Something is rotten down under. When the Communist Chinese express surprise at your level of totalitarianism, you’ve officially crossed the Rubicon. Australia is now a post-democratic country. Ironically, Australia, unlike Canada, the United States, Canada, South Africa and other European colonies is unique in that it was founded as a penal colony.

Created on similar lines to the Soviet Gulag, an archipelago of vast penal camps in which tens of millions died, Australia was England’s dustbin from 1788. Australia, the world’s largest island was a place where vagrants, prostitutes, children, the homeless, minor criminals along with Ireland’s depopulated countries were shipped to serve life sentences in the remote regions of the penal colony.

Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 ‘convicts’ were transported from Britain and Ireland to various penal colonies in Australia. Other penal colonies were later established in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1803 and Queensland in 1824, while Western Australia initially received convicts from 1826.

Up until the 1960s, orphans in British orphanages and institutions, Dr. Barnardo’s and Catholic Institutions were illegally separated from their siblings and shipped against the will to Australia.  Old habits die hard and few die harder than in Australia past and present.