Last night, ABC’s Four Corners exposed the reality of what life is like for the thousands of asylum seekers who are housed in Australia’s offshore processing centres in Nauru and Manus Island.
After being closed when the Labor Government came into power in 2007, the centres were reopened last year when two boats sunk off the north coast of Australia. The plan was to deter any other boats from entering Australian waters.
Through speaking to staff at the centres and sending in hidden cameras, reporter Debbie Whitmont outlined the harsh conditions these people are living in. One doctor who has worked at the Manus Island centre described the facilities as a “disaster, medically,”
“Almost from the day I arrived it was obvious to me that it was not a clinic that would work in its current state,” he said. “From early on I was sending lists both through my health services manager up there and directly to the medical staff of IHMS in Sydney saying, ‘look, we desperately need this stuff’.
“Stuff being oxygen, antibiotics, bladder catheters, suckers, tracheotomy equipment, anaesthetic agents, sedatives, morphine, ketamine, and these things didn’t arrive… for the first time in my life I felt ashamed to be an Australian up there seeing this squandering of money and this treatment of these poor, without exception, lovely people that I met.”
There were also reports of daily protests on the islands and of some detainees sewing their mouths, leaving only enough space to drink water through a straw.