Morrison offers Sharkie asylum briefing

Key crossbencher Rebekha Sharkie will meet with the PM after being offered a briefing on legislation to medivac asylum-seekers.

Crossbencher Rebekha Sharkie will meet with Scott Morrison over the medical evacuation of asylum-seekers in detention. Picture: AAP

Key crossbencher Rebekha Sharkie will meet with Scott Morrison within days after accepting an offer from the Prime Minister’s office for a briefing on legislation to medically evacuate asylum-seekers in offshore detention.

Ms Sharkie received the offer late on Tuesday after she confirmed her intention to support the legislation while remaining open to discussing possible amendments with the government, a spokeswoman told The Australian.

In addition to the offer of a briefing, the letter outlined why the government opposed crossbencher Kerryn Phelps’s proposal to put two doctors in charge of advising whether asylum-­seekers should be transferred from Manus Island and Nauru to Austral­ia on medical grounds.

“We don’t know what the governmen­t is going to propose — that’s up to them,” Ms Sharkie’s spokeswoman said.

“Sometimes you go to these briefing meetings and they don’t move at all, they just use it as another opportunity to tell you what they’re thinking.

“In terms of what the Prime Minister may or may not be willin­g to bend on, we don’t know, because she hasn’t spoken to him, he’s just offered her a briefing and she’s accepted.”

The Prime Minister’s office declined to comment on what the briefing would entail.

Dr Phelps’s private member’s bill would give doctors rather than politicians and bureaucrats control over medical evacuations from offshore processing centres.

Mr Morrison warned yesterday that this could result in pedo­philes, rapists, and murderers entering Australia. “This bill will mean that we would just have to take them,” he said.

He also warned that a large number of single men in detention could come to Australia. “Hundreds of them will have to be transferred to Australia at the directiv­e of doctors, not the governme­nt, and this will mean we’ll have to ­reopen detention centres that we closed, like Christmas Island,” he said.

Speaking on Sky News this week, Mr Morrison labelled the bill as “stupid” and composed by “people who haven’t got the faintest idea how this works”.

Bill Shorten has indicated Labor would support the bill, meaning the government, which has the support of Queensland crossbench MP Bob Katter, faces the risk of becoming the first governm­ent in 90 years to lose a substantive vote in parliament.

Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie said he had been lobbied by the government but had not been persuaded to drop his support for the bill.

A spokeswoman for independent member for Indi Cathy McGowan said she would ­confirm her position when the legislation went before parliament next week.

Ms Sharkie has said she “trusts the doctors over the politicians”.