Transcript
DANIEL WEBB: I was waiting with a group of refugees for the bus that takes them back to the detention centre on a Wednesday afternoon. This was in broad daylight in the middle of the main town and then two refugees walked passed us towards the police station very badly injured. They had been attacked on the street by seven locals who were armed with an iron bar and they were clearly in a bad way. One of them had very bad cuts to his head and to his arms he was covered in blood. And when he went inside to the police station he collapsed unconscious on the floor and had to be driven off to the hospital.
DW: And do we know what the attack was about?
DWEBB: I did have a chance to speak with him a couple of days after the attack when he was released from the medical center the detention camp. He is a guy who likes to stay healthy and he likes multivitamin tablets and you are not allowed to take vitamin tablets into the detention center for some strange reason. So he had gone into town to buy some vitamins and then buried them on the beach, along the beach. And he was walking with his friend back to the place where the bus picks them up and they were surrounded by a group of seven men insulted, robbed and attacked. And he told me that he feared for his life and the attack only ended when another local man very bravely intervened to save them.
DW: When you went to the camps what sense did you get that this is not something out of the ordinary?
DWEBB: I wasn't actually allowed into the detention centre unfortunately but I did have the chance to spend several days interviewing many of the men who had been warehoused on Manus for the last three years. And I met some amazing people, a guy who spoke seven languages, people of different ages from all over the world with incredible stories to tell. But what they all had in common is that they were fearful. What they all had in common is a story to tell about violence both inside the detention centre and outside of the detention centre. So they are living with this daily anxiety of danger and after three years of that they are exhausted.
DW: The camp on Manus Island has been declared illegal by the PNG courts Australia is remaining intractable on it, I think there is going to be another sitting by the supreme court in a week or so. But what is your feeling about what is going to come next?
DWEBB: Well I think the Papua New Guinean courts seem very keen to enforce their own audits. And so they should be Australia has used PNG's sovereignty as a shield to deflect responsibility and blame away when bad stuff happens. So there would be something quite fitting about Papua New Guinean sovereignty and the rule of law being a sword to strike a blow at the core of Australia's offshore detention arrangements. More broadly it is really clear these camps are dead ends. I mean you have got a thousand men who have been warehoused in harmful and unsafe conditions for three years. three years is such an incredibly long period of time. they are on a painful road that leads nowhere. And I think whatever the policy challenge a government is trying to solve. The deliberate cruelty to innocent people is not the solution. It is well and truly time for the Australian government to bring these men back to Australia.
