Six pastors and a nun taking part in a protest at the Australian Prime Minister's office against the off-shore detention centre on the Pacific island of Nauru have said they were arrested after refusing to leave.
The peaceful protest at Malcolm Turnbull's Sydney electorate office was organised by the Christian group Love Makes a Way.
Police denied that arrests were made, but over the past two years around 300 people have been arrested at events organised by Love Makes a Way, which was founded in 2014 with a sit-in protest at the office of the then-immigration minister, Scott Morrison.
In the latest incident, police were called by officials and the group was asked to leave about five hours later.
A Catholic nun, Sister Susan Connelly, from Saint Mary MacKillop's Josephite order, said: "A number of policemen came in and asked us to leave, and we refused to leave. They told us four or five times to go and when we said we wouldn't — they very respectfully, I must say, our police are lovely — they escorted each of us outside, and said that we would be hearing from them. We weren't actually charged but they took all our identification and so they know who we are and said they'd be in touch."
Sister Connelly added that she was prepared to go to prison because she would refuse to pay a fine if given one. "I can tell you now I will not be paying a fine, I will go to court and am prepared to go to jail," she said.
Reverend Michael Palmer, an Anglican rector from St Michael's at Vaucluse in the Prime Minister's electorate, said: "We were told that if we didn't leave, we'd be under arrest. We didn't leave and so we were then escorted out of the building. We left the building peacefully, there was no scuffle. I assumed because we didn't leave, it was an arrest, and the officer said there would be an ongoing investigation."
Police said the members of the group were not arrested but simply "moved on", with no charges made.
A post on the Love Makes a Way Facebook page said: "We aren't sure why the police are now claiming not to have arrested them, despite making it clear at the time, and when they "released" them. Perhaps it points to the pressure the PM feels from having pastors and nuns arrested in his office."
Rev Palmer said the group read from the Scriptures, shared Communion, prayed, sang Amazing Grace and read out incident reports from the Nauru files, which are leaked documents from inside the immigration detention system.
"It's pretty harrowing stuff really," he said. "What we want to see happen is that those detention centres close and refugees brought to Australia. That's all we want and if there wasn't going to be some assurance of that happening, which obviously there wasn't, then we were prepared to be arrested for that."
Totalling more than 8,000 pages, the leaked documents were published by the Guardian earlier this month and highlight personal accounts of sexual abuse, torture and humiliation inflicted on children.
