The Liberal MP Russell Broadbent says the government needs to consider whether there are adequate checks and balances to ensure the safety of people in immigration detention after the release of new records revealing the scale of abuse of children in offshore detention.
Broadbent, who was active alongside fellow Liberal moderates on asylum issues during the Howard era, said the incident reports published by the Guardian on Wednesday are “the sort of thing that brought John Howard to a place where he had to do something about it”.
The Victorian Liberal said the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was fully aware of Australia’s responsibilities with offshore detention but, he added, when governments moved to contract out responsibility for the management of the centres the adequacy of checks and balances was called into question.
“That is now being tested by your story,” Broadbent said.
The backbencher said churches and “people of conscience” needed to rally on the issue and he blasted the new Senate crossbenchers for prioritising a discussion about repealing protections in the Racial Discrimination Act.
“When there are issues like this that face the nation – compared to [concerns about the welfare of detainees on Nauru], changing 18C is a 15th-order issue.”
Broadbent’s intervention followed an undertaking on Wednesday from Turnbull to “carefully examine” the material about incidents on Nauru to see if there are any complaints or issues that were not properly addressed.
The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, said the government needed to implement Labor’s policy of putting in place an independent children’s advocate because offshore detention had to be conducted “in the safest possible way”.
Labor MPs also remain deeply troubled by conditions in offshore detention. The Tasmanian Labor senator Lisa Singh told Guardian Australia on Wednesday it remained her personal view that the offshore detention centres on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea should be shut down.
Labor had a bruising debate about asylum policy at its national conference last year, which resulted in the party supporting offshore processing with additional safeguards – but Singh said that debate would not be the end of the party’s internal conversation about asylum policy.
Singh said people detained on Nauru had committed no crime and yet they faced periods of indefinite detention where they were retraumatised.
“If [the Guardian Australia report] is not a wake-up call to end the practice of detaining children then I don’t know what is,” Singh said on Wednesday.
She said there was now a number of strong components to Labor’s asylum policy as a consequence of the conference debate “but that doesn’t mean the debate is over”.
The Labor MP Andrew Giles – who led the left faction push at the national conference for the ALP to oppose boat turnbacks – told Guardian Australia he was horrified and distressed by the material published on Wednesday.
Giles did not disavow the policy Labor resolved at the national conference but he said: “That material shows [the immigration minister] Peter Dutton’s claims that asylum seekers are safe are baseless.
“What these revelations do is ask all of us to think about how we approach the politics of this issue.”
Josh Wilson, the new Labor member for Fremantle who replaced one of Labor’s strongest campaigners on protecting the human rights of asylum seekers, Melissa Parke, said there was clear evidence of “chronic, systemic, institutional harm” going on in immigration detention.
“In the view of any sensible, caring Australian, these practices are unacceptable and have to change,” Wilson said.
