Page 3330 - Week 09 - Thursday, 24 August 2017
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(b) brings all refugees and asylum seekers to Australia to be resettled in Australia’s 148 Refugee Welcome Zones where they can build new lives within this network of compassionate and caring communities committed to upholding their rights; and
(4) declares that the ACT Government is willing and ready to settle refugees and asylum seekers from Manus Island and Nauru in Canberra as part of a national program of resettlement.
The situation for refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island has reached crisis point. For this reason I have brought this motion to the Legislative Assembly calling on the Australian government to immediately remove all refugees and asylum seekers from both Manus Island and Nauru and to resettle them here in Australia, including here in Canberra. The Greens believe that seeking asylum is a humanitarian issue that obliges us all to treat people seeking asylum with compassion and dignity. The Manus Island and Nauru offshore detention centres are unsafe and inappropriate places to house refugees, including children. This situation is cruel and it is unsustainable. It is well past time for the federal government’s damaging and inhumane policy to end. We believe there is a better way to deal with this situation.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN’s refugee agency, there are currently 773 people who remain on Manus Island. The centre is being progressively closed down and services are being withdrawn while refugees and asylum seekers are still inside it, removing the little essential support available to them. The scheduled closure of the regional processing centre on 31 October is occurring because last year the Papua New Guinean Supreme Court found that detention of refugees and asylum seekers on Manus island was illegal and in breach of the country’s constitution. According to the UNHCR the closure is causing acute distress amongst the refugees and asylum seekers currently housed there. The men living in the centre were given only 159 days notice that the centre would close. They have been told that water, power and cleaning services will be cut imminently from the centre. The gym has been closed, generators removed, the canteen destocked and English classes and other activities discontinued while buildings are being progressively shut down and cordoned off.
Medical care and torture and trauma support will also cease by the end of October. Refugees have reported that the conditions inside the detention centre have become more oppressive, presumably a deliberate attempt to force the refugees to move. The men will be forced to move to the Australian-built East Lorengau refugee transit centre on the outskirts of the Manus province’s main town of Lorengau. Some men have already moved to the transit centre but the facility was not built to house 700 people and is only insured to house fewer than 300. There is no medical centre and the local hospital is not equipped to deal with the complex medical needs of refugees and asylum seekers, many of whom have suffered and fled torture and persecution in their country of origin. The UNHCR has expressed significant concerns about refugees and asylum seekers going to the transit centre.
On 8 August the UNHCR said:
To prevent further tragedies … the planned closure of the Manus Island “Regional Processing Centre” must only take place in the context of continued
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