Sarah Hanson-Young Utterly Unleashed On “Biased” MPs Defending Detaining Kids On Nauru In The Senate Today
She called Barry O'Sullivan a "pig" for implying expert assessments of Nauru's harmful effects on children were false. Yeah, fair enough.
Over the past few days, the #LetThemStay campaign — a movement started last week to stop the federal government sending 267 asylum seekers currently in Australia back to Nauru — has attracted an almost unprecedented amount of public support. The thousands of people who rallied late last week and again yesterday have been cheered on by supportive coverage from major news organisations, and the dozens of churches offering refugees sanctuary. But arguably the most notable allies have been the state leaders from the two major parties that support mandatory offshore detention.
Catalysed by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’ impassioned open letter to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday (which he eclipsed yesterday with an adorable outing to the zoo), there are now six states or territories ready and willing to settle the group of asylum seekers. But considering most of them are led by Labor ministers, the Federal Opposition’s eerie silence hasn’t gone unnoticed.
There was not a single Labor MP who spoke out against the deporting of 267 asylum seekers in federal caucus meeting today.
— Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) February 9, 2016
On many issues over the past couple of years, the Greens have increasingly replaced Labor as an actual opposition party to the government. And today was no exception. This morning, during a Legal & Constitutional Affairs Committee hearing in the senate, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young didn’t hold back her frustrations in dealing with stubborn, empathy-deficient Coalition ministers.
Hanson-Young was questioning Australian Human Rights Commission president Professor Gillian Triggs about the appropriateness of sending asylum seeker children back to Nauru, where many of them have allegedly experienced abuse, and are likely to be further traumatised. Triggs answered that detaining mentally unwell children breached international conventions according to the United Nations. When Nationals Senator Barry O’Sullivan interrupted to ask if Triggs personally believed “we’re torturing these children” (as the High Court recently threw out this suggestion, it’s clear he was trying to trap her into contradicting Australian law), Hanson-Young didn’t skip a beat, following up his withdrawal with, “You can wait to be a pig then”.
If that wasn’t enough to sate your burning desire to see haughty conservative politicians put in their place, when Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald accused Hanson-Young of “peddling lies” in regards to the alleged rape of a five-year-old detainee, she replied: “I’m sorry Senator Macdonald, but you are the most biased chair in this Senate… you are a joke.”
O’Sullivan went on to say the majority — “not a minority” — of the asylum seeker families awaiting deportation were being detained because of security reasons; a suggestion Hanson-Young was similarly displeased with. She quickly interrupted to say that ASIO had actually only flagged seven asylum seekers out of the entire group, to which O’Sullivan told her to withdraw.
You can also watch that exasperating exchange below:
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