An angry Malcolm Turnbull has asked CEDA for a ‘please explain’ and the Australian Federal Police for a full incident report about the protest over Nauru and Manus Island.
From floods to drought, fire to famine, the 2015-16 El Nino has had a global impact.
Australia’s arrangements with Papua New Guinea and Nauru have not secured sustainable, durable solutions for those asylum seekers found to be refugees.
AAP/Eoin Blackwell
Both major parties support offshore processing and boat turnbacks. But public opinion on asylum seekers is not so clear-cut. And nor are the policy alternatives.
Detainees on Manus Island are seeking an injunction to prevent their removal to Nauru or elsewhere until Australia’s High Court hears their case.
AAP/Eoin Blackwell
If a new High Court claim against Australia’s offshore detention regime succeeds, it will entirely undermine Australia’s inhumane practices in relation to “those who come across the seas”.
Geography matters. Whether countries are rich or poor or safe or vulnerable still has more to do with physical geography than we usually acknowledge. Even in age that is routinely described as “global…
There are no real alternatives for resettling the refugees on Manus Island elsewhere in the region.
AAP/Eoin Blackwell
The Australian government must face the uncomfortable truth that it is no longer possible to process or detain asylum seekers and refugees in other countries in our region.
Malcolm Turnbull greeting builders a site near Brisbane on Wednesday, where he launched a pilot scheme to get more women into construction.
Glenn Hunt/AAP
Malcolm Turnbull’s nose was out of joint when Tony Abbott said last month the Turnbull government would be running at the election on the Abbott government’s record. Turnbull insisted that while there…
The detention of people transferred from Australia has no valid basis in PNG law.
AAP/Eoin Blackwell
The Australian government says it will not allow any asylum seekers on Manus Island to come here, after PNG’s Supreme Court ruled it was illegal to detain them there.
Soha, seven, is now taller than her 10-year-old sister Suhala whose growth has been stunted.
Jo Currie/World Vision
Adults who had a low birthweight or were undernourished as young children are more likely to experience high blood pressure and obesity.
The site of the hillfort of Vugala, northern Viti Levu island (Fiji). This was one of many hillforts in the area – home to a few hundred people according to reports from the 1840s – that were probably established around AD 1400 in response to conflict resulting from a food crisis that had come about as a result of an enduring fall in sea level.
Patrick Nunn
Ivo Mueller, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research) e Leanne Robinson, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
A large number of children with malaria in the Asia-Pacific have relapses of the disease, not new infections. Malaria-programs must target these latent infections to completely eliminate the disease.
Prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Michael Somare at the Papua New Guinea independence ceremony in September 1975.
NAA: A6180, 22/9/75/28
Australian colonial rule and its legacy tend to be neglected, but as Papua New Guinea marks 40 years of independence the nation is still living with the consequences.
More frequent disasters – such as Cyclone Pam which struck Vanuatu this year – will leave Pacific islands struggling to recover.
Edgar Su/Reuters
As Prime Minister Tony Abbott attends the Pacific Island Forum summit today, attention has again turned to how the low-lying islands will deal with global warming.
An image from the Manus Island detention centre during a hunger strike by asylum seekers in January.
AAP/Refugee Action Collective
Australia’s system of offshore immigration detention operates outside of any effective state jurisdiction.
Children from a village in Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands Province stand in one of countless sweet potato gardens destroyed by frost across the country, August 2015.
Kud Sitango
Papua New Guinea is now facing a drought and frosts that look set to be worse than 1997, when hundreds of people died. So how can memories of 1997 save lives over the next few months?
Too many fish in our seas, like this Pacific bluefin tuna, are being lost to over-fishing – but better management can help.
Issei Kato/Reuters
Over-fishing is a massive environmental and economic challenge. Fortunately, there are new solutions being trialled – including in a tuna hotspot in the Pacific.
Professor, Program Director of Health Security and Head of Vector-borne Diseases & Tropical Public Health, Burnet Institute; Laboratory Head, Walter & Eliza Hall Institute; Adjunct Principal Research Fellow, PNG Institute of Medical Research, Burnet Institute