Open Letter to Scott Morrison PM of Australia.

 Dear Scott,

 

               I’ve decided to address you on a first name basis due to your insistence of pretending to be an average bloke and therefore, should not be offended by the familiarity, but I can think of more appropriate things to call you. To label you a fraud and a charlatan would be too easy and not even your party room, who, have recently demonstrated their lust regarding the launch of defamation proceedings against people who haven’t come anywhere near defaming them, would be hesitant to advise you to do so, as even they know both are true.

 

It has come to my attention that you (and Herr Dutton) get upset when you are referred to as a Monster and as much as it pains me to do so, I must inform you that a Monster is exactly what you are. Now I don’t often quote dictionaries to make my point, but I figure you’re starting from a lower level than most people who bother to read my work.

 

Monster is a noun (that’s a naming word, as in, “You Monster!”) and according to The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary is 1. An imaginary creature, usu. large and frightening, compounded of incongruous elements (that’s the sky-fairy you pray to and makes you pretend to speak in tongues) 2. An inhumanely cruel or wicked person (that’s you and your government – All of you) 3. A misshapen animal or plant (again that’s you, and Spud and the Beetroot and all the rest probably) 4. A large hideous animal or thing (see 3.)

 

Having established your credentials as a Monster, we can now move onto the adjective Monstrous which is “a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify it or describe it”. Given Monstrous is described as 1. Like a monster; abnormally formed (again, very descriptive of yourself and your Government as mentioned in 3 & 4 in the previous paragraph) 2. Huge (I’m not one to body shame but it wouldn’t hurt if you lost a few kilos) 3.a. outrageously wrong or absurd b. atrocious. (Which we will now discuss)

 

Not only do you as an individual meet the criteria to be called a Monster, your actions and policies can also be described as Monstrous. It is hard to find a starting point at where to begin criticising you, Scott. I could begin with the time you buggered off to Hawaii while half the country burned but you’ve been in the game for a lot longer than that so I would probably be better served in beginning with that pathetic statue you have on your desk proclaiming that you “stopped these” referring to boats carrying people – human beings – attempting to assert their fundamental human right of seeking asylum.

 

I won’t begin with those things, nor will I berate you for your abject failure regarding The Pandemic, quarantine and the vaccine rollout because there are more pressing matters such as the failure of your government to acknowledge that Australia is, was and always will be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land. As I am not of Indigenous descent I will not delve too deeply into this issue, except to say that you and your government’s refusal to allow a referendum so as the people can vote to recognise the first inhabitants of these lands, let alone lead the country in stopping black deaths in custody, is not only Monstrous (a. outrageously wrong or absurd) but pathetic.

 

There is also no way I am going to waste my time reminding you of the hundreds of thousands of Australians you insist on keeping in abject poverty so that your Billionaire mates can turn a profit from the suffering of the least fortunate, or that the Robodebt scheme you implemented has resulted in at least two-thousand Australians committing suicide (b. atrocious). I won’t mention these things because it clear that you do not care about anyone except yourself.

 

Don’t bother parading “Jenny and The Girls” or your mother in another impotent attempt to humanise yourself in front of the populace. It is pathetic of you to pretend you have any compassion or the ability to feel empathy when even after blowing taxpayers money on an “empathy coach” (whatever that is), you still had to allegedly be told by Jenny that rape was bad. You used your own daughters as political props to play up your stupidity in an attempt to deflect attention away from your inaction regarding an alleged rape committed in Parliament House. That alone is enough to describe you as a Monster.

                                                                                                                  

What really takes the cake though (no, you can’t eat it) is your Monstrous treatment of the Murugappan family of Biloela. How someone who purports to be a Christian can be so bereft of compassion is beyond me. This is why I am writing to you Scott. Call Jenny in to explain this for you in case I use too many big words, or you fail to understand what I am telling you and need someone to ask how you would pretend to “feel, if that happened to your daughters”.

 

You managed to fake your way through pretending to care when a young Liberal staffer claimed she was raped because you could actually see your daughters in that situation. Imagine this hypothetical scenario –

 

The daughter of a former PM found unconscious and naked inside a Ministerial office by security and left to sleep it off – It would make your blood boil – All of those favours you pulled in to get your underperforming child a cushy job for life ruined by the spawn of a major party donor who you are then forced to protect because the party needs cash.

 

I am not suggesting that your daughters would be incapable of uttering the words “yes Minister” before striding off to demand an underling perform the task either of “The Girls” had been instructed to undertake. For you to not have them installed as Senior Advisors to at least a State Minister like The Beetroot has done with one of his, aged 22, would be laughable. Of course you’d do it, social climbing sycophants like yourself can’t help using their connections to benefit themselves. You pretended to realise that “The Girls” will probably find themselves in that situation at some point and Jenny told you to be grumpy about it. So, you made another announcement and followed up with nothing.

 

You were able to put yourself in the alleged victim’s father’s shoes for one presser and then all we hear are crickets. But when it comes to the Murugappan family you haven’t even tried, so I’ll pose another hypothetical –

 

Late at night Scotty is lying awake in bed pondering why he hadn’t been able to steal the preselection for Cook all those years ago, Jenny is snoring beside him and he can’t hear his daughters whose names he doesn’t remember so assumes he is the only one awake.

 

There is a loud banging at the front door and Scotty gets up to see what the fuss is about. One of his children starts to cry but he walks past her room to greet the visitors. It’s probably someone come to be healed, he tells himself. After failing to enter Politics, Scotty threw himself into the teachings of the cult he belonged to. Being gifted at grifting he quickly rose through the ranks and became a pastor who now owns a used car dealership.

 

On opening the door, he is met by armed police officers who inform him that a Government edict dictates that all people infected with the dangerous disease known as Pentecostalism must be detained and processed before being deported to their country of origin. Scotty protests but the police are adamant and push past him to take his family into custody.

 

As he is handcuffed, Scotty cries real tears for the first time in his life. It takes him being locked up to show any real emotion. It had to happen to him before it was a bad thing. He soils himself and is dragged bawling to the awaiting van. Scotty pleads with his captors insisting that he and his family were born in Australia and therefore can’t be deported to their country of origin because it is Australia.

 

Laughing, the cops remind Scotty that during his tilt at preselection he had boasted about the thief he was descended from hailed from Cornwall and arrived by boat, therefore his arrival was illegal and any of his descendants who are found to be infected by Pentecostalism must be removed from the country because they pose a clear and present danger to Australia and Australian values.

 

Do you see where I’m going with this hypothetical Scott? If this sort of thing were to happen to my completely fictional character “Scotty” you would be outraged at the injustice imposed on a “true Australian” family by the powers that be. What I am trying to express to you Scott, if you haven’t managed to figure it out even with Jenny’s help, is that you are a Monster and your Government’s policies are Monstrous, especially when we are forced (by you) to consider the plight of the Murugappan family.

 

You have spent the last three years torturing a family (including two children who were BORN HERE) for nothing more than a multi-million dollar bill that the taxpayer will pick up. To suggest that by allowing the Murugappan family to settle permanently in Biloela an armada of leaky boats packed full of people fleeing violence and persecution rocking up on our Northern border is ridiculous. Not only will it not happen but can you honestly say that any reasonable man would voluntarily board a vessel more likely to sink than float on the off chance that he will fall in love with a woman from his own ethnic group, relocate to a regional town crying out for labour, get a job, have two children, and then be willing to subject his family to three years of detention to the point where their toddler has to be to be medically evacuated from an island prison to the mainland because the best treatment your mob could think of was paracetamol.

 

Sepsis and Pneumonia. Seriously Scott, paracetamol. For Sepsis and Pneumonia. I’m not a doctor, Scott, and neither are you, but even I know that is not an adequate treatment for two potentially fatal medical conditions. Now since we’re discussing your shortcomings regarding medical science it is not much of a stretch to discuss your shortcomings as a human being. It is unfathomable to believe that you aren’t aware of the level of callousness and cruelty you have applied to the Murugappan family.

 

Australia (and The World) know that you are a cruel man, a Monster, and the longer you keep the Murugappan family in detention, the more people who witness your Monstrous cruelty will only result in more people voting against your Monstrous Government and its Monstrous policies.

 

That’s what important to you, isn’t it Scott?

 

Votes.

 

Without votes you’re nothing more than a failed ad man who really needs to put down the fork and go for a run. Anyone who pays attention to Australian Politics knows that you only won your one seat majority by running a scare campaign in Queensland funded by Clive Palmer and misrepresenting Liberal Party materiel as AEC endorsed messaging in Melbourne. Both of these things may come back to bite you Scott.

 

As I’m pretty sure that you’ve never been to Biloela, I’ll give you a quick run-down. There isn’t much there. Having visited the town on multiple occasions throughout my childhood (aged not much older than the Murugappan girls, Kopi and Tharnicaa), I can tell you that if someone was willing to settle there with their initial occupation being that of a trolley pusher at the local supermarket (as Nades did) only serves to reinforce your Prosperity Pentecostal Proselytising about how one must “Have a Go, to get a Go”.

 

Nades had a go, and he got a go. He worked his way up the employment food chain to the point where he no longer collected the empty vessels that others had used to ferry food for the more fortunate to their vehicles, only to be discarded like Climate Policy Legislation is in Canberra, somewhere in the back corner of a carpark. This man strived and achieved. He obtained and retained a job you wouldn’t have the stomach for in the local meatworks, married and bred only to be rounded up by Dutton’s Stormtroopers in a pre-dawn raid.

 

This is not a good look for you Scott and it was your first mistake regarding this matter (we can talk about your mistakes on other issues another time).

 

What you failed to realise was that the Murugappan’s presence in Biloela was welcomed. Rural towns are crying out for residents who are willing to work in local industries that have been left floundering like a Murray Cod in the Menindee Lakes. I promised not to talk about your other mistakes this time around and there aren’t any Murray Cod around Biloela anyway, but I’m sure you don’t even need Jenny to explain that one to you. It’s obvious that you have been deaf to your minor coalition partners having a massive sook cry about “City Folk” not wanting to (at massive personal expense) move to a regional area so they can pick tomatoes for a fortnight. Regional towns like Biloela want families like the Murugappans to settle in their community.

 

You can spend as much time as you want trying to foster the lunatic racist vote that exists in Outback Queensland, but you might find yourself sorely disappointed purely by your treatment of Priya, Nades, Kopi and Tharnicaa.

 

The thing is Scott, while assuming the majority of Queensland voters (especially those in The Regions) are racist xenophobic nutters like yourself and your backers do – is that you’re wrong. The South-East Corner is not an anomaly, it is the canary in the coal mine you want to build. Regional Queensland knows good people when they see them and when they laid eyes on Nades, they saw a bloke who wanted a job and worked hard when he got one. When they saw Priya, all that could be seen was a compassionate woman who was so grateful for safety that she threw herself into charitable causes around their community.

 

Good people, Scott. The kind of people who have a go. Your kind of people, if we are to believe anything you say, who deserve to get a go. To top it off, they had children. Two girls, just like you and Jenny did, who only know the freedom of Biloela and the confinement of Immigration Detention. I know it’s difficult for you to relate with people who sacrificed everything and embarked on a perilous journey that, as you oft remind us, could have potentially resulted in their deaths, but you really need to try.

 

That you continue to dig your feet in like a petulant child by continuing to declare that “anyone who arrives in Australia by boat will not be settled in Australia” is embarrassing and Monstrous. Not only when considering the plight of the Murugappan family but the hundreds of asylum seekers who remain in indefinite detention as your Government stubbornly refuses to accept offers to resettle them in third countries such as New Zealand. The difference is that most everyone else in immigration detention would welcome the offer of resettlement, but the Murugappan family were already settled.

 

You could have quietly signed an Immigration Order granting Residency to the Murugappan family three years ago and no one would have noticed, but instead, you decided to let Dutton run wild because you’re scared that he’ll have a tilt at your job. Had you used your discretion, or instructed The Spud to use his, the plight of the Murugappans would not even be a thing. The media wouldn’t have reported it because no one would have told them about it.

 

Just think for a moment, Scott, about how different this situation would have been had you just quietly brushed this under the carpet, as you have been wont to do when indiscretions regarding your Cabinet Ministers are aired. The problem, Scott, is that you didn’t.

 

The callousness shown by yourself and your Government is nothing short of Monstrous when discussing the Murugappan family. This is a family with two (2) Australian born children who did nothing more than become contributing members of the community they decided to settle in and your Government’s decision to imprison them for merely existing is Monstrous as detailed earlier (see 3.a. outrageously wrong or absurd b. atrocious.)

 

While you had a chance to let this matter go gentle into that good night before anyone even knew about it, you instead, declared that it’s not dark yet and hid under successive doonas while an innocent family festered in Immigration Detention, by most accounts, all four (4) were sharing the same bed.

 

Your problem, Scott, is that you allowed this to become an issue when it never should have been one in the first place. Instead of placating Dutton by allowing him to go full Gestapo on the Murugappan family, you could (and should) have just given them Permanent Residency and a pathway to Citizenship.

 

Had you done so, most of Australia would never have even heard of Biloela but as it stands now, everyone in this country knows that name, and some have even bothered to look it up on a map. Thanks to you, Scott, Biloela is now probably the third most well known population centre in the country. That in itself is quite an achievement, as I said earlier, there isn’t much to write home about when it comes to Bilo, but you certainly made it famous.

 

There is an opportunity for you here, Scott. One in which you can show compassion. A fleeting moment in time where you can demonstrate some humanity instead of Monstrosity to those people who are going to vote against you purely on your treatment of the Murugappan family.

 

Let them go Home, Scott.

 

Home to Bilo.