Activists organise demonstrations at MP offices around Australia to call for an end to offshore detention following the publication of the Nauru files

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Protesters armed with paper dolls bearing the text of leaked incident reports from Nauru will hold vigils at the offices of 29 federal MPs on Monday calling for the immediate closure of Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres.

The protests will start at 8am and target almost every electorate office in Sydney including prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office in Edgecliff, Tanya Plibersek’s office in Broadway, Tony Abbott’s Manly office and Anthony Albanese’s office in Marrickville.

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Later protests will also be held at the Brisbane offices of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the Perth electorate office of the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, as part of more than 40 actions planned throughout the week.

The protests are being held in response to the Guardian’s publication of the Nauru files, a collection of more than 2,000 leaked incident reports that contain serious allegations of sexual assault and child abuse at the Australian-run detention centre.

Labor and the Greens have vowed to push for a parliamentary inquiry into the allegations but the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, has resisted calls for a royal commission, downplaying the severity of the reports and saying investigating them was a matter for the Nauruan government.

Rev Dr Peter Catt, Dean of St John’s cathedral in Brisbane, said he was “appalled” by Dutton’s comments.

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“The ongoing suggestion that people are in some calculated way harming themselves to come to Australia just shows a lack of understanding of how desperate these people are, and how damaged they are,” he said.

Catt, who is also chair of the Australian churches refugee taskforce, said the Nauru files confirmed reports the church had received of conditions on the island.

He said the only moral and legal option for Australia was to immediately close the camps and bring detainees to Australia for processing, “because any inquiry is going to take time, and what we have learned is that this is an emergency”.

“I have a sense that over the last 12 months the view of the Australian public has shifted from one of acceptance or approval of the government’s policy to being appalled about what is happening in their name,” he said.

“With the publication of the Nauru files I think for the first time people have understood how profoundly destructive the government’s policy is.

“The one positive is that I think that this could be the beginning of the end.”



A spokesman for Love Makes A Way, Matt Anslow, said the group had organised the vigils as “an outpouring of grief and anger” in response to the Nauru files, which he said provided “really clear evidence of how bad it is”.

“If people don’t want to hear about it and they don’t want to read about it then they won’t anyway, so the task for people like us is to get on the street and say to Australia: this is happening and we can’t turn our backs from it any more,” Anslow said.

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“I’d almost rather people confront it and decided that they’re against what we’re saying rather, than just not care about it at all … rather than just say, ‘oh, those people aren’t even important enough to consider’.”

Another group of protesters targeted the City2Surf run in Sydney on Sunday, hanging banners demanding Australia “bring them here” and close detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru.

“We are dealing with a lot of apathy and I think the government is relying on this apathy,” Fabia Claridge said. “One young person said: ‘who are Manus and Nauru? Who are they?’

“They thought Manus and Nauru were [the names of] people.”