Couple’s desperate battle to stop Australia deporting their sick daughter to UK

A FORMER London couple are locked in a desperate battle with the Australian government to prevent their six-year-old daughter being deported to the UK — because she has a mystery medical condition.

It affects Sienna Tippett’s speech and balance and officials have decided she is a burden on the country’s health system and, unlike parents Kai Tippett and Hayley Niedzielska, who emigrated with her six years ago, she cannot stay.

It means that despite having settled into a new life when Sienna was just six months old, the family, including her siblings Charley, 16, and Abbie, 13, will have to return to England if appeals to allow her to remain are rejected.

Her parents, who live in Lennox Heads on the north coast of New South Wales, were told that Sienna had to go b e c au s e a review signed by an unnamed doctor stated that she doesn’t meet “criteria” .

Mr Tippett said today: “We had a perfect start to our ‘dream come true’ life in Australia — idyllic, we were all l iv i n g t h e d r e a m. A n d then this Corporation: “This would seem to be one of those sorts of situations where the minister should intervene for the sake of ensuring a just outcome for some people who have already got a pretty difficult situation.

“They don’t need it to be made more difficult by an arbitrary application of immigration law, which doesn’t take into account that life is not always black and white.”

A spokesman for Mr Dutton said he was yet to be given the det ails of S i e n n a ’s case, a n d A u s t r a l i a ’s D e p a r t me n t o f I mmi g r a t i o n and Border Protection said the family’s plea for his intervention was currently being assessed.