Asylum for baby ‘would put more kids at risk’: Dutton

Allowing baby Asha to stay would encourage people smugglers to put more kids on boats.

Asylum-seeker advocates outside Brisbane's Lady Cilento Children's Hospital in support of one-year-old baby Asha, in Brisbane on Sunday, February 21, 2016.

Allowing the detainee toddler known as “baby Asha” to stay in Australia would only encourage people-smugglers to put more children on boats and expose ­hospitals as a way in to the country, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has warned.

Doctors at Brisbane’s Lady ­Cilento Hospital had been ­refusing to discharge the young patient, who had arrived from Nauru earlier this month suffering from scalding burns, until a “safe” place of residence was guaranteed.

Mr Dutton said yesterday the baby and her mother would be ­released into community detention in Brisbane while their future was decided, prompting celebrations among protesters outside the hospital and across social media.

“That’s what we’ve proposed all along,” the minister said. “But at some point, if people have matters finalised in Australia, then they will be returning to Nauru, and that’s exactly the same treatment that we’ve applied equally.”

Mr Dutton said the government’s policy had reduced the number of children who had ­arrived off boats to fewer than 80, compared to the 8000 who arrived under the Labor government.

“I’m absolutely determined to make sure that we treat these families with the respect they deserve, to make sure we have a compassionate approach to provide medical assistance where it’s ­required (but) there’s no special treatment.

“There wasn’t for the family ­before them and there won’t be for the family after them.”

As well as drawing hundreds of protesters to the hospital site, baby Asha’s plight and the doctors who refused to release her attracted the support of the Australian Medical Association, which yesterday called for the immediate ­release of all children in detention and for a moratorium on any child being sent back to offshore processing centres.

An open letter to Malcolm Turnbull, carrying the names of dozens of doctors including child health expert Fiona Stanley, says that detention centres at Nauru and Manus Island have repeatedly been shown to be unsafe places and a strategy that deters people from seeking asylum on the basis that they may be mistreated is ­“unethical” and the forced detention of people in environments “with a risk of harm must cease”.

Former Immigration doctor John-Paul Sanggaran went a step further, calling for a medical boycott of detention centres, which he said were a “form of systematic child abuse and mental torture”.

There are 83 people, the majority women and children, living in Australia in community detention.

While he accepted the issue of child detention was an emotive one, Mr Dutton accused advocates of “hijacking” the debate in their mission to “see our borders open” and allow people-smugglers to get “back into business”.

He said intelligence out of ­Indonesia suggested people-smugglers were telling the estimated 14,000 people who would be ­prepared to “get on boats ­tomorrow” that the baby Asha case was indicative of a looming change in policy in Australia.

“I’m not going to allow a repeat of the 1200 people who drowned at sea ... I’m not going to allow the sort of scenes that we’re seeing on the Mediterranean, I’m not going to allow the chaos that we’re ­seeing in parts of Europe,” he said

“I’m not going to allow a ­situation where we have people harmed to come to our country to receive medical assistance and then they think there’s a formula for them to be released into the community. That’s not going to happen”.