A psychologist working on Nauru has had his contract cancelled after speaking to The Guardian about conditions on the island.
Paul Stevenson, who specialises in trauma counselling, had been working for PsyCare counselling guards at the centre and has been awarded an Order of Australia for his work with the survivors of the Bali bombings. He had done 14 deployments to Nauru and Manus Island, and was due to return to Nauru this Thursday before he got the email telling him he’d been canned.
Stevenson opened up about the extreme hopelessness he’d seen there:
“Every day is demoralising. Every single day and every night. And you can work an eight-hour shift, or a 16-hour-shift, or a 20-hour-shift, you can get up in the middle of the night to answer the calls to go down to the camp, and you know it’s not getting any better. And it’s that demoralisation that is the paramount feature of offshore detention. It’s indeterminate, it’s under terrible, terrible conditions, and there is nothing you can say about it that says there’s some positive humanity in this. And that’s why it’s such an atrocity.”
As well as his description of the awfulness of the camps, he provided over 2,000 pages of reports about incidents involving self-harm, depression, violence and assault.
He said he’s not surprised that he lost his job, but that it’s important people realised the consequences for speaking out and how much the Government controls access to Nauru.
Fingers crossed they leave it at firing him – under the Border Force Act the Government can jail staff from the centre for up to 2 years for speaking out about it, and the Government has gone after other whistleblowers in the past.
Photo: Getty Images / Ian Waldie.
