Hon Luke Hartsuyker MP                                                                 

PO Box 2056                                                                                    

Coffs Harbour 2450                                                                         Sawtell 2452 

                                                                                                            

28 April 2014

Dear Mr Hartsuyker,

I believe that I speak for many Australians when I say “enough is enough” in regard to your government’s policy on asylum seekers. As a retired asylum seeker decision maker who worked for the Immigration department in the mid 1990’s I am appalled at the downward spiral of policy and public debate on this issue since the dreaded “Tampa” decision. A decision that both major parties agreed to, in contravention of international maritime and refugee law, to their everlasting shame.  The bidding war that took place during the last federal election brought disgrace upon our political system and on this country as a democratic and law (international) abiding nation. Both your side of politics and the Labor government held a law and order style auction trying to outbid each other for who could brutalise these desperate people the most effectively. You should all hang your heads in shame. Many of you, including Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and Kevin Rudd, profess to be Christians. The fact is that many Christians have been asking your government to stop these inhuman policies and you have thumbed you noses at them. How do you sleep at night? I don’t. Every night I lay awake wondering how a country like ours has come to this state of affairs where politicians with the aid of the media have demonized innocent men, women, children, babies and unborn babies and interned them in Australia’s 21^st century answer to Nazi concentration camps.

Go home tonight, look into the eyes of your children and grandchildren and tell them that you truly believe that innocent people, who are entitled to seek protection under the international Convention on the Status of Refugees, to which our country is a signatory, should be treated like animals. If you can do that, with out any sense of guilt or remorse at the misery your policies are causing, then it is time for you to resign because you have lost any claim on humanity that you may have once had and are not fit to represent the people of Cowper.

Whatever good things you and you fellow politicians have done while in our Federal parliament, the cruel and inhuman treatment of asylum seekers has totally nullified those things. History will remember this Abbott government as a cruel and vindictive government guilty of the worst human rights offences perpetrated by a developed western democracy in recent times.

Yours sincerely

John 

Luke Hartsuyker's reply right click on letter  to enlarge

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