Tony Abbott says refugee activists should be thankful after the Coalition cleared children out of detention centres. The former Australian prime minister joked he’d been “scouring the post every day” in search of correspondence from Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs and refugee lawyer Julian Burnside QC:
The only way to keep kids out of detention is to keep the boats stopped. The only way to prevent deaths at sea is to keep the boats stopped because, as we’ve seen in Europe, you have horrific rates of death at sea once this people-smuggling trade is well in place.
