1. A profoundly disabled four-year-old girl will be transferred to an offshore detention facility in the latest controversy to hit the Federal Government’s Operation Sovereign Borders. According to The Global Mail, the Tamil girl – who is currently being held in a Brisbane detention centre – will be transferred offshore along with her father, most likely to Nauru.
Sources at the Brisbane centre have reported that the girl is unable to walk and talk, and was strapped to her father as they travelled by boat from Sri Lanka. Her disability is the result of an injury her mother sustained in a bomb blast while she was in utero.
The news comes after the story of an asylum seeker unable to visit her newborn baby in ICU made headlines earlier this week.
Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Scott Morrison, has responded to the controversies, saying: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a child, it doesn’t matter whether you’re pregnant, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a woman, it doesn’t matter if you’re an unaccompanied minor, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a health condition – if you are fit enough to get on a boat, then you can expect you’re fit enough to end up in offshore processing.”
2. Turkey has issued a warning to NSW MPs, telling them that they will not be welcome at Anzac Cove for the 100th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli in 2015. The hostility has arisen from the NSW Parliament’s formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide, an action undertaken by Turkey’s Ottoman Government during WWI, killing over a million people. The warning, from Speaker of the Turkish Parliament, Cemil Cicek, says that if formal recognition of the genocide is adopted by other Australian governments, similar sanctions will apply.