comment, editorial

IN 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a major international treaty to protect children from persecution. A year later, Australia ratified the convention on the rights of the child. One of the four key principles of that convention states: ''The authorities in each country must protect children and help ensure their full development - physically, spiritually, morally and socially.'' It is hard to reconcile Australia's commitment to that principle with the actions of the Australian government in the past week. It appears one of the reasons the government has cast an iron cloak of secrecy around asylum seeker boat arrivals is that it is instructing its officers to use children as bargaining tools to intimidate arrivals into returning to their place of origin. Asylum seekers and sources within Immigration have described to Fairfax Media government officers being instructed to put unaccompanied minors onto planes back to the countries they are fleeing, children being separated from parents on the wharf at Christmas Island and a mother being separated from her week-old baby. And those are just the incidents we have been told about through the hard work of Australian and Indonesian journalists. The government's oppressive clampdown on information makes getting to the truth of these allegations that much more difficult. Assuming they are accurate, we need to ask, at what point did it become acceptable in Australia for our government to use children - irrespective of their nationality - as political pawns? The government was clear in the lead-up to the federal election that it intended to take a hardline approach on asylum seeker arrivals, and won the right to govern on the back of those policies. But there comes a point where policies and actions cross over from being tough to inhumane. If these reports are accurate, it appears Australia has crossed that threshold. Australia has loudly decried atrocities in other countries against children - be they child soldiers in bloody civil conflicts, genocide or children sold into prostitution. The government's electoral victory gives it the right to govern in the way it sees fit. That victory however, does not give the Abbott government the right to breach our international obligations or abandon long-held and widely accepted principles on which our civil society has been built. Future generations will judge all of us - not just those who implemented or supported policies targeted at children. When our children ask us what we did to oppose brutal actions against those fleeing persecution, what will be our answer?

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