Jesus weeps, Bishop tells Rudd 4

The head of the Anglican Church in Tasmania has told the Prime Minister “Jesus weeps” over his PNG asylum seeker plans.

The Right Reverend John Harrower says he finds it reprehensible that a Christian Prime Minister could come up with the Government’s new asylum seeker policy.

The bishop has taken to Twitter telling Kevin Rudd: ‘Dear Prime minister, Jesus weeps’.

He says as a wealthy nation Australia should set up refugee camps and be a country of compassion.

The Bishop says he is appalled that both Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott support sending people who are fleeing persecution to Papua New Guinea.

Bishop Harrower says he would like to sit down with the two leaders.

“[I’d like to] bang two heads together in a good and godly way,” he said.

“I’m appalled at both of our major parties and the two men leading them, who are Christian men, who are making these decisions and I just find that quite reprehensible.”

ABC here

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• Bob Hawkins, in Comments: Just when you think it can’t get any worse than having to put up with John Howard protégé Tony Abbott and his gang of ne’er-do-wells — and you are coping with your despair only by consoling yourself that we have all fallen as low as we can go — up through a crack at the bottom of the cesspit that is Australian politics slithers a reincarnate Kevin Rudd waving an “illegals” solution that is symptomatic of all that is rotten in our nation’s character. Rudd today is our new champion coward, brandishing a neo-colonial solution to a problem we haven’t got the guts to handle ourselves as a civilised, so-called First World middle power. It’s all got so bad that even Labor’s Doug Cameron — for long one of the few lonely voices of compassion in the Lib-Lab morass that is politics-driven Australian xenophobia — is chiming in with support for his returned leader.