Peter Dutton Is Trying To Gaslight Us Into Thinking Refugees Will Steal Our Hospital Beds
He's been accused of waging a "cruel" scare campaign against "vulnerable Australians".
Peter Dutton has been accused of waging a “cruel” scare campaign against “vulnerable Australians” by independent MP Kerryn Phelps, after the Home Affairs Minister made the extraordinary claim that asylum seekers brought to Australia from Nauru and Manus Island will receive medical treatment at the expense of Australian citizens.
Dutton told reporters in Brisbane on Thursday that Australians in need of medical services would be “displaced from those services” by “hundreds and hundreds of people from Nauru and Manus”.
His comments come after the government failed to block the passage of the so-called Medivac Bill, which clears the way for sick asylum seekers held in offshore detention to be brought to Australia for treatment.
“Under Bill Shorten’s law we’re seeing people at hospitals miss out on medical services because people are taking it from Nauru and Manus,” said Dutton.
Dutton’s remarks were swiftly condemned by Phelps, a medical doctor who helped craft the medical transfer legislation.
“We’re talking about 70 people who are likely to need [an] urgent transfer,” Phelps told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. “We know that the system has [the] capacity to look after those people.”
“We have hundreds of hospitals on the eastern seaboard. The major teaching hospitals with specialist services see thousands and thousands of patients every week.”
Phelps also criticised Dutton in a Facebook post, writing that it “speaks volumes that Peter Dutton couldn’t even celebrate the day that Australia got the last #KidsOffNauru without again weaponising the refugee debate and trying to divide the Australian people”.
It’s worth noting that Dutton’s claims that asylum seekers will force Australians to give up their hospital beds runs counter to the governments controversial plan to send sick asylum seekers to Christmas Island rather than the Australian mainland.
I guess it’s kind of like how refugees can take our jobs and clog up the welfare system at the same time, hey.
If our world class health system can’t care for a few hundred sick refugees anymore @PeterDutton_MP are you saying your government has starved it of funding and broken it so completely that it’s now no better that what we find on Nauru or Manus? Well which one is it? #auspol
— Kon Karapanagiotidis (@Kon__K) February 28, 2019