The all out attack on the President of the Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, since the public release of the report on The Forgotten Children, by some members of the Abbott Government, is deceitful politics at its worst.  Accusing her of political bias does not seem to fit some of the most important facts, which seem to have been hidden by the smoke screen.

In the Commissions e-Bulletin of 26 February, Gillian Triggs clearly addresses this issue.  She speaks of the work that has been done, since she became president, prior to beginning the enquiry that led to this report.  In so doing, she spares neither Liberal nor Labour governments in their treatment of children in detention, and she did not gloss over the fact that the number of children in detention has been reduced significantly.  She notes that in July 2013, there were 1992 children in detention and that by October of the same year, this had been reduced to 1045.  Given that the Abbott government was only elected in September, she does not make the point that she could probably have made, that they might not have had responsibility for this reduction.  What she does say, and this is what is damning for the Abbott government:

“In stark contrast, over the six months after the new government took office, it became clear that children were being held for significant periods and were not being released. While the boats were stopping, the children were being detained for lengthening periods of time. When the inquiry was announced in February, 2014 children had been held on average for seven months and 1006 remained in closed indefinite detention”.

When you consider that in Great Britain for example, children can only be held for 72 hours, the situation in Australia is a horrific abuse of the children detained.

Similarly, from the human rights perspective and the good of our fellow human beings, every time we hear the government claiming their success in stopping the boats, we can wonder what has happened to the people and particularly children, who have not even had a chance to seek a better life free from oppression.

This attack on Gillian Triggs seems to reflect the truth of the Hindu proverb ‘when a thief sees a saint, he sees his pocket’.  These particular thieves are so driven by their political ideology that they do not seem to be able to consider, in an objective way, the full import of any situation that they are commenting on.