Attention Australia's politicians: I've had enough!

Somehow in the last week or so I have sloughed off my blinkers. I don't know how. I don't know why. But it happened.

I am guilty of having been attracted to (but I hasten to say – not voted for) bits of Pauline Hanson's rhetoric: if immigrants come to our shores illegally, by the back door – send them packing! What's wrong with mandatory sentencing? The solution is simple: if you don't want to go to prison, don't break the law.

But its just not that easy, is it?

It seems to me that we are guilty of putting our illegal immigrants into concentration camps. Let's not forget that our British forebears invented concentration camps during the Boer War. And we are following in that British tradition – just as the Nazis did.

I have decided that I find the notion of putting people into concentration camps (however called) abhorrent. Even if these people have come to our country uninvited and illegally, they deserve better.

After all haven't we tacitly invited them? On important civic occasions (sometimes broadcast to the world) do we not sing; "For those who've come across the seas, we've boundless plains to share"? – but of course no one knows the second verse.

Yet when they answer that invitation we lock them away in a prison in the middle of nowhere.

We should hang our heads in shame.

Let us not forget that the Pilgrim Fathers (where were the mothers?) that America remembers each Thanksgiving were boat people in much the same mould as our boat people.

We swallow the guff that the politicians shovel to us to justify this shameful practice. They tell us that these people aren't refugees. They tell us that these people are wealthy and privileged.

If they are wealthy and privileged why do they feel compelled to run away on a journey that must be fraught with peril and uncertainty, to a place that they know will probably put them, at least temporarily, into a concentration camp?

I no longer believe what our politicians, of whatever colour, tell me.

I don't have the answers. But collectively we must be able to find answers.

That's what our governments are for. But our governments no longer seem to care about their constituents.

Individual politicians are very adept at looking grave and concerned when appropriate and shedding crocodile tears as an earnest of sincerity. But I am persuaded that in the end all that interests them is power and the exercise of power. I have lost all faith in the notion that our governments are rooted in altruism.

I believe that our politicians and their governments are no longer fulfilling their part of the social contract.

Our politicians collect their handsome salaries and benefits but, in my opinion, are not doing their jobs. Collectively politicians seem to be more interested in self-aggrandisement and nest feathering than in providing good and responsible government.

Debate in our parliaments is a joke. There is no debate in the real sense. There is horse trading and posturing. We in Queensland ought to be ashamed that we elected a government tainted by internal rorting.

We ought to be ashamed that the opposition could not provide a viable or attractive alternative.

We ought to be ashamed that we are attracted to extremist views that pose hard questions but provide no answers.

We ought be ashamed that the opposition (well the Nationals) are muttering about moving closer to the right-wing extremists.

We ought to be ashamed that our Prime Minister allowed us to vote for a republic in a referendum that he engineered to fail.

We ought to be ashamed that large corporations are subsidised at taxpayers' expense while they and other corporations pay little tax and wealthy individuals make a sport of not paying proper tax.

We cannot allow the politicians to glibly tell us what is good for us and what is not in 10 second sound bites. We must demand proper and reasoned explanation and debate. We must demand openness and accountability. If we don't get it we have an obligation to force it from the politicians.

I am angry and I am not prepared to let them get away with it any more.