Australian Immigration Minister's daughter angry over policy

By GREG ANSLEY Australia correspondent

CANBERRA - For several years Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock has stonewalled a campaign to force him to turn in his Amnesty International badge because of Australia's policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers.

Last night on television, it was revealed that Ruddock, demonised by opponents at home and abroad, faced an even more emotional battle at home.

His elder daughter Kirsty, a 30-year-old lawyer, long-time human rights advocate and fellow Amnesty International member, has also been urging him to turn in his badge and return to the values she learned at her father's knee.

So distressed has Kirsty Ruddock become at the strain of life with a father whose policies are anathema to her, and who is consistently at the centre of the storm over mandatory detention, that she is leaving Australia.

"Obviously I love my dad, but sometimes you do feel a bit let down that you can't change his view on things and that you're not getting through to him as well, and that somehow it's my fault that what he's doing is wrong," she told ABC TV's Australian Story.

For his part, Ruddock may be privately pained, but he is neither attacking his daughter nor stepping back from the policy of placing all asylum seekers who have arrived illegally in Australia into detention until their appeals for refugee status have been heard.

"I don't expect my family to be parrots. She's a tenacious, competent lawyer.

"I'm proud of the fact that she does care, and I think everybody knows how proud I am of both my daughters, but I do expect that they would recognise that I have specific responsibilities for Australia."

Ruddock, a strong advocate of migration and of an annual quota of refugees, inherited the policy of mandatory detention from the former Labor Government, but has come to personify a policy vilified by the United Nations, human rights organisations - including Amnesty International - and refugee bodies.

His hard-line stance has been magnified by the Tampa affair and the subsequent "Pacific solution", and by allegations of physical and mental abuse, self-mutilation, suicide attempts and mass breakouts at remote detention centres.

At home, tensions have been rising between father and daughter.

Kirsty Ruddock said she was firmly opposed to mandatory detention - especially of children - and was disturbed by her father's inability to take a "more compassionate" approach. "I find it hard to reconcile some of the things he's doing at the moment with some of the things he's taught me to believe in."

She has now quit her job as a Government lawyer and left to work in Asia as a volunteer for the aid organisation Youth Ambassadors.

"Very much I'm motivated by wanting to go and live and work in a developing country, but another reason behind leaving, I guess, is to get away from what I see very much as the daily grind in terms of reading about the politics that my father is involved in on a daily basis, reading about immigration issues constantly ... things that I find very difficult."