“In recent years, a continent born of immigrants — 1.75 million during Queen Victoria’s reign alone — has effectively redefined itself as the most excluding nation in the world toward refugees and asylum seekers. Its immigration policies in the last five years have become the envy of those in the West who see in all but the but the most restrictive laws the specter of terrorism and social anarchy. No other country, in fact, not even the United States in the wake of September 11, has treated those fleeing persecution with such callousness.”
– Caroline Moorehead, “Amnesia in Australia”, in The New York Review of Books, NOv 16, 2006