Readers are invited to submit letters to The Guardian.
Letters may be e-mailed to guardian@cpa.org.au.
Letters of 300-400 words are preferred.

Letters to the Editor:

Open letter to three Qld MPs
Mal Brough, Peter Slipper and Alex Somlyay,
MPs in Queensland

You are our elected representatives and members of the Howard 
Government. Since 1999 you have actively supported inhumane 
treatment of people who have come to Australia legitimately 
seeking protection.

Most of these asylum seekers fled threats of persecution and 
death from Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq or the Taliban in 
Afghanistan.

Through your government's fear campaign, you have manipulated 
public opinion to condemn asylum seekers. You have persisted in 
misrepresenting these people as "economic migrants", "queue 
jumpers", "calculating opportunists", "illegal non citizens", 
even when they have overwhelmingly been found to be genuine 
refugees.

You have used the Australian Navy inappropriately to threaten and 
frighten boatloads of asylum seekers even to the point of firing 
across the bows of the boats and towing them away from Australia. 
You have ordered the Navy to stand by and watch while such a boat 
broke up and its human cargo was floundering in the sea before 
giving permission for them to be rescued, risking their lives and 
those of navy personnel.

You misrepresented these people in the "Children Overboard" 
incident and persisted in this misrepresentation even when you 
were told the facts about it.

You created the Pacific Solution in your determination to keep 
asylum seekers from reaching Australian shores. You paid vast 
sums from our taxes to Nauru and PNG to keep asylum seekers in 
appalling conditions, isolated, hidden from public scrutiny and 
without access to legal representation.

Most Australians would agree that people who come without visas 
should be detained in some way until health and security checks 
are made. However, you presided over a regime of indefinite 
mandatory detention in maximum security prison conditions. Your 
continuing inhumane regime has literally driven some of its 
victims to despair, and many, including children, to attempt 
suicide.

You have spent over $700 million of our taxes over the past three 
years building, operating and supporting detention centres in 
Australia, on Nauru and Manus Island.

You have, for the most part, ignored the numerous reports and 
requests from highly reputable watchdog organisations — the 
Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, the United 
Nations, the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the Australian Medical 
Association, Amnesty International, State Child Welfare and 
Mental Health bodies — which warned of the grave consequences of 
indeterminate detention on the mental health of detainees, and 
which pleaded for the most vulnerable of them to be released into 
the safety of approved community bodies.

You have allowed children to be held in detention for over five 
years and five months, and some are still there.

You fought and won the legal right to detain forever those few 
unfortunate asylum seekers who have a genuine fear of being 
returned to their homeland but do not fit the narrow definition 
of a United Nations Convention refugee. Some of these people have 
now been held in detention by you for over six years.

You pressured asylum seekers to return "voluntarily" to their 
home countries, by threatening them with forced deportation. Over 
five hundred Afghans did agree to return home, many of them 
forced to flee again because their situation was so unsafe.

Until 1999 all refugees were offered permanent protection. You 
introduced a system of temporary protection. This keeps refugees 
in fear and uncertainty about their future, separates many from 
their families, offers no hope of family reunion, and restricts 
their access to resettlement benefits.

Members of our organisation have visited each of you on several 
occasions to express our deep concern and to urge you to take 
action. We have told you stories based on our direct contact with 
refugees in the community and asylum seekers in detention. Each 
time you expressed your unqualified support for government 
policy.

We deplore your government's treatment of these people. We 
believe it is in breach of United Nations conventions to which 
Australia is signatory. One day the government must be held 
accountable. You are part of that government. You will not be 
able to say: "That was not my responsibility."

Nor will you be able to say: "I did not know". You were there.

Barbara Brewster, Stephanie Belfrage
Buddies Refugee Support Group
Sunshine Coast, QLD

If John Howard wants to fight the next issue on Industrial 
Relations why doesn't he release the findings of his "Inquiry 
into employment: Increasing participation in paid work?" The 
Inquiry criteria was instigated by Tony Abbot and Amanda Vanstone 
last September. The public has a right to see the results of this 
Inquiry, they paid for it out of their taxes.

The Government took eight years to construct an economy that 
squanders the energies and talents of millions of people, now 
without secure jobs. Now more than 30 percent of our human 
productive capacity is idle and wasted. I am sure that any 
promises made in the next few weeks will be met with cynicism.

According to the inquiry paper: "Building a simpler system to 
help jobless families and individuals", ISBN 0 642 77055 7, the 
intention was to "deal" with unemployed people. This sounds like 
a failure of policy to address the problem. The problem is years 
of poor policies that scapegoat income support recipients as 
victims instead of helping them into secure jobs with a living 
wage. John Howard has failed these people.

Marginalisation itself is a form of violence that leads to other 
types of violence, feeds back on itself and eventually spirals 
out of control. Many social commentators claim that violence has 
increased to a crisis point in inner cities. Unemployment, that 
is people existing on less than a living wage (this includes many 
pensioners), leads to increased poverty, illness, drugs, violence 
and suicide. This eventually adds to the nation's overall cost of 
health, welfare and law and order. It takes a perverse kind of 
genius to turn a nation's increasing ability to generate so much 
wealth into a declining standard of living for many of its 
citizens.

Mary Jenkins, Secretary
Australian National Organisation of the Unemployed (ANOU)
Spearwood WA

The Australian Constitution disqualifies any Federal electoral 
candidate from nominating if they are:

(1) under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or 
adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or 
entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of 
a foreign power: or

(2) attainted of treason, or has been convicted and is under 
sentence, or subject to be sentenced, for any offence punishable 
under the law of the Commonwealth or of a State by imprisonment 
for one year or longer (Section 44).

Given the Howard Government's surrender of Australian foreign 
policy to American imperatives, it would appear that Mr Howard is 
in breach of the Constitution and should be dismissed from office 
forthwith.

Let us hope the election produces the desired outcome without us 
having to resort to a political putsch à la Whitlam!

Gareth Smith
Byron Bay, NSW