This judgement about the crisis of Australian humanism may not be quite right:

Nicolson

The cartoon implies that an Australia that says no to refugees and asylum seekers is a fortress, inward looking, hostile to the outside world, and which sanctions the continuance of the White Australia policy.

Maybe it is the camp (of mandatory detention) that is the political face of Australia these days, not border protection.

Nicolson

The recent deportation of Vivian Alverez Solon to the Philipines indicates not just administative bungling, but the smooth operation of a system of lawful detention and deportation. The heart of that system is the camp, as illustrated by the imprisonment of Cornelia Rau, an Australian citizen.

Recently we had Mirko Bagaric and Julia Clarke, two legal academics from the law school at Deakin University, writing in The Age that torture was a 'permissable' and 'moral' action in certain circumstances. Those circumstances were then justified on utilitarian grounds. Peter Faris, one time head, of the now defunct National Crime Authority, supported the call in the context of the war of terrorism.

Government torture in the camp is back on the agenda after-Auschwitz. Once again we 'stare into the unsayable' engineered by Western rationality (instrumental reason) that gave us Auschwitz and the Gulag in modernity. The camp, then and now, is no irrational aberration.