People smugglers are the comic book villains of Australian asylum seeker policy. When he was Prime Minister in 2009, Kevin Rudd described them this way in the wake of a tragic event on an asylum seeker boat. People smugglers are engaged in the world's most evil trade and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth. People smugglers are the vilest form of human life. They trade on the tragedy of others and that's why they should rot in jail and in my own view, rot in hell. Yet people smuggling has not always had such bad press. As young Christians we were encouraged to read the inspiring story of Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch woman who was imprisoned by the Nazis for smuggling Jews out of the country. Later we all heard about Oskar Schindler, the wealthy German industrialist who used his right to Jewish slave labour as a cover for an operation which smuggled some 50,000 Jews out of Poland. In even more recent history Betty ...
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson