Polls suggest the national #KidsoffNauru campaign has already made a positive difference.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But the 100 people who rallied in Wollongong on Saturday nevertheless reiterated calls for the Federal Government to close the off-shore detention camps and resettle refugees in Australia.
Speaker after speaker at the Refugee Action Collective Illawarra run event spoke of their anger at the “inhumane” policies and treatment of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru.
Emmanuel Bakanga, who fled his home in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2005 after his six siblings and parents were killed, said the seven years he spent in refugee detention camps in Uganda, was like “hell on earth”.
“I saw for myself that children are increasingly the tragic casualties of war,” the father-of-three said.
“Children were dying every day because of lack of food, medication and basic needs.
“Australia is putting children in detention centres and they are being treated like criminals. It is time for our political leaders to stop the principle of mandatory detention.
“Anyone who uses the suffering of little children, asylum seekers and refugees to further their political ends, are simply evil, morally bankrupt and are crossing the line of human decency.”
Sydney Children’s Hospital psychiatrist Dr Michael Dudley said desperate human need was still a political football and the fight to scrap offshore detention was ongoing.
The senior University of NSW lecturer described the prolonged immigration detention as revealing “reckless indifference and calculated cruelty”.
“The government knows very well what it is doing. It knows and accepts these harms on behalf of us all and we are all implicated in this,” Dr Dudley said.
“We’ve seen so many cases of suicidal children, cases of children perhaps irretrievably damaged with post traumatic stress and severe depression. We’ve seen so many deaths.
“These [asylum seekers] people are hostages. They’ve been rented to these pacific black sites, much like Guantanamo Bay.
“They have been used as means to ends.
“Women have been sexually assaulted and nothing has been done. Children have been sexually assaulted. There are a high rate of mental health through incarceration.
“These already traumatised people fleeing persecution are rendered invisible and silenced, particularly inside offshore detention centres, unable to speak, advocate or represent themselves.”
Earlier this week Prime Minister Scott Morrison promised to remove all children off Nauru by the end of the year.
But all speakers at the rally, including Dr Dudley called on the immediate end of mandatory detention.
“We need a coherent rather than reactive refugee policy and legislation that prevents this ever happening a again,” he said.
“There is no point altering the policy if the legislation stays the same. The legislation has to change.”
Following he speeches, those at the rally marched through the streets of Wollongong and protested in front of the office of Sharon Bird (Labor) and Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells.