Hundreds of Canberrans turned out to a snap protest in Civic on Tuesday night calling for the Turnbull government to close the Nauru offshore detention centre.
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The protest, organised by the Canberra Refugee Action Committee, included a march of Australian National University staff and students from the Acton campus into Civic where a group of protesters lined Northbourne Avenue with placards calling for the end of offshore detention.
RAC spokesman and ANU Professor in Political and International Relations Dr John Minns said the rally was part of a national community response to revelations of trauma and abuse of children inside Nauru, revealed in more than 2000 incident reports leaked to Guardian Australia this month.
Dr Minns said the recent decision to close the Manus Island detention centre increased pressure on the government to do the same on Nauru.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has previously said the government was going through the information in the incident reports and said he would not be "defamed" by the media as the government was doing "everything within our power to support people".
But Dr Minns said the government's approach to keeping people detained on Nauru was effectively "indefinite detention" that would "continue to create crises for the government".
"The solution is simply to immediately bring those people here to Australia – the other solutions, such as the Cambodia Solution, were simply a farce, and I hope rationality will prevail," Dr Minns said.
He also said he would like to see more Labor Party politicians – at federal and ACT level – publicly support a change to Australia's current asylum-seeker policies.
While the federal Labor Party has not indicated any policy changes at present, Shadow Immigration Minister Shayne Neumann has pledged to try to set up a Senate inquiry into the Nauru files, contractors involved and the government's response, an inquiry that would rely on crossbench support.
