NAURU – Nauru’s secrecy over the Australian-run immigration detention centre on its island continues to deepen, with the Australian independent parliamentarian Andrew Wilkie denied a visa to the country.

“The Nauru government’s official refusal of my request for a visa to visit the Nauru detention centre confirms that the Australian government has much to hide,” the member for Denison told The Guardian.

“The only conclusion that can be drawn from not allowing a sitting member of the federal parliament to visit is that the Australian government doesn’t want the truth coming out. ”

Wilkie joins the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young and three Danish politicians in being refused a visa to visit the tiny Pacific nation this year, because of sensitivities over alleged systemic abuses within the detention camp.

Nauru has long shied from independent scrutiny of the offshore processing centre. Foreign journalists – save for specially selected acquiescent reports – are refused permission to even apply for a visa.

The United Nations refugees agency, the UNHCR, is permitted to visit the country but human rights groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are routinely denied.

Hanson-Young was previously granted a visa in 2013 but was spied on by Wilson guards, a secret surveillance operation initially denied by the company but later admitted.

Wilkie rejected the Australian government’s argument that such visas were a matter for Nauru – a sovereign nation. He said the Australian people had a right to know what was being done with their money and in their name.

“Last week prime minister Malcolm Turnbull advised me that visiting Nauru is entirely a matter for the Nauru government,” he said.

“But let’s be clear – this is entirely down to the Australian government because we all know that Nauru does exactly what Australia tells it to.

“Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull could facilitate an official visit tomorrow if he wanted to. To claim otherwise is misleading and fanciful.

“The recent leaking of thousands of accounts of incidents has re-energised public concern with offshore processing and the government is desperately scrambling to avoid any further scrutiny. ”

The Nauru government said last month on social media: “The government won’t comment on individual visa applications but like Australia reserves right to disallow entry to those who incite violence or hatred in or against Nauru or otherwise considered unwelcome and/or deemed contrary to the national interest”.

Last month, The Guardian published the Nauru files, more than 2000 leaked incident reports from the island that reported systemic abuse of children, sexual violence against women and children, and massive rates of self-harm and suicide attempts among refugees.

In the wake of the Nauru files, Australia’s offshore detention regime has come under unprecedented pressure.

Labor, the Greens and crossbench senators have promised to support a new Senate inquiry into conditions in the offshore camps and the PNG supreme court has ordered the Manus Island centre to close, ruling it “unconstitutional and illegal”.

The pre-eminent adviser to successive Australian governments – both Labor and Coalition – on asylum policy for more than two decades, Paris Aristotle, has said the current offshore arrangements have failed and that people held on Nauru and Manus Island needed a “decent solution” quickly.

He said offshore processing was never meant to become an arbitrary or indefinite detention and that asylum seekers and refugees were never meant to be used as “human shields” to prevent other people making boat journeys.

“We need to find a decent outcome for these people,” Aristotle told The Guardian.

“The people on Manus Island and Nauru now need to be given a pathway to a resettlement that is decent, in a country where the services exist to support them, where they will be able to work and to go to school and to restart their lives. For these people, it’s been too long. ”

Aristotle said that if the government would not countenance – as it appears resolute to – resettling refugees from Manus and Nauru in Australia it should negotiate with suitable countries around the world.

“The situation is critical and these people are desperate. If these people are not given hope soon, if they can’t see that this is leading to an outcome that is decent, we will see more and more people attempting to harm themselves, and attempting to kill themselves. ”

He said neither PNG nor Manus Island could be made a suitable place for refugees to be settled.

He said the offshore regional processing arrangements could be retained but only if the arrangements could guarantee fair and humane treatment, and were used as short-term contingencies for future irregular migration flows.

- The Guardian