Photograph: Daniel Munoz/Getty Images
By Situation Theatre 8/09/2015
The masses are in the streets and the refugees are out of the camps.
Tony Abbott has caved to immense public pressure and agreed to end offshore detention after Australians were discretely reminded they each possess a mind’s eye.
The new wave of pressure to close the detention centres was triggered by the tragic image of Aylan Kurdi. When Australians saw the shift in European opinion and policy in response to this photograph, many doubted a similar shift here without visual evidence of the intense suffering in Pacific prison camps.
Then about yesterday everyone suddenly remembered our highly evolved abilities of internal visualisation, empathy, imagination and abstract reasoning, and our offshore detention system was immediately shut down.