A former Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (DIEA), John Menadue, has added his voice to calls for a broader, public inquiry into the workings of the Department now known as DIMIA.

John Menadue says that Amanda Vanstone’s department is badly led, inward looking, has a culture of suspicion and contains racist elements.

Speaking to ABC Radio National John Menadue says,

"Those [racist and suspicious] sorts of attitudes are everywhere in the Australian community. Unfortunately I don’t think we’ve had good leadership on those issues in recent years where, under the name of border protection, outsiders have been subject to appalling treatment. So I think in many senses, the Department reflects the community generally, but they’ve been very badly served by the leadership that they’ve had."

[…]"the Department and the community gets the nod at the senior level of Government, from the Prime Minister in particular, that they can behave this way towards some of the most vulnerable people in the world – asylum seekers – it is not surprising that some people in the Department pick up that sort of view and believe that they’ve got to translate it into toughness in their own administration of the Migration Act."

"But when there are so many people to choose from, it is not surprising that if an Australian migration officer has to choose between and English-speaking engineer who’s a refugee and a refugee who’s a single woman who’s been raped and she’s illiterate, the latter will scarcely ever get a look in."

I first heard ‘Fuck me less’ when my sister came back from Papua New Guinea. Over there it is used by a powerless person towards a powerful person.

Fuck us less DIMIA!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 9:07 am and is filed under Welcome to my country. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Click to leave a comment.