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Treatment of boatpeople called 'inhumane'
The Australian - October 30, 2009
Pia Akerman – Doctors, academics and social workers attending a conference on trauma among child and adolescent refugees have slammed the Indonesian solution as inhumane.
University of South Australia law professor Wendy Lacey said Kevin Rudd was a hypocrite for portraying himself as against keeping children in detention, while turning a blind eye to their living conditions on Christmas Island and aboard boats trying to reach Australia.
"We have the rhetoric of humanity and of fair treatment for refugees, but at the heart of it still lies the core of the Pacific solution," she told delegates in Adelaide.
Branding the Indonesian solution "abhorrent", psychiatrist Jon Jureidini said Australia should not send asylum-seekers such as those aboard the Oceanic Viking into the hands of other nations without being confident of their future welfare.
"This is not a solution to refugee problems," Dr Jureidini said. "We don't know how people are going to be treated in Indonesia."
Dr Jureidini called for the Christmas Island detention centre to be closed, saying the Baxter centre had shown young men, as well as children, often suffered long-term harm.
Dr Lacey told the conference Australia needed stronger and more humane leadership on the issue of asylum-seekers. Speaking to The Australian later, she said the longer the people aboard the Oceanic Viking were left in limbo, the more problematic their situation became from a legal perspective.
"We need to get those people off that ship where they can be processed and their claims for asylum can be properly handled," she said. "It's about time the government took a strong stance and brought these people back to mainland Australia.
"Keeping people on remote islands without access to proper legal assistance and proper support services means we're just adding to the trauma."
Professor Lacey's sentiments were echoed by other speakers, including Flinders University psychologist Julie Robinson who has tracked the lives of 39 children who had been held at the Woomera detention centre. She found the children had strong behavioural problems with no marked improvement over the four years of the research.
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