Baby Asha released to community, day 10 of standoff - gov humiliated

A watershed week in immigration

In an extraordinary victory of the people, baby Asha and her parents are being released into the community here in Australia. The gov has had to humiliate itself in an Olympic backflip from deporting them back to the Nauru gulag.

Dutton is trying to save face, claiming it was always going to release Asha into the community (*bullshit alert*) and that she may in the end be sent back to Nauru. But I'm feeling it's all just Lieberal wind bagging, trying to pick up the pieces.

This is a turning point in the whole sorry saga, first started under John Howard, of offshore detention of refugees. Australians have had a gutful of gov cruelty and international law breaking in our name.

Congratulations to the people of Brisbane who made this possible. The people have pushed back and been heard.

An extraordinary act of public defiance has forced the federal government to back down on plans to return an asylum seeker baby being treated in a Queensland hospital to detention on Nauru. 

On Sunday, after a week-long protest by doctors and others, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton announced baby Asha would be released into community detention and not immediately transferred to Nauru, essentially buckling to the protestors’ demands. 

The one-year-old received treatment for burns she suffered from boiling water while in detention, with her plight triggering a rally of asylum seeker advocates outside the hospital lasting more than a week. 

Queensland Council of Unions general secretary Ros McLennan told Fairfax Media it was a “backflip of Olympic proportions”, while activist organisation GetUp! claimed the development had changed the national conversation on asylum seekers. The New Daily