Asylum seekers gather on one side of a fence to talk with international journalists about the journeys that brought them to the Island of Nauru, 2001. Rick Rycroft /Press Association. All rights reserved. August 2016 saw a remarkable shift in Australian public opinion regarding refugees and asylum-seekers. Where it had seemed that most Australians supported or were indifferent to the current policy of offshore detention for asylum-seekers (on Manus island in PNG or the small island state of Nauru), there was suddenly widespread public support for bringing this policy to an end. People protested outside ministerial and parliamentarians' electorate offices using placards saying, to quote just a few, 'Bring them Here', 'Close the F..ing Camps' with or without the F-word and 'Mums for Refugees'.
The most important catalyst for this shift was undoubtedly the publication by The Guardian, Australia of a huge cache of leaked incident reports from the detention centre on Nauru, detailing numerous cases of child abuse, rape and self-harm. These 'Nauru files' were rapidly taken up by activists on university campuses and in social media, the ABC and a few print newspapers and equally rapidly dismissed by the Australian and Nauru governments and their supporters in the mainstream media.
What changed with the Nauru files is that the sheer weight of evidence – the files consisted of incident reports prepared by staff, few of which could be dismissed as 'mere allegations' – appeared to confirm suspicions that had been building up in the community for some time. Many who had been aware of reports of abusive and destructive incidents in the camps, but were unsure of their significance, suddenly had their worst suspicions confirmed. Thus, for many Australians, the Nauru files simply forced them to acknowledge what, in a sense, they already knew but had somehow managed not to acknowledge. This realisation that they had already known about appalling conditions in the camps accounts, in part, for the relatively subdued level of public outrage.
