When Javed Badyari was 19 years old, the prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, announced that no asylum-seeker who tried to reach Australia by boat would ever be allowed to settle in the country.

In the years since then, Badyari, now 26, has studied medicine, moved from Sydney down to the seaside city of Wollongong, started work as a doctor, and become engaged to medical student Hannah Clements.

While Badyari was finding his feet as a young adult, hundreds of people spent the same six years in a state of permanent uncertainty, held in detention camps on small Pacific islands.

The conservative government that unseated Rudd in 2013 built on his hardline policy, leaving hundreds of asylum-seekers in indefinite detention on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and the tiny nation of Nauru. Hundreds remain there today, unsure what their future holds and increasingly suffering ill health.

via Wollongong Doctors Are Protesting Refugee Policy With An Indefinite Sleepout Against Indefinite Detention