In December, an impressive young Papua New Guinean named Jason Siwat, the director of the refugee program for the Catholic Bishops Conference of PNG and the Solomon Islands, travelled to Canberra bearing two important documents.
The first was a letter from the bishops to Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil asking the government to urgently bring to Australia a group of refugees, now 57 following some acceptances by New Zealand, who been taken to the capital of Port Moresby from the Australian-run Manus Island detention facility in late 2021……………………………………
………..The second document Mr Siwat carried was a survey of the living conditions of several hundred refugees and asylum seekers from the Indonesian province of West Papua, formerly Irian Jaya.
Pope Francis would find PNG refugee conditions an eye-opener. By Mark Gaetani, P&I