
This week marks five years since Australia re-opened mandatory detention facilities on Nauru. Tragically, there are still 124 children languishing indefinitely there.
That means there are children of school age who have known no other life but the precarious and uncertain fate of being marooned on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific.
It’s also five years since I joined Save the Children Australia as CEO. This role brought alive to me the devastating human consequences of Australia’s tough approach to border protection.
As an organisation which strives to uphold the rights of children around the world, it is distressing to see such a violation of children’s rights on our doorstep.
The world has rightly been outraged at the treatment of migrant children in the United States. The images of distraught children separated from their parents and locked in cages has brought home the reality of government policies.
Through the relentless advocacy of organisations like Save the Children and a great many others, we have made some progress. Through the US resettlement deal, some children and their families have found a future in America. Yet too many children on Nauru remain at risk and without hope today.
In my first year as CEO, Save the Children was approached by the Australian Government to provide services to children who were being sent to Nauru.
It was a tough decision.
We saw the Government’s policy as inconsistent with its international obligations and a breach of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which states that any arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be used as ‘a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time’.
On the other hand, these children were among the most vulnerable in the world and an as an organisation, we put the needs of children first and foremost in our decision-making.
For two years, over 300 dedicated staff worked tirelessly to improve the lives of children and their families on Nauru. While there is no doubt that refugee children there were better off because of Save the Children’s presence, at times it felt like we were pushing against an unturnable tide of human suffering.
Children were harmed irreparably by detention. Children were separated from their parents. Children self-harmed as a desperate cry for help.
But arguably the worst consequence for children is the lack of certainty, hopelessness and fear, which is directly linked to their lack of a permanent protection pathway.
I remember on one of my visits to Nauru being introduced to the top male and female student at the Nauru High School – both refugees. I congratulated them for their hard work and encouraged them to continue to study hard.
One of them asked me: why?
Why should he study hard when there was so little chance of being able to go on to higher education?
Top Comments
If the idea that someone running away from persecution should be punished for crossing an invisible, arbitrary line drawn on a map is ok with you, you're not a patriot, you're an arsehole.
Neither of the two major parties can claim the high ground on this. And of course we can't accept that our mucking around where we had no business to be mucking around has been a cause of the refugee problem. When you do something, there are consequences and refugees are one consequence of us invading a country we had no right invading.