When Cornelia Rau was ‘found’ and taken into care the government indicated this may not be the only case, just that mistakes were rare and unusual.

How wrong they were. Begs the question, did they already know.

The cadaverous Ruddock did what could have almost been Rau’s fate, deported a mentally ill Australian to another country.

Now Vivian Alvarez has been deported and is missing 4 years later.

This crime has now been compounded. The Phillipine police, who have been searching for this missing woman for 3 weeks, were not informed about her condition or why she was being sought until they spoke with an ABC reporter today.[hooray for the fourth estate].

Along with this, the mental condition of many of the long term detained has been exposed again. The latest includes that of a child born in detention and having lived 3 years in a prison and is unsurprisingly presenting with abnormal behaviour.

And, again, the police in Australia could not connect the dots between a missing person and one in immigration detention, although this time they had an abandoned child and a husband with a missing wife to assist them with clues.

Both may have exhibited the characteristics of a non Australian. However after 18 years in the country Alvarez would surely have given the game away when she spoke and if she didn’t then her claim to imprisonment as a sex slave should, one would have thought, led to a more extensive investigation into an allegation of a crime and thus a greater potential for a dot to connect with another.

Whilst Amanda the care bear (Amanda’s flame of justice) is away, Acting Minister McGauran is making noises about thorough enquiries and holding out the long promise of changes to mollify us, yes he’s acting as though he’s looking into it.

Several thousand cups of tea will have to be drunk by those working on the problem, many important inter-departmental committee meetings held and more narcissistic Ministerial exposures occur before any change will be seen by these unfortunates mistreated in our names.

Clearly, long term detention without a criminal conviction is unacceptable and release into the community or into care is the only course for people who the government is not going to accept as refugees. Repatriating them can be worked on whilst they live among us as human beings.

However, having spent hundreds of millions on running offshore detention camps whilst new detention centres are built to reinforce the fortress Australia mentality of the 1950s that simmers along among the xenophobes and racists in the community the government cannot easily abandon its policies and retain its dream of one pure people selecting each new member preferably from the maternity ward, but not too many from the land of IVF.

A disgusted phill Parsons is not proud to be Australian today.