Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull accused me on Tuesday, and others, of encouraging detainees at the Manus Island detention centre to stay put. He’s clearly not happy with their decision to defy his government’s efforts to coerce them out by cutting off the essentials of life.
His untrue and offensive claims are based on the false premise that the detainees do not have agency, and are incapable of making their own decisions. It is the latest insult from a government that has consistently sought to degrade and dehumanise people seeking asylum and refugees.
Dehumanisation is a central tenet of offshore detention. On Manus Island and Nauru, detainees are called by the number of their boat, instead of their names.
The inaccessibility of their prisons is by design, to avoid accountability for the horrors being inflicted upon our fellow human beings. Because of the deliberate secrecy surrounding the centres, Turnbull and his ministers have been allowed to get away with gross falsehoods and outright lies.
Turnbull falsely claims that the centre is closing because of a decision by the Papua New Guinea supreme court. The court did decide that detention at the centre was unconstitutional but the subsequent decision to open the gates during daylight hours and put on a bus to the nearby town of Lorengau was enough to satisfy the terms of its ruling.
The decision to close the detention centre on 31 October was an arbitrary one made by the Turnbull government. So was the decision to remove essential services …
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Nick McKim, Guardian
