Andrew Wilkie (Denison, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The health and healthcare situation on Manus and Nauru is desperate. Some of the most shocking individual cases include a 12-year-old boy who has overdosed twice in the past fortnight, an 11-year-old girl who is suicidal, an eight-year-old boy with autism in need of substantial support and a 27-year-old woman with depression and psychosis. She was sexually assaulted on Nauru and is so afraid to leave her accommodation that she has felt forced to urinate in a bucket. There is also a 28-year-old man with a significant knee injury, who waited six days for an X-ray; a 33-year-old man with nerve injury to his hand; a 46-year-old man who has been waiting 4½ years for surgery for a serious bowel condition; a 44-year-old man who is blind in one eye after an assault during the 2014 Nauru riot and who is now almost blind in the other; a 56-year-old woman who cares for a disabled son, so depressed she is suicidal; and a 30-year-old new mother with severe anxiety and depression.

None of these and many other people are getting the treatment they need, and that's plain cruel. So, to the government, I say: stop playing politics with people's lives and bring the asylum seekers and refugees to Australia now.