Immigration minister tells asylum seekers to return home or face a 'very very long time' in detention

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

A video message recorded by the immigration minister, Scott Morrison, telling asylum seekers to return home or face a “very very long time” in detention was screened and continues to be shown to detainees in Australia’s offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.



Guardian Australia revealed that the minister had recorded the video but it remained unclear whether it had been shown to asylum seekers. The minister’s office had refused to answer detailed questions about the circumstances of the video’s recording and its intended use.



Morrison subsequently told Fairfax Media that the video was an “orientation message” shown to new asylum seeker arrivals detained offshore for processing and resettlement.



The film shows Morrison staring into a camera and saying: “There are new rules in place under this government so I urge you to think carefully about your next decision and to make a decision to get on with the rest of your life and to not remain here and take the option to go back to the country from which you’ve originally come.”



Morrison told Fairfax on Thursday: “I make no apologies for being upfront about the reality of the situation that transferees were now faced with.”



On Friday the immigration minister did not respond to a request for comment from Guardian Australia.



The video has been widely condemned both in Australia and abroad, with many arguing it is a direct threat to asylum seekers to make them return home, which flies in the face of international law.



“This footage has confirmed that is the intention of the Abbott government to let refugees languish in the gulags of Manus Island and Nauru indefinitely,” said the Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young.



“Vulnerable asylum seekers are being presented with the worse of two evils, either return to the horrors from which you fled or suffer in the camps of cruelty.

“What is clear now is that there is nothing voluntary about these returns, it is clear coercion.

Australia is a signatory to the Refugee Convention, of which non-refoulement – the rule of not returning asylum seekers to persecution – is a core principle.