In July 2019, Guardian Australia immigration reporter Helen Davidson travelled to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Here she explains how the tropical island evolved into an Australian-run prison under John Howard, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and the current Coalition government. ‘At peak there were around 1,500 men held in the detention centre on Manus Island,’ she says. ‘Over the next few years there were riots, mass hunger strikes, murders, assaults, deaths through medical negligence and allegations against expat staff of raping local women.’ In 2016 the PNG supreme court declared the centre illegal under the country’s constitution and the men were moved out into accommodation centres in Lorengau. Davidson says the refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island were devastated by the Coalition’s 2019 election win as Labor had been planning to accept New Zealand’s to take up to 150 asylum seekers and refugees from Manus Island and Nauru each year
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