UPDATED: They sent an 8yo orphan back to detention

UPDATE: AAP reports in part this morning

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen has defended sending an Iranian boy orphaned by the Christmas Island shipwreck back to the island even though he intends to move him back to Sydney next week.

Mr Bowen came under intense pressure to let the boy stay in Sydney where he has family willing to care for him.

But Mr Bowen decided Seena should go all the way back to the island’s detention centre even though he intends to release the boy into his Sydney family’s care next week.

“The advice to me was that it would be better not to break him up from the other family members who’ve been looking after him on Christmas Island – his aunty, his cousins, etcetera – who he’s bonded with over the last couple of months, but to keep them together and then to move them to the community,” Mr Bowen told ABC Radio on Friday.

…Seena will be one of 11 survivors – including two other children – who will be released next week.Mr Bowen denied he had expedited Seena’s case because of media pressure.

The day after funerals were held for some of the at least 30 asylum seekers who died in the Christmas Island boat tragedy, the Federal Government sent an 8-year-old orphan back to detention.

And as if the the political farce wasn’t already enough, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott praised shadow Immigration Minister Scott Morrison for having the ‘guts’ to apologise.

This despite his being a type of Clayton’s apology – he apologised for only the timing of his comments but didn’t back away from the original assertion that the funerals were ‘a waste of taxpayers’ money’.

Michelle Grattan,writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, saw the apology you have when you’re not having an apology for what is was:

‘Abbott, who backed Morrison on Tuesday, was vague about his own regret yesterday. ”I want to thank Scott for being man enough to accept that perhaps we did go a little bit too far,” he said. It might have been clearer if he had said ”Scott and I” (”we” could sound like Morrison had just got them all into trouble), and somewhat more accurate if he had omitted the phrase ”a little bit”. //

This is the same Scott  Morrison who last year was actively searching for a wedge issue to tear apart the Labor Government. Asylum seekers have always been wedge issues, but he needed something specific.

The furore broke out as relatives mourned by gravesites, a shocking grief caught by news photographers which in itself – if you didn’t already know – just illustrates that we all grieve the same.

Among those who were buried were Zuma Ibrahimy, an 8 month old little girl and the father of an eight-year-old survivor of the disaster.

That 8 year old boy, who is now an ‘unaccompanied minor’ in detention on Christmas Island after his entire family drowned on that boat, was among the mourners. Take a moment to imagine what his life has been like since that disaster – and before it.

And amid the grief, the tiny coffins and the wailing, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen made the decision to send that 8-year-old boy back to Christmas Island. Back to detention. Back to the island where he watched his father and mother – who is still lost at sea – get swept away.

He is eight. Stop. Think about the eight-year-olds that you know.

Barrie Cassidy, writing for ABC’s The Drum analysed this mounting horror:

Now maybe the Government can reciprocate by admitting they too have been insensitive and more, far more, by immediately after the funeral sending a deeply traumatised 10-year-old orphan on a 5,000 kilometre journey back to Christmas Island.

Probably too much though to expect Immigration Minister Chris Bowen to, in effect, admit that he and the Government have been needlessly bureaucratic, pig headed and heartless. But then again, if Scott Morrison…?

No it won’t happen. Not when the Minister can advance arguments like this with Jon Faine on ABC 774:

8 year old Seena

What little compassion may have been left in this debate was soaked up by red tape and rhetoric.

So across the political divide, politicians forgot what this is all about. They forgot that this isn’t a political football. Not this moment. Not those funerals. Not those women, men and children. Border protection may be an issue on other days of the year, rightly or wrongly, but this was no longer about whether these people could or should come. They had. And some of them died. And they deserved to say goodbye.

Interestingly, there are hundreds of children like Seena in detention today. More than under previous governments. That’s children.

The debate will come back to border protection as it so often does, and when it does it will be helpful to bear this in mind: Since January 15, Italy has received some 5000 refugees from Tunisia following that country’s revolution. Australia has received about 24,000 asylum seekers by boat. In 34 years. Not 34 weeks. 34 years.

If our political leaders and senior portfolio holders struggle to muster the compassion required to deal with these humanitarian issues, in the small numbers in which they arrive, then we do live in a sorry state of affairs.

So if there can be one apology that is real, following all of this heartbreaking callousness, let it be mine.

I am sorry that politics in this country is not equipped and not willing to be equipped with the most basic of decent traits: compassion.

That’s what makes us human. It’s what makes asylum seekers more than just cargo on a boat.

Incidentally, these are the same asylum seekers who pulled together to donate money – what little they had – to the Queensland flood appeal when it was devastated by rains over the summer.

How’s that for compassion.

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Labor Senator Doug Cameron has now called for the sacking of Scott Morrison. Well, what do you think? Should he be sacked? And where should the debate go from here?