By
Mark Church
10 May 2013
Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s government has contemptuously dismissed an exposure by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) “Four Corners” program of the appalling and medically unsafe conditions inside the government’s refugee detention centres on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
Immigration Minister Brendan O’Connor flatly rejected the evidence that the camps were unfit for human habitation, especially by women and children, describing the conditions as “adequate” but “not 5 star”. He insisted that it was necessary to detain families in the camps in order to deter asylum seekers from attempting to reach Australia by boat.
Under Labor’s regime, asylum seekers are detained indefinitely in these camps, which still largely consist of military tents, supposedly to ensure that people arriving by boat have “no advantage” over refugees who wait for years for official permission to enter Australia.
Doctor John Vallentine, who worked on Manus Island for the government and International Health and Medical Services (IHMS) last year, told “Four Corners” that he had warned from the outset that the camp was not medically fit for occupation. The camp was covered with mosquitoes, had 49-degree Celsius weather and 100 percent humidity, and reeked of faecal matter from the poor sewerage facilities.
“I had decided that this was not the sort of place where children ought to be from a purely medical point of view and I wrote to my superiors at IHMS about that,” Vallentine said. “And then when the asylum seekers started arriving, my concerns turned to alarm because we were getting sick people who doubly ought not to have been there.
The camp was chronically short of medical supplies. Its remoteness meant that air evacuation to hospitals could take hours, endangering children’s lives. Among the first children sent to Manus Island were a severely anaphylactic young boy and nine year old girl with anaemia and a history of blood transfusions.
Vallentine explained: “The little boy with anaphylaxis … the chap was sent over with a mass in his neck requiring investigation. I mean how can we investigate a mass in a neck? We don’t even have x-rays, let alone anything else … For the first time
This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site