People who have done nothing wrong, other than seek our protection, and, be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A short while back we saw on television the body of a little boy lying abandoned on a beach in Turkey: a baby asylum seeker who’d died while trying to escape, presumably with his parents, a terrifying life in the Middle East to a better and safer one in Europe.

The media was full of the images, every news item covered it and a heap of people were interviewed; there was widespread lamentation and outrage over an image that no human being could be or should be proud of: a little mite robbed of his life before he’d really had one.

The only possible consolation was that at least he was out of it; there would be no more suffering for that little man.

Yet, here we are as a nation deliberately destroying the lives of children and their families who are locked up in our off-shore prison camps with no idea if or when they might be free to live whatever is the rest of their lives and no idea whether they will have personalities left that are capable of living a decent life.

We are destroying them as surely as that little boy was destroyed in Turkey and we are doing it deliberately and for political reasons; the High Court says it’s legal so that lets us off the hook, we can all get on with our lives and the government is clear to proceed.

But the deliberate and systematic destruction of people’s lives is only one of the cluster of obscenities that surround our creation and maintaining off-shore prison camps.

We are not allowed to see images of the children we destroy.

We’re not allowed to hear of the atrocities carried out in our name.

Medical staff, public servants, journalists who tell us what is happening or provide us with images of it face punishment because we now have a government that is increasingly wedded to secrecy – another obscenity that surrounds our “detention centres”.

But as well as creating and maintaining prison camps shrouded in secrecy our government also negotiates “trade partnerships” in secret where they negotiate away our sovereignty in a clamour to get into bed with the multi-national corporations that bully governments into submission.

Now let’s look at another obscenity: who runs our prison camps?

Are they “services” provided by the government responsible for setting them up?

No. We, the tax-payers, via our government-paid multi-national Transfield Services to do that.

We pay them money and they use as little of it as they can and retain what is left as profit.

So not only do they profit from jailing the detainees, but also they have incentives to be as frugal as possible and to maintain the service for as long as possible.

The effect of this is that we, the taxpayers, not only pay Transfield for the heinous service but we also pay them directly their profit.

So, people jailer profit good, only people smuggler profit bad.

What is the morality of this jungle?

Certainly our Samaritan impulses seem to vanish when the government blocks our knowledge!