Baby Asha and the Asylum Seeker Debate
Channel: Daily Insight
Date: 2017-07-16

For those of you who don’t know about the baby Asha story in Australia, here’s a rundown. Baby Asha is an asylum seeker baby born in Australia. (Her parents are both seeking asylum here). She has recently been staying at the Lady Cilento children’s hospital in Brisbane being treated for burns she sustained at the Nauru Regional Processing Centre. This centre is used to temporarily hold asylum seekers to Australia and has had a long history of violence including rapes, assaults and rioting. The controversy around baby Asha is that the treating doctors and nurses at the hospital do not want to release her, knowing full well that the authorities will immediately take her and her family back to Nauru. They say that they have an ethical obligation to keep her at the hospital as long as the Australian government threaten her with deportation to the detention centre. The doctors have been threatened with arrest and possible prison sentences. Recently it was reported that the government are planning to send in security personnel to forcibly take the baby. Protesters have been surrounding the exit points of the hospital in a vain hope that this will prevent the security forces from entering. It has been said the security personnel will be plain-clothed officers, so it might be a bit hard to know who is who. Obviously the staff as well as much of the public think it is a bit cruel to send a baby back to the hellhole on Nauru. I happen to agree with them. However, I can understand the government’s dilemma.


SOCIAL MEDIA
https://www.facebook.com/DailyRantAustralia/
https://odysee.com/$/invite/@DailyRantAustralia:d
https://twitter.com/RantAustralia