More than 100 former and current staff from Australia's offshore immigration detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island have signed a statement urging the federal government to close the facilities.
They're calling for asylum seekers and refugees held there to be brought to Australia following new allegations of abuse of detainees on Nauru, and renewed claims of mistreatment by Australian guards on Manus Island - "There's one element of the guards that have probably been traumatised themselves in war in the Middle East and they tend to be very very cruel. And it's very easy to be cruel to broken men with broken spirits. Taunting them, umm (sigh) ... continually kicking them in the leg in the same spot, ah ... (sighs) locking them away for discipline in isolation."
The allegations against Australian guards are the latest reports of mistreatment to emerge over the year from the regional processing centre on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island.
In 2014 and 2015 the man making the claim, who has asked not to be named, was employed an educator by the company Australia contracts to manage immigration detention facilities, then known as Transfield.
In one instance, he says, one of his own students was a target - "I saw him in solitary (confinement) and he was there because he was having nightmares all day and all night and he started having epileptic seizures again after 20 years (without) because he was thrown into Manus prison at a certain time and sexually - verbally and physically sexually - by sexually molested I'm talking about having a guard's hand down in his genital and back area, on the outside of his clothes, threatening him with rape. This is not common, I'm not saying it's common, but this sort of thing did happen."
The man is one of 103 current and past workers in Australia's offshore detention system to sign an open letter to the federal government calling for the Manus Island facility, and Australia's other offshore camp, on Nauru, to be closed.
Among them are employees of charities Save the Children and the Salvation Army, as well as the health services provider International Health and Medical Services, and Transfield - now known as Broad Spectrum.
The statement was prompted by the release of incident reports from Nauru, and argues the only way to secure the safety of offshore detainees is to bring them to Australia immediately.
Some of the signatories, they add, have made submissions and given evidence to past inquiries, and a new parliamentary inquiry being proposed by Labor isn't enough.
Dr Peter Young is one of them - a psychiatrist and former director of mental health services for I-H-M-S in Australia - "The idea of a further inquiry will just delay action, when the required action is obvious, which is to close these places, to stop doing harm to people and let them come to Australia or let them go somewhere else, like New Zealand - which has offered to take them - and not continue to punish them and to harm them deliberately in this way."
The Guardian has released 2,000 leaked incident reports from Nauru, containing allegations of sexual abuse against women and children, assault, self-harm and apparent neglect over a two-year period to October 2015.
Dr Young says the Immigration Department has known about the information for a long time - "The problem has been (is) that the government has thrown this very dense veil of secrecy over the whole system so the public doesn't know about it. This Nauru Files leak has allowed the public to get a glimpse into, I guess, what's going on despite the best efforts of the government to stop them from doing that and of course now the government has tried to minimise the significance of this information and to hope that it all goes away. "
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has said some asylum seekers have made false abuse allegations and self-immolated in a bid to get to Australia.
Judith Reen signed the letter after working with the Salvation Army on Nauru in 2014 and 2015.
She says she wrote some of the leaked incident reports, and is particularly concerned about young detainees - "Children inside the camp are living in tents which cannot be locked. There are too many adults with access to those vulnerable children. I have concerns about them not going to school and not feeling safe to go to school, the lack of cross-cultural training that has been run to prepare Nauruan schools for engagement with these children, who need a lot of support and counselling and rehabilitation. The general living conditions are dire, and it's not a healthy place for children in their infancy to learn to walk. Outside of the camp, I know the children don't feel safe to move freely, that they feel somewhat vilified by locals who are dealing with their own scarcity of resources and feel threatened by the arrival of so many people."
Save the Children's Education Manager, Pam Oakes, has helped with resettling refugees on Nauru.
She says she's disappointed that criticism from the Human Rights Commission, and groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and even the United Nations, hasn't forced the camps to close - "I can't believe that an Australian government, or Australian governments, have been party to this sort of decision and then seem to be so obstinate in accepting that what is happening is wrong and that it's inhumane - that we are breaching all sorts of international rules on how you treat people. Those people are being damaged by this, and damage that will take a long time to repair. The longer we go, the greater damage we are doing to every person there."
The open letter from immigration detention staff follows one from a smaller group of past Save the Children workers, and another signed by over 1,800 Australian academics.
In a statement the Immigration Minister says he has to make decisions to remove people from immigration detention and processing centres as quickly as possible, but it must be done in a way that doesn't see boats and deaths at sea recommence.
