The Hon. Peter Dutton Member for Dickson, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Dear Peter, I was listening to ABC RN this morning and heard the interview with John Lawrence, SC, relating to the case of a five year old Iranian girl who is being held prisoner in Darwin by your department and being threatened with removal back to Nauru. I was extremely upset by his description of the mental disorder the girl is exhibiting and the conditions in which she is being held - in fact it brought me to tears as I was driving my car. I believe the only morally acceptable and rational decision is to immediately release her and her family into the community and to provide her with on-going psychiatric care. Now in case you feel I am some bleeding heart - let me tell you that I have 16 years service in the Australian Army (I am currently still serving in the Army Reserves) and I run a Management Consulting firm that specializes in organizational restructures. Not the regular profile of an International Socialist! I am however a Christian and grew up with a father who is a Psychiatrist and I studied clinical psychology at University. I know from this experience that this girl will, unless we radically change her life course, end up with a severe psychiatric disorder such as a Multiple Personality or Borderline Personality disorder. I have seen these people twenty years on having terrible lives and being a huge burden on our health system. It is a bad moral and a poor economic decision by your department. As I listed to John on the radio I was reminded of something that Hanna Arendt wrote:

For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight."

-Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility”

I read that text in December soon after visiting the small Polish town of Oswiecim with my family - better known today by its German name “Auschwitz”. Seeing the death ovens of the camp, the rooms full of human hair, the pictures of murdered children what occurs to you is "what madness could have driven the German people to these acts of Evil?” The answer to that is more horrible than an explanation that they were barbarous people. The Nazi death camps were an administrative convenience - a means to a necessary end. What started as a camp to hold political prisoners slowly and surely became the symbol of humanities' capacity for absolute evil. The people who ran them wanted to please their masters and make a problem go away. In 2015 we commemorate the 100 years of the Gallipoli campaign. We wish on the 25th to honour the sacrifices of our men and women in the service of our country but we will not do that by creating a society that is so hard of heart and which exhibits the propensity to move towards being evil. I look forward to the news that you have decided to release this family from prison. Although I don't know you, I expect that as a product of an Australian upbringing with all of the opportunities this brings, you have a capacity for compassion. This Anzac day at the dawn service as I stand to attention in my Australian Army uniform, of which I am very proud, and I will pray for this five year old girl and for the country that feels it essential to put its political economy before her safety. If I hear she is sent back to Nauru I will dedicate my efforts to your un-election in 18 months time. While not a Radical I have a moral line which when crossed will drive me to persistent and enduring action - and I will be prepared to invest my time and financial resources which are not unsubstantial to see this wrong corrected. Yours faithfully,

D. Unwin, St Lucia.