Pretty much every Australian teenager growing up in the 1970’s knew about Countdown. And so, I would wager, did thousands of long suffering parents. Watching the Saturday evening music show became something of a national ritual. It was one of the very few times when we sat down in the same room as our siblings without the petty bickering, hushing our bemused oldies as the familiar intro theme heralded a somewhat shambolic hour long plunge into a sensually tacky world of colour, flashing lights and badly mimed video clips. The visual effects were unsophisticated and crass by today’s standards. The satin flares, lairy costumes and bad haircuts seemed in perfectly good taste at the time. For us Countdown was rebellion, experimentation and the claiming of a world that adults could neither comprehend nor truly participate in. And then there was Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum, always looking quietly perplexed by his own creation, yet always dropping names like Madonna, Bowie and Jagger with a scho
In recent times a light has been increasingly shone on Australia’s treatment of refugees, and in particular the unfortunate souls who have found themselves detained indefinitely on Manus Island. Up until now, it has been all too easy for the government to rationalise this as ‘border protection’ and thus coerce the public into turning a blind eye to it. There is still another layer to Australia’s draconian immigration detention regime which is yet to be fully exposed and investigated. That is the domain of onshore detention, and it is rarely given more than a cursory glance largely due to the public perception of those who have been so detained by it. Dutton’s modus operandi when challenged on indefinite detention of asylum seekers is simple – he will lie and use smear tactics to denigrate those individuals in order to turn public sympathy against them. In exactly the same way it has been easy for him to deflect attention away from the onshore detention regime. The Immigratio