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Four Corners exposes detention centre shame

A doctor at Manus Island Detention Centre told Four Corners the centre was a medical disaster.

2013-04-30_1100Four Corners last night brought attention to the condition of detention centres in Nauru and Manus Islands.

A doctor who worked at the immigration centre on Manus Island says he informed authorities that the facility was inappropriate for children well before they were sent there, but nothing was done about it.

“The whole time I was there it was just a disaster, medically,” he told the ABC show.

“Almost from the day I arrived it was obvious to me that it was not a clinic that would work in its current state.

“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.

“It’s just a remote, silly place to be putting people.”

The program also described cases of people harming themselves at the Manus centre, including a man who poured petrol over himself in an effort to commit suicide.

It also said the number of people harming themselves at Australia’s processing centre on Nauru increased after former immigration minister Chris Bowen visited.

The Four Corners report showed there were still differences between Australia and Nauru on the Australian government’s “no advantage” policy.

The policy requires asylum seekers coming by boat to wait the same period to be resettled as other refugees coming through regular channels.

“The no advantage policy is an Australian government policy,” Nauru’s former foreign minister Kieren Keke told the ABC.

But an interview with opposition spokesman on immigration, Scott Morrison did not air. Morrison says women and children should not be detained in the temporary asylum-seeker processing centre on Manus Island.

“I said it wasn’t a fit place for families, I don’t have any objections to single males being sent to Manus Island and we will certainly continue that practise,” Morrison said in the unaired interview.

“Children seven and under can’t be there because they can’t be immunised against tropical diseases, for a start, and the issue is, obviously, that women who become pregnant and so on, the facilities just aren’t there to support women in that condition in that environment,” he said.

In a statement from Four Corners, The Australian was told it was “an editorial decision taken by the executive producer” not to run the interview.

Morrison said: “The Coalition regularly submits itself to scrutiny of our policies on border protection in the media, as we did once again on this occasion with the ABC’s Four Corners program. It is disappointing that Minister O’Connor was not prepared to do the same, as we were advised by the ABC.”

Lifeline: 13 11 14.

Source: ABC, Daily Telegraph The Australian

8 Responses

  1. Race has nothing to do with it, people entering Australia illegally by any means from any country will be detained or deported, it’s just the boat people have become the ‘whipping boy’ in this whole debate, for better or worse and while it was better under Howard a lot has changed and personally I don’t think Tony Abbott will have much luck fixing things when he becomes PM.

  2. Surely this starts with pregnant woman and children starting a sea voyage on on leaky wooden fishing boat….on a journey they should not have taken in the first place….
    If anyone here …did the same thing in reverse and turned up..in a boat..in another country…no papers…how do you think we would be greeted…

  3. Is there no comments section in this country safe from the ignorant racist rabble. Why not give talk-back radio and News Corp papers a miss for a day or two and shout yourself some actual information.

  4. I would have thought that any accommodation would be better than what these people are “fleeing” from. Surely they don’t expect us to roll out the red carpet when we have thousands of homeless ourselves.

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