¿Cuál ciudad de Australia es mejor?

Nobody mention the war, the captives, or the asylum seekers
The threat to arrest journalists is a further sign of the Government’s unhealthy obsession with secrecy.
When the Government of Nauru, with the support and encouragement of the UNHCR, allowed media representatives to attend a volleyball game between Nauruan police and detained Afghan asylum seekers last October, Australia wasn’t happy.
It was even less happy that media had been allowed to inspect conditions at the detention camp, and had been allowed to speak to detainees.
The Nauruans were quickly informed they should organise no further such volleyball games, tours of the holding facilities or chances for direct media contact with boat people.
This denial of media contact ran counter to the international policy of the UNHCR, and its team leader on Nauru, Gregory Balke, was nonplussed.
Mr Balke said media access to asylum seekers could contribute to greater public understanding, and noted that the balance between security and media access was struck elsewhere in the world, with journalists allowed into camps every day.
But the Government’s actions in Nauru were entirely typical of its position on media access and secrecy.
Its general aversion to scrutiny is obvious across a wide range of areas, from plans to give extra powers to intelligence agencies to its imposition of new, tighter controls on what pictures can be taken by news photographers during Question Time.
But it has never been as obvious as in the (overlapping) cases of the boat people and the war in Afghanistan.
As the Tampa floated off Christmas Island last August, the port was closed and an air exclusion zone was imposed over the ship. For most information, media were forced to rely on the Norwegian ambassador, the only person with access to the vessel and the inclination to talk.
And during the controversy about whether children were or were not thrown overboard from another boat seeking asylum, a former chief of the navy, Sir Richard Peek, described government censorship as "Goebbels-like".
In the case of Afghanistan, the level of domestic secrecy saw the Pentagon happily confirm basic details of its arrival in Afghanistan, while Australia’s military was still denying it.
Likewise, the US continues to provide more information on David Hicks, the Australian alleged to have trained with the Taliban, now detained by the United States at Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It has even let a Herald reporter in to see the camp and talk to US military personnel about Hicks.
Camp X-Ray houses 200 of the alleged worst of the worst of the Afghan war, but access is allowed. Woomera detention camp houses about 200 Afghans who fled the worst of the worst, and access is denied.
Furthermore, journalists doing their jobs at Woomera face arrest even for getting close enough to see what happens under the world’s only policy of mandatory, non-reviewable detention of asylum-seekers.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that senior media executives, including those from this paper and The Age, yesterday protested in the strongest terms about the removal of journalists from the vicinity of the Woomera centre.
Last night, though, there was no indication it had made the slightest difference.