If you were seriously ill, who would you trust to make decisions about your healthcare – a doctor or a politician?
Doctors and healthcare professionals are trained to make critical decisions grounded in evidence, experience, and care for human life. Yet right now, more than 100 people held offshore in Papua New Guinea and Nauru are being denied that same standard of care — because politicians, not doctors, are determining whether they can access life-saving treatment.
For twelve years, the Australian Government has been subjecting people to an offshore detention regime so inhumane that the United Nations has called it "degrading" and "akin to torture”.1 I’ve heard directly from refugees and people seeking asylum about what they’ve endured: overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, physical and sexual assault — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Right now, one in five people in offshore detention are so unwell their lives are in immediate danger. Fourteen people have already died — not from complex illnesses, but from conditions that should have been easily treated. How many more lives will be lost before this Government puts people’s health above politics?
This isn’t just a crisis — it’s a complete failure by the Australian Government to protect basic human rights and help people whose lives are at serious risk.
We now have a newly elected Labor Government with a clear and expanded mandate. That gives us a powerful opportunity — and a responsibility — to push them to act. They can and must end this shameful policy and evacuate the people still stranded offshore, some for over a decade already. Together, we can make sure they use that mandate to save lives without further delay.
That’s why I — along with fellow doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals — am demanding the immediate evacuation of everyone still trapped in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. They must be brought to Australia to receive the urgent medical care they have been shamefully denied for far too long.
WATCH: Healthcare professionals across Australia call on the Australian Government to medically evacuate people from Nauru and PNG now.