For the past few weeks I’v been on holiday. The Old Boy, the Wonder Dog and I, like to retreat to a small cabin in the south west of Victoria, in a little town that boasts one pub, one small general store, a school for about 20 kids and a few houses. Our cabin is about five minutes drive outside this little town, with views of the surrounding hills, gum trees, herds of cattle and right next door a small flock of goats which cheerfully dispose of our food scraps. The internet is intermittent, as is the television, so we were delightfully removed from the rat race for a while. The occasional snippet of news would make its way through the wall of serenity but I tried not to pay attention to it. I refused to let politics ruin my holiday. But, like all good things, it came to an end. I came back to hear that our multi-millionaire Prime Minister has just been granted a $10,000 pay rise at the same time as he intends to further reduce penalty rates for people working on the weekend. A lot of those affected will be the working poor: waiters, bar attendants… After all, why waste money on poor folk? All they do is waste it on fripperies such as food, medicine, clothing, school fees, water and electricity. I came back to see our major ally, the United States, attack, criticise and disengage from our other allies. Then, the President of the USA praised a known dictator – a man who had his own family slaughtered in case they challenged his authority; who executes anyone who criticises him; who starves his own people etc – and called him a “good guy”. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The same president called white supremacists: “fine people”. His Attorney General has enacted a policy to remove children (even babies!) from people seeking asylum, and shut them up in cages. When challenged on this, the President said that it was Obama’s fault and he refused to sign an executive order, rescinding this cruelty. Yes, it’s obvious who his role model is, and it isn’t Mr Trudeau… or even President Bush or Reagan or, indeed, any previous American President. And before we Aussies get too smug, don’t forget that our immigration policies aren’t that dissimilar towards people who try to reach us by boat. In the government’s efforts to deter people smugglers, and stop the deaths at sea, they have chosen to detain the smugglers’ victims. Instead, it should be the ones who forced those desperate people onto leaky boats, took their money and then sent them to sea, knowing they’d probably drown before they reached a safe shore. Those are the ones who should be languishing in detention centres on Manus and Nauru, not the desperate families, who have fled abuse and oppression and have thrown themselves on our mercy. I think I need to go back to the cabin.