Tony Abbott has acknowledged the “very disturbing” findings of the Moss review into sexual assault in the detention centre in Nauru, declaring there is no place for such activities in any Australian government-linked institution.
The prime minister’s comments on Saturday differed from his initial response on Friday, when he argued most asylum seekers transferred to offshore processing centres were treated well most of the time and that “occasionally … things happen”.
Abbott’s remarks followed the release of a government-commissioned review conducted by the former integrity commissioner Philip Moss, who noted two specific allegations of rape of two women at the Nauru centre. One of those cases was still being investigated by local police and the other person did not wish to make a formal complaint.
The review also concluded that Nauruan guards trading marijuana with detainees in exchange for sexual favours was “possibly occurring”; many people transferred to the centre were apprehensive about their personal safety; and there was under-reporting of sexual and other physical assault.
It found no conclusive information supporting previous claims, aired by the government, that Save The Children staff might have encouraged self harm or facilitated protest activity.
When asked on Saturday if the Save The Children staff had been falsely accused of “coaching” detainees, Abbott said: “Look, we welcome the Moss review. We’ve accepted all of the recommendations and we make the point that there is absolutely no place in any institution with which the Australian government has any association whatsoever for the kind of activities that were found. That’s why we’ve accepted all of the recommendations.”
The prime minister acknowledged the seriousness of the report. “These are very important, very important, and very disturbing claims, very disturbing findings, and that is why we have fully accepted the recommendations of the report,” he said.
In his initial comments to 2GB on Friday, Abbott said he was not across the full details of the report but defended his overall policy to stop asylum seeker boat arrivals.
“Occasionally, I daresay, things happen, because in any institution you get things that occasionally aren’t perfect,” he said in that interview.
Labor frontbencher Tony Burke, a former immigration minister who helped implement Kevin Rudd’s new hardline Papua New Guinea arrangement in 2013, said he was “alarmed” with the prime minister’s initial reaction.
“Given the gravity of what this report refers to, we need to all be willing to say there are messages for all of us, to look at the report carefully, and to make sure that while we do have an imperative to want to stop people drowning at sea, we also have to make sure that if people are in our care directly or indirectly that they’re protected from that sort of abuse,” Burke told the ABC on Sunday.
The review found people were concerned that making a complaint could negatively affect the outcome of their asylum applications, or had “lost confidence that anything would be done about their complaints”, or did not want to make a report for cultural reasons.
But it also said that when formal complaints had been lodged, contract services providers had acted appropriately “in the most part” in dealing with them.
The secretary of the immigration department, Mike Pezzullo, received the Moss report early last month and the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, released it in Brisbane on Friday afternoon. Dutton vowed to work with Nauruan police to build the capacity of local investigators.
