New Zealanders with Samoan and Tongan heritage are worse off as detainees, awaiting court appeals or deportation to New Zealand, in an Australian offshore centre in Christmas Island.
The view is by justice advocate Filipa Payne for New Zealanders in the detention centre, northwest of Australia’s mainland where ‘bloodied’ detainees were “…apparently beaten with steel pipes..” by guards.
The New Zealand Herald carried a report last Wednesday, of a video of the altercation released to TeAoMaori news, that “…shows several men bleeding heavily, with lacerations to their legs and bodies and zip-tied to furniture in a dining area.”
Advocator Payne told the NZ Herald that the men were protesting treatment and conditions at the facility and the wounds were inflicted by its Emergency Response Team (ERT), which was called in to end the protest.
Payne told the Herald that most of those who were subdued were Kiwis and “if they weren’t New Zealanders, they were Pacific Islanders.”
Some of the prisoners have been there for eight years as they await appeal or deportation.
Payne argued that it’s worse for some Pasifika peoples, because those nations are not always obligated to take their people back.
“Samoa and Tonga are not compelled to take their people back, so the Tongan nationality is the second-highest indigenous detained group and that is where the majority of those people are held.”
Detainees are being deported under the Australian government’s 501 scheme, which allows non-citizens to be returned to their country of origin for crimes or perceived bad character.
The NZ Herald wrote that “…Aotearoa has consistently opposed the action on the grounds of New Zealanders’ reciprocal right to work and live indefinitely in each other’s country.”
Advocator Payne says many of the detainees have no connection to Aotearoa, given they, or their parents, may have migrated to Australia as children; the detainees had their own lives, children and jobs in Australia, Payne says.