When I travelled to Roj camp in 2022, I looked into the eyes of an eight-year-old Australian girl, whose frame was so small and frail that she looked much younger than my own daughter, who was five at the time. Many of her teeth were rotten or missing, and she was showing signs of stunting from poor nutrition.
Behind the debate about these families, this is the reality. Australian children living in tents exposed to baking hot summers and freezing winters, denied adequate healthcare, their education disrupted.
It was then that I vowed to redouble our efforts to support these families to return to Australia.
Save the Children does not fund or conduct repatriations, nor do we ever intend to play such a role. We have not been involved in any extraction of Australians from camps in Syria. But for more than six years, we have engaged in sustained advocacy, calling on the Australian government to bring these children home. This has not always been a popular choice, but it is the right choice, in keeping with our mission to fight for every child’s rights, no matter who they are.
When we acted as a litigation guardian in a Federal Court appeal in 2024, the full bench of the Federal Court found that it would be a “relatively straightforward” exercise for the Australian government to bring these children home if it “had the political will”. But that political will is nowhere to be seen.
Although the Morrison government repatriated eight orphans in 2019 and the Albanese government followed suit by repatriating three families in 2022, official channels slammed shut once this was deemed too unpopular to continue.