But within a month the disheartened refugee advocate returned to Australia after realising her intentions had been altruistic but naive.  

Ms Shafar was in Ballarat on Saturday to share her experiences with support groups and the general public at Lake Wendouree.  

She said she had originally travelled to Nauru in October 2015 to set up a maternal child and health service.

But searched, watched and followed every step of the way, Ms Shafar was left frustrated by the limitations.

“I had this brief before I went of all these things I was going to be able to do, but when I was there I wasn’t allowed to do anything,” she said.

“I’m a clinician, a hands-on practitioner and I just wasn’t able to make any difference to anybody apart from a hand on a shoulder or listen to a story.”

Still deeply committed to changing Australia’s treatment of refugees, Ms Shafar decided to continue her efforts outside of Nauru. 

“I found it to be an impossible task to make a difference,” she said.

“What was going to happen was (if I stayed) I was going to forge a relationship with these people, which was going to break their heart and break my heart.”

During Ms Shafar’s time on Nauru, the government decreed overnight 800 of the 1000 people seeking asylum were refugees, which meant they had to live outside of the regional processing centre.

“They were constructing demountables furiously, but they didn’t have enough for them so they ended up putting them into mouldy tents, in terribly harsh conditions,” she said. 

“And their medical care was appalling. It was impossible to get good care. There was layer upon layer of bureaucracy. It was non-timely, you could be well and truly dead before you got the care that you needed. This was especially the case in one of the most remote sites in the jungle.”

Ms Shafar said there had been a shift in public awareness and support for refugees, but this was happening at a “terribly slow” pace.

She said people still needed to understand the harshness of the government policies and how the consequences impacted on families, especially children, in offshore detention.

“If the government ups the ante, we need to up the ante and keep lobbying,” Ms Shafar said.

“There is a big divide between government policy and what the people of Australia want... I don’t understand how they (the government) can get away with it.

“It’s a political issue, but it should be a humanitarian issue. We can not let people be treated like this.”