Mentally-ill Australians re-classed as Illegal Immigrants

Background by staff researcher Ewen Shearer

CANBERRA - The Australian Government incarcerates mentally-ill Australians in immigration detention centers.

The Australian Immigration Minister, Senator Vanstonne, announced pioneering innovation to management of mentally-ill citizens following the successful field trial involving one Cornelia Rau, a 39-year-old schizophrenic patient released 'into the wild' from Sydney's Manly Hospital in March 2004.

Australia's Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstonne is a "hands-on" Senator

In April Aboriginal people found Ms Rau wandering in north of Cairns township in the AUstralian state of Queensland and notified police. She was held at the Brisbane Women's Correctional Center for several months, then handed over to Department of Immigration officials in August as a suspected illegal immigrant (the Australian Immigration Department being widely renowned for its compassionate, leading-edge treatment of the mentally ill), transferring to Baxter detention center four months ago.

"The system worked splendidly", Senator Vanstonne proclaimed.

"It was a double-blind test. No government department or agency knew of our testing strategy - in fact no-one at all - yet they all functioned as hoped. Ms Rau did not fall through the net but, inevitably, was sifted into Baxter detention center. Given time, most loons on the loose should eventually accumulate behind razor wire!"

State governments in Australia have traditionally managed mental hospitals. As diagnosis of mental disease gained precision over the past 50 years it was discovered that vast numbers of 'lazy bludgers' were in fact psychotic, schizophrenic or bipolar manic-depressives. Consequently mental hospitals filled to capacity, crippling the states' health budgets.

To combat this, mental patients were dispersed 'into the community' using hundreds of small business units to manage privately-funded 'charities' housing the former patients in communal homes.

To the government's delight most psychotic ‘clients’ disappeared onto the streets, creating a profitable turnover for the business units (paid by the head) thus releasing a steady percentage of vacant beds and shifting the problem to Federal government welfare.

The only flaw in the plan was clients whose relatives would occasionally report family members missing, only to discover them eating dirt in the neighbor’s garden or spotting them on the six o’clock newstainment threatening police with a knife in a remote part of the city (usually an entirely different city).

The mental institutions, now mostly vacant, were (suddenly) discovered to occupy valuable real estate in major cities around Australia, leaving state governments no option but to act responsibly by disposing of this priceless public asset to wealthy land developers 'in the public interest', coincidentally reducing 'government debt' (widely suspected to be the 'debt' of mismanagement).

The Australian Federal Government, saddled by an increasing drain on social welfare payments due to vast hordes of homeless, derelict mentally-ill and disabled (former) patients roaming suburbia (directed by do-gooders where to find their periodic entitlements) devised a strategy to reduce welfare payments by "inadvertently" re-incarcerating the recipients in now largely empty detention centers built for illegal immigrants.

Intending uninvited Immigrants removed Australia from the list of desirable destinations following several incidents in which the Australian Navy rammed and sank numerous Indonesian fishing boats crowded with asylum-seekers, and the now-famous artillery shelling of the Norwegian freighter Tampa, forcing it away from Australia after rescuing survivors of a rammed and sinking boat.

With dozens of privately-managed detention centers now empty, and the federal government stuck with crippling outsourcing contracts, "… I put these two disparate problems together to create one whopper of an opportunity" Senator Vanstonne beamed.

"The PM is particularly pleased.

“This maintains our high-profile detention policy: encampments full to intimidate asylum wannabes plus the modern trend of managing those afflicted by mental disease and intellectual handicaps using cruelty and diffidence" the Senator explained.

"The Government is proud of its record in these fields. We raised the bar to a new height! Two birds with one stonne! We cold-shouldered distraught, hapless victims of of war and pestilence seeking refuge, simultaneously shifting society's losers off welfare and the street into the care of a Global corporation that now profits from their misfortune!

“If the Federal Opposition was elected tomorrow it would be hard-pressed to maintain our prominence in Asia - indeed the world - as a mean-spirited, paranoid, cruel, uncaring Government eroding civil-liberties in the guise of terrorist emergency to covertly enhance corporate profitability. Not to mention (if I inadvertently didn’t) shifting welfare and critical infrastructure from government to private ownership.”

“And with full support of the world's most selfish, greedy, small-and-narrow-minded, short-sighted, dare-I-say-ignorant, ugly white people … with the obvious exception, she hastily groveled, of our steadfast ally, the United States of America.