I was prompted to pick up this book after I had heard Julian Burnside on the conversation hour with Jon Faine late last year. At the time I couldn’t help but think it was a Howard-bashing leading into the Fed election, even though Burnside went on to express that it wasn’t, and that the timing of the launch was coincidence. Whilst I tipped it to be a classic leftie book I figured I would give it a go anyway. It’s taken me a few months to get around to reading it although; I must say that now that I have, I’m glad.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe with everything Burnside depicts in this book, but I think the essays/speeches are for the large part quite interesting and put forward a human element to mandatory detention – one that I don’t recall being portrayed so much during the political debates.
Burnside reproduces a series of essays/speeches delivered over a decade or so, as well as writings published in newspapers/other publications. Because he is ‘on message’ for a lot of these, it does tend toward being a little repetitive although Burnside does mention this in his introduction.
All in all, an interesting read, a bit of an eye opener as some of the material is quite disturbing. Particularly interesting is the final section of the book which reviews some of Burnside’s favourite legal battles.
