October 18, 2015
Davis kept from meeting detainees
Labour’s corrections spokesperson Kelvin Davis spent the weekend trying to visit Australian detention centres, but authorities there aren’t keen to let him see the condition hundreds of New Zealanders are being kept in.
The Te Tai Tokerau MP flew to remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean on Saturday and had a frustrating wait to hear from officials.
But he was able to talk to detainees by cell phone, and they report a gradual tightening in conditions, with no certainty from day to day whether they might even get out of their cells.
" A lot of the opportunities privileges I guess that you could call it that they had when they got in here and even earlier this year have been taken away. They're just cracking down making it as miserable as possible. Doing that people get resentful and they start to play up a bit and then they get smacked down again some more. They're told you're playing up. More reason to knock down harder on them and that's just nonsense," he says.
Kelvin Davis says Australian ministers try to paint the detainees as hardened criminals, but many of them were sentenced for relatively minor things like traffic offences.
He welcomed a promise Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made during his first official visit to New Zealand over the weekend that the process of cancelling the visa of people sentenced to jail terms of a year or more would be speeded up.
But Mr Davis says people should not by made to languish in detention centres while they are going through the appeal process.
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