Australia’s Interior Minister Peter Dutton today introduced a bill to repeal the law allowing refugees and asylum seekers held on the Papuan island of Manus and Nauru to move to their territory for medical reasons , in the South Pacific. These transfers are regulated through the so-called “Medevac” (Medical Evacuation) law, which gives doctors more powers to decide the evacuation, and which was approved in February when the government was in a minority, following an intense campaign driven by allegations about deteriorating mental health of inmates, including minors.
“As a nation it is imperative that we be able to determine who enters Australia and whether they should remain at our borders permanently,” Dutton said in introducing the bill to Parliament. HELP US Click the Google News star and follow usThe legislative proposal states that “Medevac” empowers the minister to refuse a transfer for national security reasons but does not include “no mechanism of expulsion or return” of refugees to Nauru and Manus. The reform aims to “allow (immigrants) to be removed from Australia or returned to regional centres once they no longer need to be in Australia for the temporary reason they were transferred.”
Dutton said the reform will “repair” a situation that attributed to the “political myopia” of the Labour opposition to please Green Party voters before the May election, in which the conservative coalition renewed its mandate and expanded its majority. The government has a large enough majority to pass the bill in the lower house but will have to negotiate for more support in the Senate. According to an Interior report submitted to the Senate, some 900 asylum seekers were transferred to Australia since 2013, when the ocean icing on the Pacific opened detention centres, and of these, 282 were returned to Nauru and Manus while the remainder was ed at centres in Australia. To date, the “Medavac” law has allowed 31 medical evacuations while nine others have been rejected, according to The Guardian Australia newspaper last month. Since the Liberal-National Coalition won the May election, self-harm and suicide attempts have been reported among Manus asylum seekers and refugees, cases dutton called attempts to use “Medevac” to enter the country. Many of the refugees and asylum seekers who attempted to enter Australia by sea have fled conflicts such as those in Afghanistan, Darfur, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria, and others have escaped discrimination, such as the Rohingya minorities in Burma (Myanmar ) or bidun in the Gulf region.
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