Australians recognise that everyone should have a right to live in safety, with access to clean water, good food, health care and education, be able to develop their abilities to earn a living and live in peace. In the Australian off-shore detention camps refugees are confined in hot conditions, with limited water supplies, extremely limited access to health care, and unsafe living conditions.
This week we learned that another refugee in off-shore detention has died due to Australian negligence and the ignoring of calls for help. In another case, a despairing man burnt himself to death in protest against the imprisonment of people seeking safety. Others have died because of lack of proper medical care. Children have been psychologically and physically damaged by the conditions they are forced to live in.
Over more than a year and a half, people have been sending letters to Federal M.P.s, calling for the refugees on Nauru and Manus to be released onto the Australian mainland. Some of us have stated that we would take responsibility for caring for a refugee or a family, to help them settle in Australia.
This week Mr. Tehan sent some of us a letter in which he stated that since the Coalition came into office there have been no “deaths at sea”, and that “all the children are out of detention”. Are children on Nauru not children? If all children have been removed from detention, then where have the families on Nauru gone?
The claim about “no deaths at sea” is also untrue. A friend of mine was visiting someone in Iran, and was told by someone whom she met there that one of his good friends was drowned at sea. He said that the boat on which his friend was travelling was met by Border Force. His friend was pushed back into the water by a Border Force person, and consequently drowned. This incident was reported to him by a survivor. Perhaps like many people from land-locked countries his friend was not able to swim, or perhaps he was weak from the effects of the boat journey. Who knows?
As Border Force boats operate under a veil of secrecy, how do we know whether or not other people have been pushed into the water and been drowned because of such treatment?
The Coalition government has stated that many of the refugees can safely be sent back to their countries of origin. This does not apply to asylum seekers from Iran and Sri Lanka, and many other places. For example the Sri Lankan government has members who are war criminals, who ordered the bombing of hospitals and other places of refuge. The Iranian government has one of the most notorious prisons on the planet, where people are known to be tortured. Our Coal-Alition government and ASIO obviously get their information about these asylum seekers from governments that have killed with impunity.
Our federal government needs to be honest and admit that the years of imprisonment of children and people who have not been convicted of any crime is purely political game playing to gain votes. Lives can be saved by processing applicants before they embark on dangerous voyages.
Gillian Blair, Panmure, Vic.
