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Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has somehow found himself back in the same position he was in 25-years-ago, surrounded by public servants who enjoy terrifying young brown kids and their families as part of their job.
This comes as the Western Queensland town of Biloela’s beloved Tamil family of Priya, her husband Nadesalingam and their two Australian-born daughters learn their deportation has been delayed until next Wednesday, after years of heartache about the prospect of being sent back to Sri Lanka.
The old man, who worked in the abattoir in Biloela while his daughters attended the local daycare centre, reportedly missed out of refugee status after a clerical error within the Home Affairs office resulted in their papers not being processed in time.
Mr Dutton said the government would go through the court process but he expected the family would still be deported.”I would like the family to accept that they are not refugees, they’re not owed protection by our country,” Mr Dutton told Today.
The plight of this family has dominated headlines since they were dragged out of bed in their remote Central Queensland town at dawn last year and seperated, before being placed in detention – where the girls have since been denied birthday cake and dental care – as the youngest struggles to grow baby teeth due to her enclosed and under-resourced childhood behind bars.
However, the torturous existence of these girls appears to be in trend with the workplace culture that fosters under Peter Dutton, stemming back to an incident involving Peter Dutton’s colleagues while he was in the QLD police force.
In 1994, three Murri boys, aged 12, 13, and 14, were ordered into paddy wagons by six of Dutton’s police colleagues in Fortitude Valley. Each boy was driven in a separate patrol car to a swampy area in Queensland’s bayside. The officers threatened to throw the boys into the swampy wasteland, and threatened to cut their fingers off. before being abandoned after their shoes were taken from them. The boys later retrieved their shoes and began to walk home. They finished the journey in a taxi paid for by a security guard they met along the way.
Dutton has never clarified if he was a member of the ‘Pinkenba Six’ – but appears to have remained close with the officers, one of who (Mark Ellis, Pictured) ran a failed campaign as a One Nation candidate in the recent QLD state election.
