Former Armidale GP Dr Nick Martin was awarded for his role in exposing the inadequate conditions and lack of medical care for refugees held on Nauru by the Australian government at the 2019 Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize Event held in London on Wednesday, January 16.
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Dr Martin trained in the UK, worked around the world with the Royal Navy and now practices as a GP in Western Australia’s Kimberley. From November 2016 to August 2017, he was one of the doctors working in the Nauru asylum-seeker detention camps and said he held the unfortunate title of being a whistleblower.
“It’s unfortunate I had to be a whistleblower, I suppose,” he said.
Once you’ve made that decision there’s no turning back really.
- Dr Nick Martin
“Basically, I got this award, which is lovely and I’m very honoured to get it, because I spoke out about a situation I saw happening when I was working off shore at Nauru.
“It’s not something anyone wants to speak out about. So, while it’s lovely getting the award, it’s still frustrating that you need organisations like this to protect whistleblowers.”
Dr Martin said we should not have to be relying on whistleblowers to be speaking out for information to come out.
“I guess a lot of the time if you look at things that happen in history, you look back with hindsight and ask why more people didn’t say something,” he said.
“I guess most people don’t want the hassle. They want to get through each day and have enough stuff going on.
“It’s a bit like seeing someone asleep on the train and you wonder if they have missed their stop or not. Do you want to get involved and wake them up, or do you want to leave them and hope someone else will do it for you?”
You end up becoming used as a political football
He said his life was changed “a little bit”, but you can’t help suspect it was a little more than a little.
“I’ve ended up doing things like this; you know, talking to you, and things I wouldn’t normally do,” he said.
“I realised that while I was speaking out about what I felt was medically not right, it was such a politically charged environment – that’s the way that Australia has a conversation about migration, boat people, border protection – and people tend to want to use you in their cause.
“I don’t tend to have any politics in Australia. I’m not a particularly political person. I don’t want to have an opinion on it, but yet I am aware that what I have said has been used by various people to push a political agenda.”
Dr Martin saw no politicial agenda in multiple instances of delayed medical treatment, medical advice being ignored or doubtful medical practices, they were simply things he just could not ignore.
Their mental state is dire
In an article for the The Australian Doctor Group, he described the appaulling situation on Nauru in some detail.
“After four months it dawned on me: it wasn’t only the refugees who had learned helplessness. It affected the staff too. They had ceased to care, reduced to automata, ticking boxes to satisfy administrators in Sydney or Canberra while people were dying in front of us.” he wrote.
“Off-shore detention is still very much a thing. We still hold hundreds of people in off-shore detention,” Dr Martin said.
“The campaign that’s recently happened about [getting] the kids off Nauru has been very effective, and so most of the children have got off.
“But that still leaves an awful lot of men and women stuck off-shore at Manus and Naura. After six years of detention their mental state is pretty dire.”
