Weekly media wrap - 2 September 2019

A family of four Tamil asylum seekers were granted a last-minute interim injunction giving them a five-day reprieve from deportation. Their plane, which had departed Melbourne set for Sri Lanka, was forced to land in Darwin. They were subsequently moved to the Christmas Island detention centre. An urgent federal court hearing delayed the deportation, with lawyers acting for the two-year-old daughter arguing that no assessment had been conducted by Australia as to whether she is owed protection obligations. The family has received strong community support, including many supporters who protested at Melbourne Airport this week. 

Weekly allowances and food rations for hundreds of refugees on Manus Island have been stopped amidst the Papua New Guinea Government’s plans to relocate refugees and asylum seekers to Port Morseby. Many refugee families had their allowances and food stopped with no explanation in May and June, and have struggled to provide for their families with no money or employment. 

Meanwhile, a Senate inquiry has heard that asylum seekers and refugees detained in PNG are being blocked from talking to lawyers or doctors, which is preventing medical evacuation approved under new medevac laws. Many of the asylum seekers do not have access to phones, meaning that medical evacuation response teams are unable to contact them.  

New documents released to the Senate reveal that Paladin, the security firm contracted to deliver services on Manus Island, has been fined more than a thousand times by the Home Affairs department for ‘performance failures’. These failures included chronic understaffing, incidents of drink-driving, failures to have staff with appropriate training, and lengthy delays in responding to maintenance issues in the facilities. 

Findings from a recent Deloitte Access Economics report demonstrated that increasing Australia’s refugee intake could boost the economy by billions each year, and sustain tens of thousands of full time jobs. The report found that overall economic benefit far outweighed the cost of refugee assistance and settlement services.