Woomera, South Australia residents in the mid-1960s. However, with the establishment of the USAF/ADF Joint Defence Communications Facility in 1969 at the nearby Nurrungar site, approximately south of Woomera, along with its 1100 permanent staff, the village population stabilized at around 4,500 people (including around 800 children). In the late 1990s, as the Nurrungar program was winding down, the ADF reassessed the role of Woomera in its future force structure. What became apparent to the ADF at that time was that the Woomera Test Range was the only land-based test range left in the Western world capable of testing the next (or what
Immigration detention in Australia 2015 people in onshore immigration detention had been there for an average 445 days. The average detention period has increased since May 2014. There were 1792 people in onshore detention, including 91 children, and most were from Iran, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam and Afghanistan. On 26 April 2016, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled that detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island was breaching their constitutional right to freedom and thus illegal, and ordered the Australian-run detention centre to close. However, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton iterated that the 850 asylum seekers were the responsibility of Papua