I NOTE columnist Robert Macklin’s counsel (CN, November 13) that I should “tread carefully in promoting the asylum seeker issue in Labor circles”. Mr Macklin goes on to suggest that the asylum seeker issue is one on which politicians and political parties should simply follow the national mood and accept the current policy as it is.

As an aside I assume Mr Macklin would, in the same light, support the reintroduction of the death penalty and would perhaps have argued against the abandonment of the White Australia policy or policies involving the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, on the basis that those policies all had, at one time, popular support and in the case of the death penalty probably still does. Those policies were, of course, only abandoned as a result of strong political leadership.

I will not, with respect, be accepting Mr Macklin’s advice. The current Australian asylum seeker policies, including those supported by my party, the ALP, are in my view, not acceptable.

Those aspects of the policies that involve, for example, the mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum seekers, most particularly children, are cruel, inhumane and in some respects may possibly constitute torture.

We Australians are by our treatment of asylum seekers knowingly damaging the health and welfare of innocent men, women and children. There are aspects of our current policies that shame Australia and by extension all Australians.

Rather than accepting Mr Macklin’s exhortation that we all turn our faces away from the cruelty and inhumanity being perpetrated in our names as a result of the policies implemented by successive Labor and Liberal Governments, I intend to continue to agitate for our leaders, most particularly my colleagues in the ALP, to actually show some leadership and moral fibre on the matter and find a better way.

Jon Stanhope, Bruce

Slavery still dishonours us

JOHN Griffiths has written a fine tribute to Maj-Gen Sherman’s remarkable victory against the Confederacy during the American Civil War (CN, December 4), but I am saddened at his dismissing slavery as “unpleasantly exceptional” today, when there are at present an estimated 30 million people around the world who are viewed as property by others and forced to live in bondage.

Today the countries where you are most likely to be enslaved are Mauritania, Haiti, Pakistan and India. Slavery is not a phenomenon limited in time and place to the US; the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery on December 2 brings to our attention each year the fact that we as a human family are all still dishonoured by its existence among us.

Catherine Doherty, Campbell

Honest Abe or Lying Lincoln?

SO President Obama will not fly to Atlanta to celebrate that city’s burning. He probably knows more than John Griffiths (CN, December 4) who trots out the old canard the American Civil War (1861-1865) was fought “fundamentally” over slavery.

At least he qualified his comments because slavery had nothing to do with it until the North needed more troops and this emotive issue was seen as an encouragement to volunteer. The real point of the war was to preserve the Union.

Those who doubt this should see Abraham Lincoln’s words of September 18, 1858 in Charleston, Illinois, where the future president said, inter alia: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of… the social and political equality of the white and black races… of making voters or jurors of negroes… of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people.”

A war to free the slaves? Honest Abe seems like Lying Lincoln to me.

Greg Cornwell, Yarralumla

Sky’s the limit for fat wallets

THE ACT Labor and Liberal parties, by conspiring to remove the cap on political so-called “donations”, are saying in effect: “Yes, we like and accept bribes, in fact, the bigger bribes the better, so the sky’s the limit now for anyone with a fat wallet who would like us to see things their way”.

This is now the level of political morality in the capital city of Australia.

Andrew Barr, Jeremy Hanson and their colleagues should be ashamed.

Hugh Dakin, Griffith

Need for strong politicians

THE move to legalise drug use goes back several decades and has powerful backers. In the early years of this century George Soros’ Open Society Institute organised a petition to the UN demanding an end to the “war on drugs”. It was signed by a number of personalities in Victoria.

The move has been accompanied by a human tragedy in drug use, supported by the 2013 national drug strategy household survey that reported about eight million people in Australia aged 14 years or older had ever illicitly used drugs, including misuse of pharmaceuticals. Almost three million had done so in the last 12 months, increasing from the 2.7 million in 2010.

Without politicians strong enough to resist drug-liberalisation forces and change our drug policy, this and future generations can look forward to a repetition of tobacco use, which has caused over 500,000 deaths during the past 60 years and provided riches to all treasuries in that time.

Colliss Parrett, Drug Advisory, Council Australia, Barton