Commentary

The Australian Government has a duty of care to provide proper healthcare to the people it has held offshore on Nauru and Manus for six long years. Before the Medevac laws, it is clear that the Government was failing in its duty.

Today marks an awful milestone. It is six years since then prime minister Kevin Rudd announced that anyone arriving in Australia by boat seeking safety would be deported to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

The medical and humanitarian crisis in Australia’s offshore detention camps in Nauru and Manus Island keeps escalating, with the bearers of our government’s harsh policies being the bodies of the people who have been held captive for nearly six years.

The government keeps playing politics with innocent people’s lives but the public mood has shifted. After almost six years of unmitigated cruelty to innocent people, Australia is finally rediscovering its moral compass. There’s a palpable sense that this has all gone too far, for too long.

Over the past five years we have seen children on Nauru go from being playful and curious little kids to listless, voiceless, hopeless bodies on a mattress, unable to eat or speak. We’ve seen their spirits slowly dissolve and the brightness slowly fade from their eyes.

It’s 2018 and women’s voices are still ridiculed, disregarded, dismissed and put down. But there’s no doubting that our voices are out there, loud and clear and they are increasingly more difficult to ignore. Our voices are out there and this is a good thing. But not all women’s voices are heard.

For me and millions of other mums around Australia, today will be a special day. I'll wake to some slightly burnt toast, some slightly cold tea, a jar of jam from the school stall and probably a couple of earnest home-made Mother's Day cards, delivered to me in bed with a smile from my two beautiful boys.

Men are dying, women have been sexually assaulted and children traumatised on Manus and Nauru. This can’t continue writes Daniel Webb.

If we’ve learnt anything from the #LetThemStay campaign. If we’ve learnt anything from Baby Asha and the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital. If we’ve learnt anything from the church sanctuary movement, it’s this: on this issue, we can’t sit back and hope for leadership from our politicians. It’s you who must lead them.

Malcolm Turnbull’s proposed lifetime visa ban is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist and an attempt to distract us from one that does.

The proposal is absurd, the wedge politics cynical and the explanations insincere. Sadly, the fear and harm being caused is real.