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TRACEEEE CAN RELATE
The Age’s Traceeee Hutchison ponders a wayward woman’s plight:
I’m sure I’m not the only Australian who struggled to recognise my country many times during the Howard government’s reign. And one of the many soul-searching moments came after the revelation of the wrongful detention of Cornelia Rau.
Who had a few problems of her own when it came to recognising countries. More of which in a moment.
Rau, the German-born Australian resident who was struggling with an undiagnosed mental illness, was held at Brisbane’s women’s prison and later in Adelaide’s Baxter immigration detention centre for 10 months during 2004-05 after authorities assumed she was an illegal immigrant.
Not exactly; Traceeee omits a few details. Leon Ward helps her out:
Do I have this right? A person signs herself out of a psychiatric hospital, gets rid of anything that could identify her, changes her name, moves to a place where no one knows her and refuses to speak English, in which she is fluent.
The authorities investigate and find this woman does not exist, so she is locked up pending further information. While incarcerated, she still refuses to speak English or to give any honest details about herself.
By chance, her identity is discovered and she is released. She is provided with accommodation, support and transport to various venues including French lessons. And now we owe her $2.4 million. I’ve heard much sadder stories.
Among them: Queensland’s Labor government is now considering throwing some cash Cornelia’s way. Brilliantly, Traceeee uses this story of a delusional German woman who made things up and would have perished had she not been taken into care to argue for stolen generation compensation.
UPDATE. Will Rau sue Bob Ellis?
UPDATE II. Rau’s sister Christine claims that, due to “medical and political mistakes”, Cornelia’s “neural pathways are irretrievably altered”. Political mistakes can do that?
I’m thinking about a career change- I might work on babbling incoherently and wandering around remote Nth Qld like a loon, and see if I can convince some wallahs from la Migra that I’m some sort of illegal foreign chappie; unfortunately with the change of government about all I’ll probably score a (now) worthless visa and a sript for methadone.
Prepare for much more silliness before this episode peters out.
I once got so full of singing syrup, I could neither walk or talk, recognise myself or anybody else. I also made a frightful mess of the Caroma dual flush and am no longer welcome to purchase a Super Dog with extra cheese. Reparations now please!
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2008 02 24 at 10:04 PM • permalinkThis is a bargain. $2.4 million never to hear from this idiot again. Given that the woman is 40ish, and has no hope of ever getting a job, $2.4 million is probably what she will cost Australian taxpayers over the next 40 years or so anyway.
And for Traceeee’s benefit, just like the sorry to the Stealing Generation, this will immediately remove any lingering compassion for the ‘plight’ of this oxygen thief.
I’m sure I’m not the only Australian who struggled to recognise my country many times during the Howard government’s reign. And one of the many soul-searching moments came after the revelation of the wrongful detention of Cornelia Rau.
The quote above is evidence enough that we need to have a set of stocks set up in every capital city so that brain-addled twats like Traceee can be pelted with refuse as a symbol of our scorn for their utter stupidity.
I tend to agree with Bad Santa. If 2.4 mill is the cost of her $orry, then it’s reasonable by today’s prices. Never get another job? Maybe she can sue Qantas(?) into giving her back her old job as a flight attendant. Just don’t ask for another pillow.
All the hand-wringers have this idea that the immigration authorities should have instantly diagnosed Rau’s “schizophrenia”, and were somehow criminally and morally liable for failing to do so. Diagnosing mental illnesses is not like diagnosing a cold - there’s a lot of interpretation involved. How many people do you see walking around city streets, or Greens party offices, with obvious but ‘undiagnosed’ mental illnesses. Do we owe them $2.4 million for breach of duty of care?
One of my mates, who’s an electronics designer, used to date Cornelia Rau when she was in her 20s.
His comment?
Terrific hardware. Significant software issues.
Which would make her quite unlike Traceeeee who, while having serious software issues of her own, seems to have let her hardware maintenance contract lapse at least a decade ago.
Posted by Jack Lacton on 2008 02 24 at 11:31 PM • permalinkI don’t get it. Why isn’t it she who owes the Australian government for her self-inflicted wound?
Posted by Mystery Meat on 2008 02 24 at 11:37 PM • permalinkWhat ho, Australia! What will Rudd do about this?
More relevant info ...
Rau gave several versions of her story, identifying herself as Anna Brotmeyer and Anna Schmidt, and spoke both English and German. She said that she was a tourist from Munich, Germany, and that she was planning to continue north as far as Weipa. However, she could not provide any documentation and said there was no-one else in Australia who would know she was missing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Rau
Why is anyone surprised she was sent to Immigration detention?
Lets see here, $2.4M over 10 months works out to…
$8000 per day. What?
<Checks again>
Sod this for a game of cricket, I’m off to the detention centre for a year.
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2008 02 24 at 11:57 PM • permalink#20 You just beat me to it, so I’ll post the link to the relevant Muslim Village thread instead. As usual, they’re feeling victimised, and, as usual, they’ve stolen the entire article. Copyright isn’t a dhimmi right.
Posted by flying pigs over mecca on 2008 02 24 at 11:59 PM • permalink19 -that’s a bit silly. It is not for lawyers in settlement deeds to weasel clients out of Centrelink repayments/ exclusions. Both the payer and the client must advise Centrelink of the claim and the breakup. If any economic loss was included in any settlement, then Centrelink will deem 50% as being for lost wages, and figure out the preclusion period. For any insurer to go along with a plan to defraud Centrelink would be dangerous and my experience of thousands of various settlements, along with colleagues - making this total tens of thousands, is that insurers do not tell Centrleink porkies just to help settle a claim. Let alone lawyers willing to risk their 1 practising certficate and income lifeline over a few months / dollars.
Re this settlement - Its seems the govt agencies are in trouble because they locked up an idiot. I’d volunteer a few more names if all it costs is $2.4 mil for 2 years of peace.
Tracee comes first to mind.
O/T: Its good to be the
KingPresident.Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2008 02 24 at 11:59 PM • permalinkI’m kinda confused. What should the Australian government have done differently, exactly?
Posted by daddy dave on 2008 02 25 at 12:01 AM • permalinkSo, if I come down to Australia next week, and take up residence, and act all looney and disoriented….I could end up rich?
And possibly a government minister.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2008 02 25 at 12:06 AM • permalinkWhat does Traceeeeeee think of the wrongful detention of Pauline Hanson?
Posted by Ted Schuerzinger on 2008 02 25 at 12:18 AM • permalinkThis really belongs in the Jason/Axel/Barry thread, but . . .eh, so sue me.
Once upon a time, there was a precocious little boy named Axle Bruns (he would later change his name to Axel, but that is a story for another day).
Now, Axle was a bright child, curious and observant, but the one great frustration of his life was that he was the youngest – by many years – of five children, and could never get a word in edgewise. He would come in from the garden, having seen a particularly beautiful butterfly, or the amusing antics of a gray squirrel, and he would be bursting at the seams to tell of his discovery, only to be ignored by his siblings.
“Oh, hush, Axle!”, said his oldest brother, Carburetor. “We all know what a monarch butterfly looks like.”
“And squirrels are just rats with bushy tails,” said his second oldest brother, Dashboard.
“I think rodents are a revolting subject for the dinner table, Axle”, said his oldest sister, Glovebox. “But it does remind me of a darling muskrat fur coat I saw, Mother, which happens to be on sale . . .”
Axle was most keenly disappointed in the youngest sister (though she was still his senior by many years). He thought to find in her a natural ally, since their parents were always scolding her; they didn’t like the clothes she wore, nor the late hours she kept, nor the expensive presents she received from older men who drove expensive cars. But even Head Gasket had no time for little Axle; she was either arguing with their parents, or flouncing out the front door to meet some leering male friend, who would be standing by the passenger side of a Cadillac, holding the door for her.
One day, little Axle shook his tiny fist at the heavens and vowed that, when he came to manhood, he would release such a torrent of words upon the world, that not only his family, but all mankind, would stand up and take notice.
The years went by, and Axle grew into a robust, intelligent (though prematurely bald) young man. He studied at the University, and became an academic, and realized, at long last, his dream of pouring out his repository of words upon all and sundry. But, unfortunately, in his determination to store up words, he had failed to spend sufficient time in mastering their meanings, and the proper way to join them together. Initially, his associates greeted him in a friendly manner, and would smile and nod as he began to talk. But after a few minutes, they invariably acquired a perplexed expression, and after a few minutes more, they began to yawn. Ultimately, they would tap their watches, and say things like, “My goodness! Look at the time!”, or “I must run; I have an appointment.”
Axle couldn’t understand why this was so. He knew he said intelligent and clever things; when he had uttered the following sentence at a faculty committee meeting – “Beyond such polemic (described in the open source community as ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) campaigns’), however, a number of industry players in these and other fields are now beginning to examine new business models based on produsage itself . . .” – virtually everyone in the room was so awed that they said they were going to rush back to their offices and mull over the impact of his observations on their respective fields of expertise. And yet, strangely, his colleagues began shortly afterwards to have faculty meetings in secret locations, to which he was not invited.
It was at this point in his life, that Axle decided that, if he were to ever reach an audience of a size commensurate with his vast word-knowledge, there was only one true path for him: politics!
#27 Daddy Dave
What should the Australian government have done differently, exactly?
Obviously, in the future the Department of Immigration must, whenever they find someone claiming to be a foreign tourist with inadequate documentation, diagnose them as schizophrenic, stuff them full of drugs and stick them in psychiatric hospitals.
Cynics might argue that this would generate at least as many miscarriages of justice, lawsuits and bad publicity as the Rau case, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs
#31, Ted.
Given the company she keeps, I’m sure Traceeeee thinks Pauline Hanson’s detention was “rightful”.
As for Cornelia Rau, I’ve thought all along that her family surely had some responsibility there. Particularly her sister who didn’t seem to have made a lot of effort to locate her.
If it had been one of my sisters, I would have turned Heaven and earth upside down looking for her.
Well a political mistake made by the Australian electorate back in November has sure changed my neural pathways- I used to just think that the place is full of retards, now I have a monomaniac belief that a large part of the electorate should be confined, and hooked up to the same thorazine drip as Crazy Corns.
Isn’t Traceeee Hutchison a major conservative ediorialist at the neocon Age newspaper? I’m sure I read that recently at Australia’s version of the influential Daily Kos.
Posted by andycanuck on 2008 02 25 at 01:46 AM • permalinkDue to the fact the police fuckup was stat, and it was the EEEvil Howard Feds who ran detention guess who the only target of this exercise has been?
The POLICE picked her up, did enquiries and then dumped her at immigration detention as an undocumented illegal immigrant.
The immigration department then would have been expending its time attempting to trace her in Germany, where she was claiming to be from.
Germany would have been checking to see if anyone, including missing persons (remember she may have been a mentally ill German under an assumed name), you are easily looking at months before Germany finishes their own enquiries.Meanwhile DO’s and immigration are stuck with a feces flinging, German speaking mentally ill, liar. At exactly what stage do normal people say “Hmm this person who is mentally ill, German speaking, and claiming to be a German citizen, is actually an Australian citizen?
While working at Port Hedland Detention center we had a Kurdish bloke who spent the last 6 months or so of his stay in Australia in segregation, because he was easily led and had (under a great deal of pressure/encouragement from other detainees) attempted self harm a number of times.
The main reason Immigration authorities don’t like letting people out for treatment is because certain lefty lawyers started a production line of bogus “mental health” cases, which would miraculously clear up the moment the lawyer filed a motion for release on mental health grounds.
How do I know? I witnessed it on 2 occasions as the escorting officer at Greylands mental facility in Perth. (It happened about 4 times at PH and I don’t know how many times at the city centers).
The same day these “mentally ill” detainees arrived the certain lawyer (a lady who was on TV quite often) and her cheer squad would turn up. As the facility wasn’t Immigration detention she was free to visit and scheme as much as she liked.That’s why it became so hard to get detainees out for treatment, because the system was abused to the point of breakdown, which was the shitheads plan anyway.
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2008 02 25 at 02:04 AM • permalink#20
Oh, Paco.
I do timetabling.
It’s all I can do to tell them to just bugger off with their whining. Everyone I mean. (First week of semester this week, I’m over it already!)“I work every day except such and such, can you fit the lectures to my work schedule?” - from a full-time uni student.
“The tute in Z clashes with my lecture Y.” - bullshit. Lecture Y is offered in the afternoon and in the evening. Lecture Z is offered in second semester. Decide what you want to do. And don’t come whining to me, or your lecturer, about it.
Unkingleivable - oh wait, that was a previous thread.
#21 I’ve heard say that Aus Immigration should have immediately been able to identify her using photos (or something).
Do these people have any idea how hard it is to do that without any reference point?#36
Can’t wait for Axle’s political path! Any yellow bricks involved?Posted by carpefraise on 2008 02 25 at 07:32 AM • permalink$2.4 million?
Wer sind ich? Wo bin ich?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2008 02 25 at 10:55 AM • permalinkSie sind in Australien, dumkopf…
Should the polite form be used in the above…?
Posted by AlburyShifton on 2008 02 25 at 05:33 PM • permalinkYeah, I know blogalog, it was bigger than you thought it would be. Took your breath away.
Hey, wanna check out my filthy plume?
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2008 02 25 at 07:53 PM • permalink
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Why are the bad things that happen to me always of the non-compensatory kind?