Australia defends plan to create island quarantine camp for coronavirus

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s government on Thursday defended its plan to send citizens evacuated from the epicenter of China’s novel coronavirus emergency to a remote island used to banish asylum seekers and convicted criminals, despite warnings that that some Australians would prefer to stay in China.

Australia is preparing to send potentially hundreds of its citizens rescued from Hubei province to a quarantine camp on remote Christmas Island. The Indian Ocean island has been used by the government in a widely condemned policy of banishing asylum seekers who attempt to arrive by boat to offshore camps.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said notorious Christmas Island struck the right balance between supporting Australians stranded in China and protecting the wider Australian population from the potentially deadly disease.

“I can’t clear out a hospital in Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane. I don’t have a facility otherwise that we can quickly accommodate for what might be many hundreds of people and Christmas Island is purpose-built for exactly this scenario,” Dutton told reporters.

The Australian Medical Association, the nation’s leading medical advocate, said the Australians would be better quarantined on the Australian mainland.

“We feel that the repatriation to Christmas Island — to a place previously the focus of populations under enormous mental and physical trauma and anguish — is not a really appropriate solution,” the association’s president Tony Bartone told Nine Network television.

But Dutton dismissed that criticism as based on doctors’ longstanding opposition to the government using Christmas Island, Nauru and Papua New Guinea to accommodate thousands of exiled refugees that Australia refuses to accept.

Rod McGuirk is an Associated Press writer.