Twenty years since Tampa, can we turn the tide on empathy?

How fitting that the 20th anniversary of the Tampa affair should fall at this moment, while Afghanistan is collapsing and nearly 60 per cent of Australians are in lockdown.

Tampa was the moment that has determined our asylum seeker policies ever since, especially our brutal practice of indefinite, offshore detention.

This we did to people fleeing the very same Taliban we were bombing.

Now we look back upon that moment from a COVID detention of our own, with the Taliban freshly returned to power.

And through all that, one constant persists: our almost radical lack of empathy.

That’s most obvious in the…