‘I felt physically ill’

After the Senate passed the so-called Medevac Bill, Senator Linda Reynolds, assistant minister for home affairs, addressed some pointed remarks to those celebrating their conspicuous compassion and virtue. The entire speech can viewed above, but this section is worth quoting:

…Let me say to everybody here: it won’t be the senators in this place who have to recover the bloated corpses of babies and women mauled by the sharks; it will be the men and women of the Australian Border Force and the Australian Defence Force, who have had to do it twice before. It won’t be journalists having to deal with the lifelong trauma of survivors. It won’t be members of the House of Representatives who will be comforting our Defence and Border Force personnel who years later still wake with night terrors, reliving the horrors we knowingly inflicted on them.

I say to all senators and members who voted for this today and their cheer squads: when the inevitable happens, don’t you dare come into this place justifying your actions on the basis you did not know it could happen again…