18th December 2018
Dear Prime Minister,
Please find enclosed an open letter to you, which has
been signed by 1,835 people. The signatures have been collected by supporters
of Rural Australians for Refugees in many communities across Australia. The
letter reads:
“We, the undersigned, are well aware that the
international community faces serious challenges in dealing with the millions
of people around the world who have been forced to flee their country.
Detaining people indefinitely on remote islands, away
from public scrutiny, however, can never be a part of the solution. More than
100 children remain on Nauru. Many of them have only known a life in detention.
A large number of them have significant mental health issues. Current
government policy is deliberately cruel, utterly inhumane, morally
indefensible, and unsustainable. We have a humanitarian catastrophe on our
hands which has been deliberately created to achieve political objectives.
We therefore call on your government to immediately
evacuate all the children, men and women currently held on Nauru. They must be
brought to Australia to receive appropriate care and resettlement here or
eventually in other safe countries prepared to accept them. Enough is enough.”
We acknowledge that, since the launch of this open
letter, the number of children on Nauru has been dramatically reduced, but we
note, with dismay, that your government has spent some $480,000 in the courts
during this financial year in a cruel attempt to prevent children coming to our
shores for emergency medical treatment. That is truly reprehensible, and cannot
possibly be justified. We can protect our borders without treating asylum
seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus with such cruelty and inhumanity.
It is surely time to bring this shameful chapter in
our history to an end.
Yours
sincerely,
Mike
Griffin
On behalf of
Rural Australians for Refugees
No comments:
Post a Comment