date.
sidenote: the Liberal party in Australia are the right wing guys.
Sorry to link to buzzfeed but i want peter dutton’s head on a pike
should note that nauru banned facebook because refugees were using it m to spread awareness
Dr Nick Kowalenko, who chairs the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry international relations subcommittee at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Child Psychiatrists, said that environmental features of pervasive refusal syndrome – including trauma, parental mental illness, and a pervading sense of hopelessness – have been the reality for years for the kids on Nauru.
“People can endure difficulties if there’s an anticipated hopeful outcome, a light at the end of the tunnel,” Kowalenko said. “But the dawning experience on a lot of those families and kids is that’s not the case.”
the explicit point of australia’s immigration policy, the explicit point of the way the detention centers on nauru and manus island have been run, is to provoke a sense of hopelessness. the trauma being done to these children is not even an accidental byproduct of conditions at the camps: it is an intended and inevitable consequence of the way the system is run, because it is a system designed to traumatise, regardless of the number of euphemisms deployed to design that fact
the stories in this article are proof positive that the people running australia’s immigration system are doing so competently and effectively
