Shame on you!

Australian government, you disgust me more and more every week.

Just when I don't think that you can sink any lower, there you go again. You do something even more vulgar than the things you managed last week.

Not content with abusing people's religious and social freedoms with your new "anti-terrorism" laws and trying to insist that Muslim women who wear a Hijab are using it to make defiant anti-government statements, you have an American peace activist arrested and locked in solitary confinement, telling him that he will only be taken out of that state when he gives up on his appeal against being thrown out of the country. And you say that he hasn't breached any of the conditions of his visa.

So why have you locked him up, government?

Is it because he protested against the invasion of Iraq? Are you that worried by people having opinions that contradict your own that you have to lock them away, send them out of the country, silence them? Does this mean that all of the people in Australia who think that war is wrong will soon be rounded up and locked away?

Oh government, when did you think you could take on the attitudes and behaviours of a dictatorship? Things are at a sorry state when you imprison a peace activist. I'd expect it of Sadam Hussein when he was in power, but you? Why?

What have you done with Australia, government? What have you done with our age-old tradition of giving people a fair go? Why don't you listen to the Australian public any more? Who tells you that Australians want war? Who tells you that we need to have university fees increased until the average person will be struggling to afford a tertiary education in years to come? Who tells you to make laws that abuse human rights?

I love Australia. It's a beautiful, wonderful country full of interesting people from all kinds of backgrounds. So why, government, are you trying to change that to make it bad?

Please, government, give Australia its true democracy back. Please let us return to the days where we really were the friendly country. When we weren't attacking other nations. When we weren't being racist. Yes, I said racist. That's what you have become in your own strange way, government. Please give us back our equality. Please let us all have a fair go. Please try to look out for education, health care and social structures rather than spending more and more on the army. Please do what a government is meant to do - be here for us, care for us and do your best for all people.

Please remember that democracy is built on human rights and ENCOURAGES people to have different opinions and to speak about them freely, to agree to disagree. Please give that back to us.

For your sake. For our own. For the future. For the name of Australia, both here and overseas.