Suffer the children

Human Rights Commission and Prof. Gillian Triggs targeted by the bully brigade ... Miserable move to deflect attention from policy of mistreatment of children in immigration detention ... Labor culpable, but Coalition used children as political pawns  

I had thought that long ago Piers Akerman had dissolved into a puddle of rancid lard. 

But no. There he is still slathering away in a dark backend of The Daily Smellograph - a sort of spluttering, superannuated Bolt. 

His damnation last week of Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs must go down as one of the ugliest piece of excrement ever to emerge the cloacal depths of the Murdoch press. 

Akerman claimed that because Triggs' own disabled child was taken into care, she was unfit to "lecture anyone about the human rights of children".

Using the personal tragedy of president of the HRC as a way of smearing the work she and the HRC did on the Forgotten Children in immigration detention is a low mark, even for someone of Akerman's depleted sensibilities.   

The line of argument from the Abbott government and its claqueurs in the press is that this is Labor's fault, while the Coalition has been heroic in getting children out of detention. 

The prime minister said the Human Rights Commission "should be ashamed of itself". 

"I reckon that the Human Rights Commission ought to be sending a note of congratulations to Scott Morrison saying 'Well done mate because your actions have been very good for the human rights and the human flourishing of thousands of people'."  

Morrison said that the nine months work by the commission and experts amounted to out-of-date "allegations". "The children are pretty much out." Immigration minister Dutton used same line from the same speaking notes. 

There was also a barrage of criticism from the bowyang division of the Coalition. 

Queensland backbencher George Christensen told The Australian that he had more confidence in getting impartial advice from Green Left Weekly than from Gillian Triggs. 

Christensen is chairman of the House of Representative Committee on social policy and legal affairs. 

Queensland LNP senator Barry O'Sullivan, told the 7.30 Report: "It's no doubt a question that she is asking herself at the moment as to whether she has the confidence of the government, the confidence of the nation." 

O'Sullivan was being fed questions by staff from the attorney general's office to fire at Triggs during Senate estimates.

Tasmanian Liberal backbencher and glued-on member of the Abbott cheer squad, Brigadier Andrew Nikolic, who has just been promoted to the whip's office, declared Triggs' position was "absolutely untenable". 

Apart from squawking from the peanut gallery, news broke of a clumsy attempt to interfere with the independence of the president of the commission. 

Chris Moraitis, head of the attorney general's department, acting on behalf of Soapy George Brandis, had asked Triggs to resign before the children in detention report was released.  

Last month The Australian's legal affairs man, Chris Merritt, was running stories about how "legally flawed" Triggs was for relying on international conventions and treaties to underpin her recommendations on cases where she found breaches of human rights 

Slowly it must have dawned on him that the Human Rights Commission Act requires the commission to apply the ICCPR and other treaties as applicable normative standards of human rights in this country.  

How he's arguing that the Act must be changed so that HRC findings are not determined by the standards of international law. 

The 2014 national inquiry into children held in immigration detention was a 10th anniversary follow-up to the 2004 report done when Catherine Branson was president of the HRC. 

About 1,200 children were in immigration detention when the HRC began work on the report in February 2014. 

The government held detained children to ransom as a means to securing passage of last year's amendments to the Migration Act.

Morrison said children would be released on TPVs if the amendments went through. This was the factor that drove the last person holding-out, Senator Ricky Muir, into Morrison's arms. 

Even so, there are still 350 children held in immigration detention. The emphasis of the report is on their treatment and welfare. The HRC found 233 recorded assaults involving children and 33 incidents of reported sexual assault. It also found 207 incidents of actual self-harm and 436 incidents of threatened self harm. 

Associated with this are the high levels of mental illness and developmental harm suffered by these children.  

The HRC also found that despite the Coalition's claim it was moving children out of the camps, the length of time they were held in detention stretched to an average period of nearly one year. 

While Labor was certainly culpable in its management of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, the Coalition has gone further and deliberately made cruelty and suffering a central plank in its policy of deterrence. 

Among the loudest voices in support of Triggs' findings have been the Australian Bar Association and the Law Council of Australia. 

The ABA issued a statement on February 12, welcoming the report and urging the government to act quickly.  

Then on February 14 the ABA and the LCA jointly deplored the attacks of Triggs.  

ABA prez Fiona McLeod said: 

"Those who are critical of Professor Triggs and the Commission need only stop and read the report to see that it is concerned with detention practices of both the current and former government." 

This morning (Monday, Feb 16) in the Fairfax Media, Prof. Triggs made a strong rebuttal of the smears and misinformatuion directed against her and the commission.