Brian Owler’s address to Australian Medical Association forum on asylum seekers says immigration policy is ‘pulling apart the moral fabric of the country’

The Australian immigration and border protection department is “pulling apart the moral fabric of the country”, and prolonged detention is “state-sanctioned child abuse”, the head of the Australia’s peak medical body has told a forum in Sydney.

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Prof Brian Owler, the national president of the Australian Medical Association (AMA), delivered the closing address at the AMA forum on the health of asylum seekers on Sunday, and while his forthright speech was harsh on the Australian government and its treatment of asylum seekers, he rejected calls for a boycott of the system by Australian medical professionals.

Owler also gave the organisation’s support to the health professionals standing against the Australian government in Brisbane by refusing to discharge a baby who had been treated for burns back into the care of the immigration detention system.

A number of doctors and health professionals at the forum added to recent calls for a boycott. A former IHMS health officer said workers were faced with the choice of being complicit in a system which tortured people, or of maintaining ethical conduct and risking punishment including under the Border Force Act.

Owler said change must come through public opinion and that “provision of medical treatment is not condoning the system”. He noted IHMS was already attempting to bypass Australian professionals and hire foreign medical workers.

Owler said a boycott would draw good services away from asylum seekers, and that he believed doctors and nurses would go anyway. “That’s what doctors and nurses do, they put their patient first.”

He added that it was “perfectly acceptable” for people not to participate in the system if they felt they couldn’t, but a boycott was not the way to achieve change.

Dr David Isaacs, a paediatrician who has frequently spoken out about detention and how it amounts to torture, did not agree with a boycott either.

Isaacs said medical professionals were in an “impossible position”, torn between providing healthcare to those who needed it, and not participating in torture. He said the only answer was for the government to stop putting them in that position and close the detention centres.

However he told Guardian Australia outside the forum that he was “conflicted”, having written publicly in the past that a boycott should be considered.

“But when you think about what it would actually involve, you have to say, well why would we do a boycott?” he said.

Isaacs said a boycott wouldn’t actually be effective, and if it was held for moral or ethical reasons then everyone would have to agree.

“I don’t think everyone does agree with the morality of boycott. A lot of people, I think, do agree that it is implicitly condoning torture to work within the system, but some people would say that it’s justified by helping people,” he said.

“The AMA will not stand up and say we should boycott, but they will say that it’s torture and they don’t condone torture.”

Dr Peter Young, the former IHMS chief psychiatrist, said there should be more transparency and first-rate care.

Currently the system did not allow for that, so “a logical consequence of that was people shouldn’t be doing it,” he told Guardian Australia outside the forum.

Young suggested that instead “we can put forward another model that provides for those services, that can provided freely and not under this restricted context”.

The AMA officially called for a moratorium on asylum seeker children being returned to detention; the immediate release of all children from onshore and offshore detention into the community, the establishment of an independent statutory body of experts with the power to investigate and report on the health and welfare of asylum seekers; and for the government and opposition to revisit their policies if they could not provide satisfactory healthcare.

Speaking after the forum, Owler told media the immigration department displayed “zealot like behaviour” and that he had “never encountered the sort of attitude that doesn’t seem to understand an alternative point of view”.

“That is so determined to keep a level of secrecy and lack of transparency, that wants to shut people away, that has been intimidating our own doctors. This is a ridiculous situation where you have ... immigration going to Senate estimates and saying the doctors don’t decide who gets transferred if they have a medical condition, we decide.”



Attendees of the forum also heard from Prof Elizabeth Elliott, who has inspected the Christmas Island and recently Darwin’s Wickham Point detention centres.

Elliott said processing has been “purposefully slow” resulting in prolonged arbitrary detention explicitly at odds with the UN convention on the rights of the child. “As a result of our policy hundreds of children have been denied human rights,” she said.

She spoke of the midnight transfers of people, and quoted one female detainee who said they wake up in the morning and “our friends have gone”.

Elliot described a number of people who had committed acts of self harm or attempted suicide, and were severely mentally ill. “Compassion, it appears, had gone missing on Christmas Island,” she said.

Elliot also said the 69 children she assessed at Wickham Point were “amongst the most traumatised children we had ever seen.”

Over 95% of children over the age of eight were at high risk of PTSD, and more than 95% received highest score for “hopelessness”. She said all children assessed were in the top two categories of risk for developmental problems, and the findings suggested the Human Rights Commission’s Forgotten Children report had “fallen on deaf ears.”

She predicted the recent and any further push from medical professionals for change would prompt accusations that doctors and nurses were advocates, “as if this is a pejorative term.”

Elliot questioned why Australians had not been so vocal in protest, suggesting the deliberate hiding of faces and identities by the government led to a situation of “out of sight, out of mind.”

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Registered nurse Alanna Maycock told of her visit with Isaacs to Nauru, where she witnessed a man being assaulted, and spoke to a woman who had been menstruating for two months but had not been referred for medical care.

She also noted the shower blocks were shielded only by flimsy curtains and were in full view of guards. “We had no agenda when we went to Nauru. but when you’re working with a system … that prevents you from carrying out your duty of care … you need to question what system you’re working with,” she said.

“We gave our recommendations to IHMS … but those recommendations go to the government,” she said. “That’s not a chain of command I can trust.”