A group of prominent Australians are lending their voices to a campaign to end the practice of holding children in detention centres.

The We’re Better Than This movement includes well known Australian sportspeople, business people and actors such as Ita Buttrose, Ian Chappell, Claudia Karvan and George Gregan.

The song We’re Better Than This has been released online amid comparisons to Live Aid’s We Are The World.

A group of prominent Australians are lending their voices to a campaign to end the practice of holding children in detention centres.

The We’re Better Than This movement includes well known Australian sportspeople, business people and actors such as Ita Buttrose, Ian Chappell, Claudia Karvan and George Gregan.

The song We’re Better Than This has been released online amid comparisons to Live Aid’s We Are The World.

Actor Bryan Brown is heading the campaign and said it was time for the Government to find an alternative way of managing young asylum seekers.

“These children are self-harming. They’re in there for 400 days on average, and we’ve got to treat them better than this,” he said.

“We want the subject talked about. Our Government, our politicians, are being given the responsibility to look after these children and we want them to take that responsibility and to do it properly, which is what they are not doing at the moment.

“We want it discussed and we want them to come up with an alternative way of dealing with these children which is humane and proper.”

Brown said he came up with the idea for We’re Better Than This after recieving a “magnificent” response from a number of prominent people who said they wanted to join the campaign.

“A couple of mates were talking to me about how wrong this was and we had a few discussions and we thought we had better do something about it,” he said.

“It’s too easy to sit around and talk about things and you sort of have to get off your bum and do stuff. This is appalling how these children are being treated.

“So I sent out emails to a number of prominent people, some I knew and others I didn’t, and the response from them was magnificent, and they said ‘yes’ – they wanted to be part of a We Are The World type video.”

Brown said the Australian Government needed to be held accountable for how children in detention were being treated.

“There’s about 700 children being kept on the mainland and offshore. We want all of them – we want this addressed – as to how you treat 700 children, or more, or whoever we take in while we’re dealing with immigration problems,” he said.

“How do we look after those children? Whether they go into homes in Australia – into Australian homes or how it’s done. We want that talked about, and we want the Government to address it.

“I find it deeply depressing to think that a country that I have a lot of pride in can actually think that this is alright how we look after children, by putting them behind barbed wire where children are self-harming. That somehow this is OK.”

‘The more I think about it, the more I’m just appalled’

In response to the Government’s announcement earlier this year that young children and their families held in detention in Australia would be released on bridging visas, Brown said the move was positive but not enough.

The policy will not extend to children being held on Nauru and Christmas Island.

“I don’t know how we’ve got to this position. And that was a comment made by many of the people that are in this video. ‘How did we get here? How did we think this is alright?’

“If we don’t know how to look after children who are put in our care, how do we know how to do anything else? The more I think about it, the more I am just appalled.

“I don’t know how decisions can be made by people who represent me and my friends and the other people that are Australians, how they can choose to think this is the way to look after children.

“These children are here. How they got here and why they got here is a whole other conversation. But we have the responsibility to look after them. It’s as simple as that.

“I know how to look after children. I brought up three of them. Most Australians know how to look after children. Our Government doesn’t. Both sides of politics have failed in this. And I think it’s time they pulled their finger out.”

Professor Gillian Triggs, president of Australian Human Rights Commission, also took part in the video and said the practice of detaining children marred Australia’s international human rights reputation.

“No other country in the world holds children in the way that we do and the United Nations is very, very concerned about Australia’s policies,” she said.

Buttrose, who is part of the campaign, said the detention of children was responsible for destroying childhoods.

“I think when you lock a child up, you lock up their imagination and when you do that, you destroy the childhood,” she said.