I know that the sinecure, or cushy upstairs job, is a time-honoured tradition, but it shouldn’t just protect the douchebag from the world. It should also protect the world from the douchebag.
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To anoint Philip ‘children overboard’ Ruddock as our special envoy on human rights is an irony of breathtaking proportions. It’s almost as bizarre as allowing George Pell’s dicky heart to distance him from those whose hearts he helped break. In both cases, Australia looks weak, venal and mean.
As Howard’s Immigration Minister, Ruddock designed and implemented the Pacific solution. Now, as our first-ever special envoy to the UN Human Rights Commission, he must persuade them it was a solution, not simply a tactic.
He must prove that practices that have made Australia an international human rights pariah – the “stop the boats” war cry, the indefinite incarceration of babies, rape victims and the terminally ill, the blanket secrecy – are not an outright disgrace.
Can it work? Is the UN really that gullible? Or do we, Australia, just not care that much? Is it simply domestic politics: with an election imminent Malcolm needs comfy Berowra for some numbers guy, and that’s the deal, done?
Ruddock’s deeds date almost exclusively from his second 20 years in Parliament, from his sudden 1996 trade of principle for power to help puff Howard’s yeasty rise.
His main deed, his main legacy, is the camps.
Last November, the UN’s Universal Periodic Review of human rights focused on Australia. 105 states spoke: 70 selected Australia’s camps for criticism.
France, Germany, India, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Argentina, Denmark and China were amongst those who voiced concern over Australia’s imprisonment of children, lack of protections, cancellation of the UN rapporteur’s visit, silencing of doctors and expulsion of charity workers.
Australia used to be good at this stuff; good as in moral, not just clever. Back in the 1940s we helped draft the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
We’ve also signed the UN Convention Against Torture – of which the UN rapporteur found our camps are in breach – as well as conventions on discrimination against women, and on the Rights of the Child.
We have mountains of testimony that this enduring and unfathomable trauma will wreck the children’s lives, yet we sanction it – then send the system’s architect to sell it to the world.
The Vatican itself could not invent an uglier strategy.
And so to Pell. I’m amazed how much understanding the system – both church and state – affords the Cardinal, and how little they afford victims of his regime.
I’m staggered how frail and forgetful these old bulls get when a profound moral issue needs their attention.
I’m astonished how much denial, cruelty, perpetuation and victim-blaming a moral and spiritual leader can deliver and still seem a moral and spiritual leader.
Pell should be here. I’m sorry the cardinal’s heart is dodgy. I am.
But looking back over his alleged victim-blaming and indifference, the allegations of silence-money and cover-ups, his efforts to avoid fronting up, Pell’s heart seems to have been dicky for years. Ruddock’s too, for that matter.
But I can’t help thinking hearts that puny should see them sent to pasture. Running the Vatican, selling Australia’s torture camps; these are not jobs for the fainthearted.