Sev Ozdowski, former Human Rights Commissioner responsible for the 2001 inquiry: Certainly the repetition of my inquiry is the highest form of flattery but timing is very odd. When the boats were arriving in large numbers and Labor was at its peak of cruelty towards the boat arrivals AHRC almost did not see the problem and the newly appointed Children Rights Commissioner was proclaiming that her jurisdiction is limited to domestic matters. THE Australian Human Rights Commission should have considered an inquiry into asylum-seeker children in detention under the former Labor government when numbers were actually rising, the commission’s president has admitted. Gillian Triggs said she accepted criticism that the timing of the commission’s current inquiry, announced yesterday, was off by about “two or three years”… The commission’s first report into child detention in Australia noted a peak of 842 children held under the Howard government in September 2001. That number was passed under the Gillard government in November 2010, when 883 children were in detention. It passed 1000 for the first time under Labor in January 2011 and reached a high of almost 2000 last July, two months before the federal election. It is estimated there are about 1028 children in asylum detention in Australia and Nauru. blogs.news.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/human_rights_commission_grills_coalition_like_it_admits_it_should_have_gril/
Posted on: Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:30:16 +0000
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