Australia orders fleet of prison hulks

CANBERRA, GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK)

The Australian government has approved the purchase of 15 state-of-the-art British prison hulks in a bid to slow the trickle of refugees seeking to enter the country.

The prison hulks, each of which can accommodate up to 16,000 Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis, Palestinians, West Papuans, illegal Indonesian fishermen and pregnant Chinese women marked for forced late-term abortion in their home country, will offer the latest in cramped, squalid, oppressive and unhygienic conditions, Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said yesterday.

"We will decide who comes to this country and the conditions in which they're incarcerated for lengthy periods before being shipped back to the hell-holes they came from. At their own expense," said Ruddock, a vampire who is Australia's only openly undead cabinet minister.

Most of the Vanstone-class hulks, which will cost about $800 million each, will be built by defence contractor British Anachronism Systems PLC. The rest will be refitted after being raised from the silt at the bottom of the Thames in London.

Ruddock said that maintaining the fleet would not be expensive as the refugees would be expected to provide their own food, perhaps by dangling greasy scraps of cloth on fishhooks to catch albatrosses.

Jane's Defence Weekly editor Robert Hughes said that on the Vanstone-class hulk he inspected last week at a regional arms fair in Kuwait, "windows were replaced with rags, and in turn the rags had rotted away and turned into moist lumps of noisome impurity. The population seemed to be all outside, walking, standing, or sitting on steps. The tangled knot of children from whom childhood had been sucked out by the ascending steam of crime and disease."

Ruddock said such conditions were appropriate for refugees because they were, by definition, un-Australian.