Sometimes the pleasure I get from being right is far outweighed by the pain of wishing I had been wrong. This is one of these times. About a month ago I suggested that the media and government assault on Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs over an obscure immigration case was merely a preliminary skirmish before the release of the Commission's report into children in detention. I'm deeply sorry to have been proved right. On February 11 the government tabled the Commission's report, The Forgotten Children, which it has been sitting on since November while it engaged in its initial softening up process. I've only had time so far to read the summary and skim the rest, but it is not pretty reading. Over an eight month period, teams of Commission staff and assistants, including experts in child health, interviewed over 1,000 children and family members in eleven Australian immigration detention centres. The Commission also received a couple of hundred f
'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