Following some debates in the Senate last
week, I was struck by some odd phrasing and linguistic glitches on the part of
some of the honourable members. There was the Greens child-senator Hanson-Young
who said the nasty old government was literally bashing up the poor unfortunate
children of refugees (..).
She also described the circumstances of an
indeed very tragic case of a juvenile asylum seeker who had suffered the trauma
of his father not just being murdered by the Taliban but what made matters
worse was that his father also ended up dead as a result of the murder.
But it wasn't all one way by any means. A
Coalition senator (at least I'm guessing she was, dressed like Margaret
Thatcher on acid), responded to the questions around underage asylum seekers,
consistently talking about "unaccompanied minders." I take it she meant to say 'unaccompanied
minors'. If the juveniles had had
minders with them, they wouldn't have been unaccompanied, surely.
Another nice usage was a Labor MP
describing a plan initiated by his opponents as follows: "To call this a
half-baked plan would be unkind to half-baked plans."
No comments:
Post a Comment