Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

McKIM (—) (): COVID is running rampant through the detainees in the Park Hotel prison in Melbourne. The latest government figures from 8.30 am yesterday show that 13 detainees in the Park Hotel prison have tested positive for COVID. I understand that, as of this afternoon, there are actually 19 positive cases, including one in hospital and one who is so sick that an ambulance has been called. This is tragic, but it was eminently foreseeable and utterly predictable. The Greens and many other people warned at the start of the pandemic that this would happen unless all low-risk detainees were released from the alternative places of detention—the Park Hotel prison and other hotel prisons—into appropriate accommodation in the community.

A vaccine program for detainees in immigration detention only began rolling out two months ago. In Papua New Guinea, where there are still over 100 people who were exiled there 8½ years ago, only two per cent of the country's population are fully vaccinated. Numerous people who Australia exiled there have contracted COVID. The country's health system is buckling under the strain, with Port Moresby's largest hospital saying it is teetering on the brink of collapse, with wards at capacity and its morgue filled with bodies stacked one on top of another. The government was warned about this and has once again abjectly failed these people.

Eight and a half years of ongoing indefinite detention is an utter disgrace and one of the darkest and most shameful chapters in our country's story. For goodness sake, haven't these people suffered enough?