Victoria will take the 267 asylum seekers, Daniel Andrews tells Malcolm Turnbull
Andrews wrote to the prime minister urging him to take action and keep a group of Australian-born asylum seeker children and their families in Australia
A rally in front of Flinders St train station in Melbourne, Friday, 5 February 2016. The rally is in response to a number of children who are to be send from Australia back to Nauru and Manus Island detention centres. Photograph: David Crosling/AAP Ben Doherty
@bendohertycorro
Saturday 6 February 2016 17.14 AEDTLast modified on Saturday 6 February 201617.32 AEDT
The 267 asylum seekers whose removal to Nauru was cleared by a controversial high court ruling are welcome to stay in Victoria, the state’s premier Daniel Andrews has said.
Andrews wrote to the Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday offering that the group – which includes 37 babies born in Australia to asylum seeker mothers – can “call Victoria home”.
“I write to inform you that Victoria will accept full responsibility for all of these children and their families, including the provision of housing, health, education, and welfare services,” he told the prime minister.
“Given we stand ready to provide a safe, secure and welcoming environment for these children and their families, there is no justification for their removal.”
On Wednesday, the high court ruled that Australia’s offshore processing regime was constitutional and that the government had the legal right to establish, pay for, and direct the detention for processing of asylum seekers in foreign countries.
The 267 asylum seekers, most of whom were held on Nauru and were brought to Australia for medical treatment, were party to the court challenge.
They can now be removed to Nauru at 72 hours notice. None have been moved so far, and the government has committed to assessing each removal on an individual basis and committing that the government would not “send people into harm’s way”.
Several of the women and children have allegedly been sexually assaulted and raped on the island, others have complex ongoing health complaints.
Not all of the asylum seekers facing removal are children or families with children. Some are adult men and women. Andrews’s letter does not specify that Victoria will take all 267 asylum seekers, though in posting the letter to Twitter he appended the tag #LetThemStay, which has been the slogan of the campaign to keep all of the asylum seekers in Australia.
Andrews wrote that there was a moral imperative not to return children to Nauru, which he said was not a fair solution.
“A sense of compassion is not only in the best interests of these children and their families. It is also in the best interests of our status as a fair and decent nation. There are infants amongst the group who were born in this country.
Sending them to Nauru will needlessly expose them to a life of physical and emotional trauma.
“It is wrong. Medical professionals tell us this.
Humanitarian agencies tell us this. Our values tell us this too. Sending these children and their families to Nauru is not the Australian way.
”Immigration minister Peter Dutton told the ABC’s7.30 program this week that the Australian government was committed to its current compassionate arrangements for people requiring medical attention but that offshore processing was a fundamental policy in controlling Australia’s borders.
“There’s obviously a lot of emotion around this issue at the moment ... but the situation on Nauru is quite different than the way in which people are painting it,” he said. “For example, nobody is held in detention on Nauru.
“There is the ability for people to come and go freely in the community and I think it’s quite a different picture than that which has been painted by some of the advocates, but, as I say, that’s understandable because it is a very emotional space.”
The minister said each case for removal to Nauru would be assessed individually, taking note of the advice of medical experts.
“We aren’t going to put people in harm’s way,” he said.
Turnbull told parliament this week that “one child in detention is too many”, but that the government was committed to offshore processing because it was an effective deterrent to people-smuggling.
“Since coming back into office, the Coalition government have stopped the boats and we have reduced the number of children in detention to fewer than 100.
Our goal is to reduce that to zero. But the key element in doing so is to ensure that people do not get on people-smugglers’ boats and put their lives at risk.”
Earlier on Saturday, it was reported that more than 60 Australian writers – including Nobel laureate JM Coetzee and Booker prize winners Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey – have written to the prime minister and immigration minister condemning the government’s offshore detention policies as “brutal” and “shameful”
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Andrews’ letter, which has been labelled “progressive and compassionate” on social media, said sending people to offshore detention is simply “wrong”.
He says Victoria will accept full responsibility for all the families and children as a “sparse Pacific island is not a fair solution”.
