Australia's first evacuation flight leaves from Wuhan Amid Controversy
I produced the following newscast for NPR on 3/1/2020
The Australian government chartered its first evacuation flight today out of the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the new coronavirus. This evacuation took place amid a controversial plan to quarantine evacuees in an offshore Australian immigration detention center on a remote island in the Indian Ocean.
Almost 300 Australians were flown out of Wuhan that took evacuees to Christmas Island via Western Australia. Only the passengers on board, not the crew, will be held in the detention center for at least 14 days.
The immigration detention center operated from 2003 until late 2018, and has been the site of numerous cases of abuse and unrest. It has been a pillar of Australia’s increasingly restrictive immigration policies, which aim to deter refugees arriving by boat from seeking asylum in the country.
Parents in China felt conflicted by this evacuation offer, with some preferring to stay in Wuhan rather than send their children to the offshore immigration detention center.
The detention center which costs millions to operate and can hold thousands of people, reopened mid-last year, to detain a Tamil couple from Sri Lanka and their two young children, both of whom were born in Australia as they fight an ongoing deportation case.
According to SBS News, the Tamil family’s lawyer said they were not informed about the plan to send people who could potentially carry the virus to the detention center. The Biloela family have described the conditions in in the detention center as ‘mental torture’ and the Australian government has ignored requests from the UN Human Rights Commission to release the family from detention.
Cover image: Christmas Island Detention Center by D-Stanley.