Borderline: Australia's Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Wake of the Tampa (Reportage (Sydney, N.S.W.).)

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Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors, A thousand windows and a thousand doors, Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours. W.H. Auden ‘Twelve Songs’

Books published in the

R E P O RTAG E

series

Borderline: Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers in the wake of the Tampa PETER MAREs Fit to Print: Inside the Canberra Press Gallery MARGARET SIMONS Reconciliation: A Journey MICHAEL GORDON

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borderline $8675$/,$·6 5(63216(72 5()8*((6$1' $6 There is a contradiction at the heart of Australian society. Like the United States and Canada, Australia is one of the world’s true immigrant nations. If we are not Aborigines, then we are migrants, or their recent descendants. Yet, this is a nation hostile to its foundations. For much of our brief history we have been preoccupied with controlling our borders to prevent the entry of others.The White Australia policy is recent, not ancient history; its influence is still felt. There is much concern at the moment about our falling birthrate and about the great burden that an aging population will place on future generations, and still we seem determined to keep out people who are willing to risk their lives to come here in order to establish a better future for their families. This book is a small plea for us to reconsider our approach — for us to contemplate the heresy that it is in the national interest to adopt a more generous attitude to asylum seekers and refugees. Borderline was originally published in April 2001.This present edition has been revised to include developments since then, particularly the Tampa affair and its repercussions. However, much of the original text remains, in the hope that this serves to map the course of policy over time and to show how Australia came to steer global refugee policy into new and uncharted waters. At the outset, it is important to briefly outline the current administrative and legal procedures for dealing with refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. Australia currently has an offshore refugee and humanitarian program, and an onshore refugee program, with a combined intake of 12,000 people per annum. Offshore refugees are those who apply to come to Australia from overseas.They fall into two broad categories. In one category — the special humanitarian program — are applicants who can demonstrate ‘some connection to Australia’ and who ‘have experienced substantial discrimination amounting to gross violation of human rights’. Their applications to come to Australia must be spon-

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sored by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, or by an Australian organisation.The second broad category is for refugees with ‘a strong need of resettlement’ in a safe country. Most of these refugees will be referred to Australian authorities by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).The federal government pays for the airfares and other costs associated with resettlement. Onshore refugees are those who make it to Australia under their own steam, either legally or illegally, and who subsequently apply to stay here long term.When they seek Australia’s protection, they do so under the provisions of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.Australia is a voluntary signatory to both these international agreements (referred to simply as ‘the Convention’); as such, it is obliged to offer protection to anyone who meets the Convention definition of a refugee. Article 1A defines a refugee as a person who: «RZLQJWRDZHOOIRXQGHGIHDURIEHLQJSHUVHFXWHGIRUUHDVRQVRIUDFHUHOLJLRQ QDWLRQDOLW\PHPEHUVKLSRIDSDUWLFXODUVRFLDOJURXSRUSROLWLFDORSLQLRQLVRXWVLGH WKHFRXQWU\RIKLVQDWLRQDOLW\DQGLVXQDEOHRURZLQJWRVXFKIHDULVXQZLOOLQJWR DYDLOKLPVHOIRIWKHSURWHFWLRQRIWKDWFRXQWU\«

Australia has a sophisticated system in place for determining whether or not people meet this definition.A person who comes to Australia in search of such protection is known as an ‘asylum seeker’. Asylum seekers who enter Australia lawfully (for example, on a tourist or student visa) are usually not detained and can live freely in the community. Provided that they apply for refugee status within forty-five days of arrival, such ‘lawful’ asylum seekers can also obtain a work permit. Asylum seekers who enter unlawfully (that is, without a valid visa) are detained in privately run immigration detention centres. Since September 2001 certain remote parts of Australian territory (the Indian Ocean territories of Christmas and Cocos Islands, Ashmore Reef and Cartier Island in the Timor Sea and offshore resource and other installations) have been excised from the operation of the Migration Act. A person who makes landfall at such territory may be detained there, or moved to a detention centre in another excised place, or even to a detention centre in another country (for instance, Nauru and Papua New Guinea). The express purpose of this policy is to prevent such asylum seekers from setting foot on the Australian mainland. An asylum seeker who arrives in an excised territory cannot apply for asylum under Australian laws and will be processed under a different set of rules, with fewer procedural safeguards and fewer appeal rights. The federal government maintains its refugee-determination procedures accord with the international practice of the UNHCR. If an asylum seeker does manage to enter Australia’s ‘migration

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zone’, then the first step in the refugee-determination process is a ‘compliance interview’, at which frontline officers must be convinced that the person is making a valid application to ‘invoke Australia’s protection obligations’. The interview may occur at an airport immigration counter in the middle of the night; or it might occur when Australian officials first make contact with boat people who have landed on a remote part of the coastline. Interview questions will focus on how a person got to Australia, what assistance was provided by peoplesmugglers and how much money was paid. Officers will not ask a person directly if they are a refugee or if they have come to Australia to seek asylum.An interpreter will be employed at the interview if necessary.At most airport interviews, though, the interpreter is not physically present and the service is provided via the telephone. An asylum seeker who does not give a clear indication at the airport interview that they fear persecution in their country of origin and that they are seeking to stay in Australia as a Convention refugee may well be turned around immediately and put on the next flight out. In 1999–2000, of the 1695 people who landed at airports without authorisation to enter Australia, 1340 were refused immigration clearance and removed from the country within seventy-two hours and 354 were assessed as presenting information that may engage Australia’s protection obligations. If a person enters the ‘migration zone’ by boat, and officials deem that they have failed to invoke the Convention, then that person will be kept in ‘separation’ detention, without access to any kind of legal advice, and without any opportunity to make contact with family or friends, until removal from Australia can be organised. Asylum seekers who do cross that initial threshold — the compliance interview — are then permitted to make a formal application for refugee status. Asylum seekers who are in detention will be assisted in their applications by a registered migration agent (often, but not always, a lawyer) and an interpreter. This service is paid for by the Commonwealth, and there is pressure on the migration agents to get the job done quickly. If a detail is missed at this initial stage, however, it can prove disastrous later in the process. Federal assistance can also extend to community-based refugee claimants, though it is more difficult for them to access such assistance, because of funding shortfalls and the priority given to detention cases.The ability of asylum seekers who are not in detention to obtain qualified advice depends on whether they have the resources to pay the fees of a migration agent, and on their connections and their luck. The written application and all accompanying documents must be submitted in English, or with an accredited English translation. However, the Commonwealth will provide an interpreter for interviews.The primary decision on an asylum seeker’s case will be made by

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a delegate of the minister — that is, by one of the staff members at the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) qualified and entitled to make such determinations. Asylum seekers in detention are all interviewed by the DIMIA delegate before a primary decision is made. For applicants living in the community, the DIMIA officer can make a determination ‘on the papers’ alone, if it is felt that an interview is unnecessary. If the application is rejected at the primary stage, the asylum seeker can then appeal to the Refugee Review Tribunal, which is supposed to take a completely fresh and independent look at the merits of the case. For asylum seekers in detention, there will be further brief contact with a migration agent, often a different person to the first one, to help prepare this second submission. Migration agents are not funded to accompany their clients to the hearings, however, and many asylum seekers must face the tribunal alone. A single member of the tribunal will interrogate the refugee claimant directly or through an interpreter. If the claimant is accompanied by an adviser, that adviser generally has no right to address the tribunal on points of law or fact, although it is general practice for the tribunal to permit the adviser to make an oral submission at the end of the hearing and to invite the adviser to state if there are any further questions they believe ought to be asked of the applicant. If the case fails at the tribunal, the asylum seeker can seek leave to bring an appeal before the High Court, the highest judicial body in the land, which has the power to review questions of law under the Constitution. Appeals must be lodged within thirty-five days and leave to be heard will only be granted in exceptional circumstances. Prior to September 2001, asylum seekers also had limited appeal rights before the Federal Court, but this was effectively nullified by legislative amendment.When all else fails, the asylum seeker can ask the minister for Immigration to use his discretion to grant a visa on compassionate grounds. If the application is successful at any stage, the asylum seeker is then recognised as a refugee.An asylum seeker who arrived in Australia lawfully (and was, therefore, not in detention) will be granted permanent resident status, access to resettlement services and the right to sponsor family members to join them in Australia. An asylum seeker who arrived unlawfully (and who was in detention) must make do with a three-year temporary protection visa with limited entitlements. The temporary protection visa came into operation in October 1999 and initially held out the prospect of permanent residency (and the right to sponsor family to Australia) if the risk of persecution in a refugee’s homeland continued after three years. In the wake of the Tampa, however, the regulations relating to permanent protection visas were

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substantially tightened. Refugees who apply for a permanent protection visa after 27 September 2001, and who arrived unlawfully, must now demonstrate why they were unable to obtain effective protection in any country where they spent seven or more consecutive days before reaching Australia. In other words, they must demonstrate why they did not seek asylum at the UNHCR office in a transit country such as Indonesia or Pakistan. If refugees cannot meet this test, then the best they can hope for is renewal of their temporary visa for another three years. The visa does not allow refugees to re-enter Australia if they depart for any reason, effectively preventing them from visiting immediate members of their own family who may have found refuge elsewhere. Refugees with temporary protection visas are also prevented from applying for a visa to stay in Australia for any other reason (even if, for example, they marry an Australian citizen) without first leaving the country. Without the personal intervention of the minister for Immigration these temporary refugees can never gain permanent residency and never sponsor their spouse or children to join them in Australia. In 1998–99, 7274 asylum seekers had their applications finalised by the Immigration department. Only 979 were granted protection visas. The other 85 per cent of applicants failed to meet the Convention definition of a refugee and were required to leave the country. In more recent years the proportion of applicants granted protection visas has risen, reflecting a changing mix of asylum seekers, with more compelling cases from countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2000–2001 the Immigration department finalised the cases of 14,672 people who had made onshore applications for refugee status and it has granted 5577 protection visas. In other words, around two-thirds of all applicants were rejected.These ‘failed’ asylum seekers are regarded as ‘unlawful non-citizens’ and the Commonwealth regularly organises the removal of such people from Australia. In the period 1996–2000, for example, 1452 boat people arrived illegally in Australia from China: all but five of them were returned. Australia is one of only ten countries in the world that does actively resettle refugees and the minister for Immigration frequently lauds the generosity of our ‘offshore’ humanitarian and refugee intake. But, as Savitri Taylor has argued, behind the alibi of a generous ‘offshore’ resettlement program shelters the more miserly and punitive treatment of ‘onshore’ asylum seekers.That is the subject of this book.

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In early February 2000 Dr Mohammed Taha Alsalami, a medical scientist, received an urgent and rather unusual request. Officials from the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) wanted him to travel immediately to the remote Curtin air base, near Derby in the far northwest of Australia, which is used as a detention centre for asylum seekers. At the time Curtin was holding 1147 people who had come by boat to Australia seeking asylum; most of them were fleeing persecution in Iraq and Afghanistan. A dangerous situation had developed amongst the asylum seekers and DIMA was hoping that Dr Alsalami would have the skills to defuse it. Dr Alsalami is a prominent figure in Sydney’s Muslim community and a founding member of the Organisation for Human Rights in Iraq, so DIMA knew that he would have the cultural affinity and the moral authority necessary to command the trust of the detainees. He was also a known quantity. A few years earlier Dr Alsalami had helped the department to deal with a difficult situation at Sydney’s Villawood detention centre, and he had been serving for the previous three years as a member of the minister’s Refugee Resettlement Advisory Council. On the morning of Monday, 7 February, Dr Alsalami began the nine-hour trek to Curtin air base. First he flew to Perth, then on to Broome, and next he journeyed more than 200 km by road to Derby, finally arriving at Curtin in the enervating afternoon heat. What he found there shocked him. There were hundreds of people sitting in the yard, Dr Alsalami recalls. ‘As soon as they saw me coming, escorted by the authorities, they thought I must be someone from the government’, he says, ‘and they became very excited.’ The people sitting around in the yard had entered the seventh day of a hunger strike. ‘I can’t explain about how much they were unhappy, unsatisfied,’ says Dr Alsalami. He explained that their treatment at Curtin made them wonder whether they could

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really be in Australia at all, which they thought of as a country with a reputation for tolerance and for upholding human rights. They had expected to be treated with dignity. The protest was well-organised. Occasionally, before the heat of the day had peaked, or after it had eased, men would rise from the ranks of the crowd to speak, or rouse protesters with the chant ‘Where are human rights? Where is freedom? We want freedom!’.There was also a large, professionally drawn banner, which depicted the dictator Saddam Hussein expressing gratitude to DIMA for its cooperation in locking up his critics. Some hunger-strikers were refusing water. Already, before Dr Alsalami’s arrival, the detention-centre clinic had received patients who had collapsed from dehydration. Most dramatically of all, a core group of between a dozen and twenty men had sewn up their lips. ‘I saw them,’ says Dr Alsalami, ‘their mouths still stitched. It was dreadful.’ The men had sewn their lips together using ordinary needles and thread available in the camp for mending clothes. According to Dr Alsalami, they could not open their mouths more than half a centimetre; they could barely talk and he struggled to decipher their indistinct mumbles. He believes the men would have been incapable of taking any sustenance, except via a straw. < > Lip-stitching has now become a more familiar form of protest in Australia’s immigration detention centres, but at the time the incident at Curtin was unprecedented.When I heard a brief news item about it on the radio, the image would not leave me. I found the act both appalling and compelling. People who render themselves dumb, I reasoned, must surely have a pressing need to be heard, an urgent story to tell. I wanted to know more.What had pushed the men to that extreme? Were conditions in the detention centre really so bad? I began trawling through reports on the story, but found few answers to my questions.At that stage the detention of asylum seekers was not an issue to which the media had devoted much attention, even though there were some 3000 people locked up in the camps. Their arrival in the country had provoked a storm of interest; their continued presence went almost unremarked and my rough media survey of the Curtin lip-stitching protest revealed a remarkable and depressing similarity of coverage. In the Age newspaper in Melbourne, the Curtin hunger strike rated three side-bar news briefs, each about fifty words long.Two of the Age stories were almost identical. Both used the word ‘bizarre’ to describe the lip-stitching protest and each one quoted Immigration department

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officials as saying that the hunger strike was now all but over.The Age also described the protest organisers as ‘ringleaders’ — hardly a neutral term (the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ringleaders’ as ‘the chief instigators in a mutiny or a riot’). Coverage in the Age of the Curtin protest was dwarfed by another inter-State story, the fate of a ‘feisty ferret’ that bit a Queensland policeman on the penis. The compere of ABC Radio’s ‘AM’ program also used the term ‘bizarre’ to describe the lip-stitching. However, the ‘AM’ report was unique in that, along with sound-bites from Richard Court (premier of Western Australia at the time) and the minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, it also included an alternative view of events from Jackie King of the Refugee Council of Western Australia. The Australian demonstrated some originality by eschewing the epithet ‘bizarre’. Instead, the headline described the protest as ‘grisly’.The article quoted Mr Ruddock as saying that he would not be ‘coerced’ by the detainees nor would he respond to ‘intimidation’. The Sydney Morning Herald initially carried a forty-word side-bar news brief about the hunger strike and then a slightly longer story on the lip-stitching two days later. Perth’s Sunday Times and the West Australian devoted more copy to the story than their east-coast counterparts, which provided space for extra adjectives. ‘Bizarre’ cropped up again; ‘gruesome’ was thrown in for good measure.The West Australian also followed up with reports on a subsequent joint visit to Curtin by Mr Ruddock and Mr Court; apparently, they spent an hour listening to the detainees’ concerns. Afterwards, Mr Court declared that the detainees ‘had a nerve to be complaining’ and that they ought to show ‘a little bit of gratitude’.The premier then chastised the asylum seekers for their ‘irresponsibility’ in bringing children to Australia. He admitted that seeing the children ‘sort of tugs on the heart strings’, but said that the detainees ‘should have had the decency not to subject their children to that illegal activity’. The ‘illegal activity’ the former premier was referring to is that of entering Australia without a valid visa. For this, they were locked up without charge and without recourse to a magistrate.They were unable to apply for bail. Yet, none of the detainees at Curtin would ever be prosecuted in relation to this supposed ‘crime’. They were destined either to be allowed to remain in Australia or returned overseas, depending on whether or not they were recognised as refugees under the accepted international definition. If they were recognised as refugees, they would be accorded the protection that Australia promised to provide when it signed the relevant international agreements — the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. If they were not recognised as refugees, then, barring personal intervention by the minister on

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humanitarian grounds, the Immigration department would remove them from Australia. Asylum seekers who arrive in Australia without a visa are treated as though guilty, until proven innocent, and must, by Australian law, be held in detention, along with their children. No court has the power to order their release. There is provision to release certain people on bridging visas for compassionate reasons, but the eligibility criteria are extremely limited and instances of release are rare. All the news reports of the Curtin protest relied heavily on the official version of events as supplied by DIMA in Canberra, and that is hardly surprising. No journalists are allowed into Australia’s six immigration detention centres except on occasional guided tours, during which detainees are kept at a distance.Those people who do have regular entry — such as doctors, nurses and lawyers — are often reluctant to speak to the media for fear that it may jeopardise their future access to the detainees, or their future contracts with the Immigration department or Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), the private company that runs the camps. In an effort to find out more, I began making my own inquiries, and quickly ran into my own brick walls. Father Lorenz, the priest at nearby Derby told me that he had no idea what had been going on at the camp recently, though he did tell me how much trouble he had had getting permission to conduct a Christmas Mass there. I phoned lawyers, and refugee advocates and Amnesty International, but no one had any more information than I had.There were people who probably could have answered my questions, but they did not return my calls. Eventually I, too, was left with the official view of events supplied by DIMA in Canberra. When I called the department to ask about the hunger strike, a surly media spokesman made it clear that I was wasting valuable time — I was inquiring about an issue that had been adequately covered and which was fading appropriately into history.What he did, reluctantly, tell me was that the protesting asylum-seekers had wanted their applications for refugee status dealt with immediately and that they wanted to be moved to open camps in the city while they waited. An understandable demand, but one never likely to be met. I began to resign myself to failure. I had been unable to uncover any more detail about the events at Curtin in early February.Then came an unexpected break, via the internet. In March Chris Masters presented a ‘Four Corners’ program about the detention of asylum seekers, and particularly about the use of sedatives to dope people against their will before they are removed from Australia by private contractors. Afterwards, he and producer Matt Brown hosted a live discussion on the net. One contributor posted a message about the hunger strike at Curtin.That is how I came in contact with Dr Alsalami.

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< > Dr Alsalami was pleased to find someone interested in following up the story and in our long conversation he painted a detailed picture of events. Much of what he told me was later confirmed by another witness to the protest at Curtin, who must remain anonymous. According to Dr Alsalami, at least 300 people took part in the hunger strike; most of them, if not all, were Iraqis.Afghans in the detention centre looked on with sympathy and some skipped a few meals themselves, but more as a gesture of solidarity than an act of protest. This ethnic divide is easily explicable. It arose out of the Iraqis’ mistaken belief that they were being discriminated against in the refugee assessment process, and that Afghans were receiving preferential treatment. It was, in fact, true that Afghans tended to be processed and released more quickly from Curtin; but this was the result of bureaucratic procedure — it was not from prejudice.When assessing claims for asylum, the Immigration department will attempt to verify, where possible, the refugees’ identities and authenticate any documents that they carry with them. As a rule the Afghans have no such documents, because it is such a long time since in their homeland there was any regime functional enough to issue even something as basic as a birth certificate. So, because there were no papers to check, the Afghans were processed more quickly and some were released ahead of Iraqis who had been locked up for longer. A senior DIMA officer had apparently made an earnest attempt to explain this discrepancy to the detainees. It is hardly surprising, though, that such bureaucratic machinations should remain opaque. Nevertheless, this ‘discrimination’ issue might never have sparked a hunger strike, if it had not been for much broader and more wellfounded complaints about the conditions in detention. According to Dr Alsalami, the conditions at Curtin were ‘subhuman’. People complained about finding snakes in the camp, about the shower facilities being inadequate, about queuing for hours in the hot sun to wait for meals. The mess could only seat 250 people at a time, which meant detainees were forced to eat in shifts. A detainee who requested a pair of nail-clippers to clip his toe-nails was told to use his teeth. Above all, the detainees complained about being cut off from the rest of Australia and the rest of the world — there was no telephone, no access to the media and no ability to send or receive mail. According to a former detainee, there had in fact been a pay-phone and a television set at Curtin when he was first sent to the camp in early October 1999. He claims that both were taken away when the number of new arrivals continued to swell, and as the public debate hotted up over the introduction of a new temporary visa for refugees. The

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television was eventually returned, but detainees were only allowed to use it for watching videos and were not allowed to tune in to the evening news. In his brief stay at Curtin Dr Alsalami was given around 400 letters to post or telephone numbers to call on behalf of the detainees. He says he tore pages out of his diary for people to write on; others thrust at him messages and phone numbers scribbled on scraps of cardboard ripped from old cartons. For many, it was their first opportunity in three or four months to contact friends or relatives, to reassure them that they were still alive. Among the detainees at Curtin was a Bedoon. (The Bedoon are stateless Arabs who live in Kuwait, but are discriminated against by the Kuwaiti government.) When Dr Alsalami contacted the Bedoon’s friends in Sydney, they wept tears of joy and relief. They had already carried out a funeral service for their friend, so firmly did they believe that he had been lost at sea during the crossing from Indonesia.‘I cannot believe that we do that to people,’ Dr Alsalami observes. ‘It is unAustralian. Perhaps it’s not right that the people come to Australia in such a way, but it’s also not right that we punish them.’ There were many intellectuals amongst the detainees, Dr Alsalami told me; there were doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and religious leaders. Dr Alsalami even recognised one man — a dentist who had fixed his teeth during a visit he made to a town in Iran five years earlier. ‘I was very ashamed to see him in that camp. He was very wellknown and had a great name amongst the Iraqi people in that town.’ Dr Alsalami wrote to Mr Ruddock, describing his experiences at Curtin and documenting, over seven pages, the detainees’ numerous complaints. He also made a full report to the minister’s Refugee Resettlement Advisory Committee, of which he is a member. Dr Alsalami’s view is that, instead of holding people incommunicado, the government would do better to alleviate their suffering and anxiety. ‘Sooner or later we will release them and those people will need a great deal of rehabilitation. The situation in the camp was very volatile and very dangerous. It could have prompted violence against themselves and against others.’ In an effort to prevent the Curtin detainees doing further harm to themselves, or to others, Dr Alsalami spent many hours talking with the protesters. He painstakingly explained to them the history of the White Australia policy, multiculturalism and the non-discriminatory procedures for assessing refugees. ‘I want to bring them to understand how we do things here in Australia,’ he says.‘That this is a democratic country, but bureaucratic as well. I was very open with them and tried to make them understand that the government was under great pressure from the public about the way they had come to Australia.’

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He told the men who had stitched their lips that he understood their motivation — how they wanted to express their anger and frustration in the strongest possible way. But he tried to explain that their action would rebound on them:‘People in Australia don’t understand,’ he told them.‘They think you are crazy, you are weird.’ He was eventually able to convince them to go to the clinic to have the stitches removed.‘I am medical scientist, I try to help,’ he says. ‘It was dreadful.’ None of this background emerged in the reporting of the Curtin protest. The media’s shallow treatment of the event shows how effectively the federal government had enforced a black-out on news from Australia’s six immigration detention centres. In late 2000, after allegations of child sexual abuse at Woomera detention centre, conditions in Australia’s immigration detention facilities became a focus of national concern. Since that time many journalists have devoted a great deal of effort to investigating the issue and growing numbers of people employed in the detention centres have also decided to speak publicly about their concerns, despite the secrecy provisions included in their contracts. In early 2000, however, that public debate had not yet started. Of course, even without knowledge of the detailed background provided to me by Dr Alsalami, the media could still have treated the Curtin protest differently. Instead of being called ‘bizarre’, ‘gruesome’ and ‘grisly’, the hunger strike could have been tagged as ‘desperate’; alternatively, the noun ‘protest’ might have been left unadorned by adjectives. After all, symbolically the act of sewing your mouth partly shut is, in itself, eloquent. It communicates the frustration and anger of those made mute and impotent. To steal the words of the Reverend David Pargeter, a Uniting Church minister and co-convener of the alliance ‘Justice for Asylum Seekers’, it shows what people may do when the only power they have is over their own bodies. In response to the Curtin protest, Amnesty International warned that detainees could resort to more extreme forms of self-harm. It was a warning that would prove prescient. By early 2002 it had become almost commonplace to read media reports of detainees damaging their own bodies, whether it was by slashing themselves, banging their heads against brick walls, swallowing shampoo, overdosing on pain-killers, refusing to eat or, indeed, suturing their lips. Given the restrictions on access to the detention centres, it is safe to assume that media reporting does not reveal the full extent of the problem and that many incidents continue to go unreported. Figures compiled by the Commonwealth Ombudsman give some insight into the extent of the problem.The statistics were put together as part of an investigation into the way in which ACM reports incidents in the detention centres to the Immigration department. The figures show that between October 1999 and November 2000 there were 121 reported incidents of actual

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or threatened self-harm in Australia’s six immigration detention centres. In addition, ACM reported a total of sixty-eight hunger strikes. In other words, incidents of self-harm or hunger strikes were occurring almost every second day.The situation appeared to worsen significantly in 2001. Statistics obtained under a freedom of information application by the Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace showed that there were 264 incidents of self-harm in Australia’s immigration detention centres in the eight months between 1 March and 30 October 2001 — an average rate of one incident every day. | Mr Ruddock characterises the boat people as ‘those who have the money, those who are prepared to break our law, those who are prepared to deal with people smugglers and criminals’.The boat people are damned by association, insidiously tarred with the brush of venality. However, the payment of money bears no necessary relationship to the legitimacy of a person’s flight. During World War II Danish fishermen who helped Jews flee to safety from the Nazis charged a fee for carrying them in their boats. More recently, Chinese dissidents employed people-smugglers (or ‘snakeheads’) to escape to Hong Kong after the 1989 Beijing massacre.As a character comments in Thomas Kenneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark, ‘There are times when the only people left to do business with are crooks’. Jews trying to survive the Nazis could hardly afford to be choosy about their associates. The same is true of the boat people. Brokers who move people for money may be cynical, exploitative and cruel, yet they are meeting a real need. Much of the demand for the smugglers’ services is driven by the desperation of refugees seeking sanctuary from persecution. In 2001 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) identified 21.8 million people around the world as ‘people of concern’ because they had been displaced from their homes and lacked security. Add to this the vast numbers of potential migrants — people who are not in flight but nonetheless wish to search out a better life for themselves and their families — and two things become clear: first, the smugglers’ market is potentially enormous; second, the trade may still be in its infancy. According to various estimates, around 4 million people attempt to illegally enter a country each year and the worldwide people-smuggling business is worth up to $10 billion per annum. It is not only legitimate enterprises that profit from economic opportunities opened up by globalisation.As one criminologist puts it,‘organised crime depends not on victims, but on customers’ (though this does not preclude illegal migrants ending up dead in sunken boats or in hermetically sealed lorries). In order to carry out their customers’ wishes, the smugglers

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must be ingenious; they must learn to circumvent the ever-more intricate barriers erected in the countries they are trying to enter.As a business, theirs may be immoral and illicit but it is a business nonetheless and, like the drug trade, it will continue to thrive against repressive measures, to mutate and to innovate as long as there is a substantial profit to be made. As Andreas Schloenhardt has observed in an economic analysis of migrant trafficking for the Australian Institute of Criminology: ‘[T]he drug dealer exists because the legal market does not satisfy the public’s desire for certain narcotics.The “loan shark” exists because the existing banking regulations in many countries leave potential customers unserved. The migrant trafficker exists where legal ways of cross-border migration are denied to people willing or forced to move abroad.’ McKenzie Wark has referred to migration as ‘globalisation from below’ and as long as the imbalance between the ‘overdeveloped’ and ‘underdeveloped’ world is not addressed, the number of people seeking to move will only increase. It is the restrictions imposed on legal migration by developed nations that forge the demand for alternative, illicit routes. It may be comforting to think of people-smugglers as the embodiment of evil, but it is probably more useful to regard them as rational, calculating business figures, who make a sober assessment of the ratio between profit and risk in relation to their trade. < > Khalil is grateful to the people-smugglers. ‘They saved my life,’ he says simply. Khalil is a tall, good-looking young man with a fair complexion and a round face. He does not match the stereotype of the swarthy, bearded Afghan so frequently presented on our television screens. Afghanistan is at the cross-roads of Asia, and Khalil’s features show influences flowing from the East rather than the West. He is a member of the minority Hazara tribe, descendants of Genghiz Khan’s army. I met Khalil in Dandenong, one of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, in a flat which he shared with two other men, also Afghans. It is April 2000 and Khalil and his friends have only recently been released from detention.Their flat is empty, apart from a worn, green Salvation Army sofa that cost $70 and a small coffee-table, on which Khalil serves me tea and fruit-cake.As he shares his story, Khalil’s shoulders drop and his open smile turns into a frown. Khalil fled to Australia at the age of eighteen, leaving behind his parents and five younger brothers and sisters. Eight months have passed since then, and he has had no news of his family in Afghanistan because it is impossible to contact them:‘There is no postal service, no telephone,

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no electricity, no fax machine, no media, nothing,’ he says. He relates how his family scraped together US$5000 to send him out of Afghanistan because, as a young man of fighting age, he was particularly at risk from the Taliban militia, who were then ruling Afghanistan.The Taliban had its support-base in the dominant Pushtun tribes, who are Sunni Muslims.They targeted the Hazara minority, who are Shiah, in reprisal for their association with opposition forces. It has been well-documented that in August 1998 Taliban forces massacred more than 2000 Hazaras in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and there is no doubt that Khalil would have been at risk in his homeland. The first time Khalil had ever been on a boat, or even seen the ocean, was when he made the smugglers’ crossing from Indonesia with twenty-six other people. He was terrified. He could see water leaking into the vessel. ‘There was a 95 per cent chance of death and a 5 per cent chance of life,’ he says. ‘But better to die on the way than to be killed by the Taliban.’ On landing in Australia, he was detained and then taken to Curtin. He says a DIMA officer addressed his group soon after their arrival at the detention centre and told them that Australia could do nothing for them. They were told that they had no invitation to come to the country, that they had broken the law and that they were ‘queue-jumpers’.At that point Khalil was truly afraid that he would be sent back to Afghanistan. The image of the ‘queue-jumper’ is potent because it deeply offends our sense of fair play. It raises the question — why should we give favoured treatment to people who can afford to buy their passage to Australia? The image has power because it contains an element of truth. People who can afford to raise the money to pay the smugglers are, of course, more fortunate — or less unfortunate — than those who have no money at all, and who must remain where they are, no matter what. No doubt one could find people in Afghanistan who have suffered more than Khalil.That does not make him any safer there, nor does it give us cause to deny him sympathy and sanctuary.The fact that a person has money, or has access to money, does not invalidate their claim to refugee status, nor reduce their need for protection.Again, the comparison with Nazi Germany is apposite: for many Jews, being well-off did not save them from the concentration camps. Khalil’s response to the queue-jumper argument is more fundamental. ‘But there isn’t any queue,’ he says to me, again and again. He is right. The selection of refugees for resettlement is more like a lottery than an orderly process. The annual number of refugee and humanitarian places in Australia’s immigration program is fixed at 12,000 (which combines both onshore and offshore applicants).That’s 500 fewer than in 1990, and down from an annual 20,000 at the beginning of the 1980s. In the 2000–2001

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financial year, 4000 of the 12,000 places in the migration program were nominally set aside for Convention refugees, who are mostly referred to Australian offices by the UNHCR. Another 4000 places were set aside for entrants under the special humanitarian program, who, while not Convention refugees, ‘have experienced substantial discrimination amounting to gross violation of human rights’. Applicants under the special humanitarian program ‘must demonstrate some connection with Australia’. Most will be sponsored by a relative — a husband, wife, brother or sister, for instance, or a son or daughter, or perhaps an uncle or aunt. In former times they might have tried to come to Australia under the family reunion program, but the size of the intake under this program has halved in the ten years since 1990, and almost 80 per cent of places are now taken by spouses and fiancé(e)s.The remaining places go to parents or dependent children. For a refugee who has no family connection with Australia the chances of getting a visa are remote. Applicants also stand a better chance of being resettled if they speak English, and if they are skilled.This makes it more likely, in the language of policy, that immigration officials will ‘identify resettlement in Australia as the appropriate solution’. However, applicants with health problems are likely to be rejected. Take the case of Shahraz Kayani. Mr Kayani came to Australia from Pakistan in 1996 and was subsequently recognised as a refugee. On Australia Day 1999 he took out Australian citizenship.At the same time he tried unsuccessfully to bring his immediate family to join him in Australia. Mr Kayani’s application was twice rejected by DIMA because his ten-year-old daughter Annum suffered from cerebral palsy, and she was assessed as likely to place too great a burden on the Australian health system. (DIMA estimated that her care would cost Australian taxpayers $750,000.) On 2 April 2001, after five years of banging his head against a bureaucratic brick wall, Mr Kayani took his case directly to Canberra. He doused himself with petrol and set himself alight outside Parliament House, suffering burns to more than 50 per cent of his body. Specialists at Sydney’s Concord Hospital were unable to save him and he succumbed to his injuries eight weeks later. Mr Kayani had applied to bring his wife and daughters to Australia under the ‘split family’ provisions of Australia’s humanitarian migration program. Later, the Immigration minister said that Mr Kayani should have applied under the family program, a different strand within the system.According to the family’s spokesman, however, no one ever told Mr Kayani this. No one told him that his application would have more chance of success if it were submitted under a different category (a category where the family, rather than the government, would have picked up the tab for his daughter’s initial medical bills). In any case, the ‘split family’ category under which Mr Kayani did apply is specifically

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designed for people in his situation — that is, refugees granted permanent protection in Australia and separated from their immediate relatives. So Mr Kayani’s family was standing in the right ‘queue’, but had run up against an invisible barrier — an impossible one to pass for someone like his daughter. The case exposes the myth of an orderly queue for refugee applications.As David Corlett argues in the University of New South Wales Law Journal (December 2000), a more appropriate metaphor is ‘a “refugee heap” out of which very few are plucked for resettlement in countries such as Australia’. Statistically, European refugees stand a better chance of making it to Australia under the offshore program than do their counterparts in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Of the 45,147 offshore refugee and humanitarian visas issued by Australia between 30 June 1996 and 1 July 2001, 45 per cent were given to people in Europe. In the financial year 2000–2001 there were just 2300 places available for the entire Middle East and 1970 places for all of Africa, despite the huge refugee populations in those regions. In September 1999 the waiting list at just one of Australia’s offshore posts in Africa — Nairobi — was almost equivalent to Australia’s global annual humanitarian intake. Australia’s Nairobi office deals with thirty-four countries, including those in the troubled Horn of Africa, and has three (two full-time and one part-time) Australian staff members.According to a High Commission document, there was a backlog of 8000 applicants in September 1999, with a further 2000 applications yet to be registered. I was told that Islamabad, which covers Iran and Afghanistan, had an even bigger log-jam. However, when I subsequently sought clarification of the length of the offshore waiting-list from DIMA, I was given a different story. According to DIMA, in August 2000 there were 16,542 offshore applications for refugee and humanitarian entry on hand around the world. The posts with the largest ‘pipelines’ were said to be Vienna (4856), Belgrade (3713) and Islamabad (1245). Either Canberra officials count the figures differently than their colleagues overseas, or else a very large number of applications had been rejected very quickly in the intervening eleven months. Normally, the process is grindingly slow. On average, it takes eighteen months for an applicant’s paperwork to finally make its way to the top of the pile for consideration. Then it has, at best, a one-in-five chance of success. The first test is to check whether the applicant is already registered as a refugee with the equally overburdened UNHCR office. If not, then the resettlement request will usually be rejected out of hand.This provides a convenient filter to ease the bureaucratic load; it does not, however, guarantee just outcomes. At my meeting with Khalil in his Dandenong flat, I asked why he did not try to come to Australia on the ‘legitimate’ route, via the

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UNHCR and the Australian High Commission in Islamabad. He looked at me, somewhat incredulous at the naivety of my question. At the time of our meeting, the Taliban were still in power in Kabul.‘You know Pakistan supports the Taliban,’ he told me. ‘Afghan refugees are killed by the Pakistani authorities in Pakistan.’ Khalil said he was afraid of the guards who control the entrance to the UNHCR compound. ‘Everyone is afraid. Not just me.’ Khalil’s fears may have been exaggerated, but they were not without foundation. Pakistan was one of only three countries in the world that recognised the Taliban regime and the Taliban movement was largely a creation of Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence service. Afghan armed groups operated with impunity in the country and refugees were not safe, even in the three main refugee camps. Taliban soldiers would visit the camps to forcibly conscript young men into the ranks of their army. Most Afghans live outside the camps in any case; if they arrived in the country after 1992, they are officially regarded as illegal immigrants. They have no right to work and no right to education. They are not at great risk of being forced back to Afghanistan, but it cannot be said that they are offered adequate protection as prescribed by the 1951 Refugee Convention: in any case, Pakistan is not a signatory to the Convention. Although Pakistan has generously shouldered a huge refugee burden for more than two decades now, since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, most Afghans live in Pakistan on sufferance so far as local officials are concerned.The Afghans are subject to the whim of the authorities in a system that is notoriously corrupt.‘How could I get inside the embassy or the UNHCR?’ asks Khalil.The only way, he says, is by paying lots of money, ‘thousands of dollars’. Again, Khalil’s story of corruption is probably exaggerated. The UNHCR in Pakistan would not be the only international organisation in a developing country to have guards that demand bribes before letting people through the gate. But there is also anecdotal evidence to suggest that the problems in Islamabad went deeper. In late 1999 concerns over corruption in the refugee-determination process forced a purge of locally engaged staff in the Islamabad offices of a number of international organisations and diplomatic missions. DIMA denied that any locally engaged staff were dismissed from the Australian High Commission as a result of concerns about corruption in the processing of visa applications. The department also insisted that the transfer of any expatriate officers out of Islamabad at the time was made to meet operational needs, not from any concerns about the way the post was managed. The problems at another refugee hotspot are more fully documented. United Nations investigators have found that corrupt staff at the UNHCR in Nairobi extorted millions of dollars from refugees

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seeking resettlement places. Bribes were levied at every stage of the process, from a US$25 fee to get in the compound gate, to a fee of $100 or $200 to secure an interview. Kenya hosts some 250,000 displaced people, mostly from Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan. In 1999, when the Nairobi corruption scam was operating, some 9000 of these refugees were resettled in developed countries, including Australia. The United Nations senior investigator into the scandal, Frank Montil, estimates that sums of more than $5000 may have been paid to secure successful resettlement, a figure on a par with that paid to people-smugglers to secure entry into a developed country. Dr Nouria Salehi, OAM, believes that there have been similar problems in Islamabad. She estimates that 80 per cent of the Afghan refugees who have come to Australia through ‘legitimate channels’ have actually paid money to do so. Nouria has lived in Australia since 1981 and before that she lived in France. By birth, however, she is Afghan. By day Nouria works in a Melbourne hospital; by night she runs a restaurant. She opened the Afghan Gallery in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, in 1983, long before that street became a trendy cafe-strip. Her aim was to help Afghan refugees to get to Australia: if she could guarantee them a job on arrival, they were far more likely to get a visa. In all, she has sponsored thirty-five Afghan families to settle in Australia. The system has changed now and she can no longer sponsor people for jobs in the restaurant, but she uses it to provide training opportunities for recently resettled refugees and continues to devote all the profits to helping Afghans living in Pakistan, especially widows. When I ask her about the problems in joining the ‘queue’ for resettlement in Islamabad, Nouria, already passionate, goes into overdrive. ‘They asked them to go to UNHCR and bring a paper that they are a genuine widow, or a genuine refugee. In a country like Pakistan it is impossible to get a piece of paper if you don’t pay money.You should pay for the bribery money, then you get a piece of paper. So they cannot get anything.’ Nouria claims to know of dozens of people in this situation. According to her, when these people lodged their applications with the Australian High Commission, they were asked to go and register with the UNHCR. And when they went to the UNHCR, they could not even get inside the door.‘So,’ relates Nouria,‘they stayed outside the door asking for the paper but were told “no, no, no, we don’t know you”. Some people had money and were clever enough to pay the money and get the paper. People who cannot afford to pay, cannot get it. So then they receive a rejection letter from the Australian High Commission saying that, sorry, we cannot accept you, because the UNHCR does not accept your case.’ Nouria’s portrayal of the situation raises an interesting question of relative moral values: is greasing the palm of a gate-keeper to move

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your file along a bureaucratic chain more legitimate or less legitimate than paying a people-smuggler to move your body along the human pipeline? There is another aspect to the problem, too. If a country is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention, then it falls to the UNHCR, rather than to the national authorities, to make determinations of refugee status. In a country like Pakistan with more than 1 million refugees, it would be a waste of UNHCR resources to conduct individual interviews. The general circumstances which brought the refugees to Pakistan are well-known and clearly form the basis for a well-founded fear of persecution. So, for the most part, individual status determination is not done.This means that few Afghan refugees are listed on the UNHCR’s books for potential resettlement in a third country. Applicants who wish to come to Australia will usually be nominated by family members who are already residents, under the special humanitarian component of our migration program. This category is not strictly a refugee program, yet the Australian High Commission in Islamabad still insists applicants register with the UNHCR prior to their application being considered. As a result, applicants can end up in a catch-22 situation. Australia says they must register with the UNHCR before they can be considered for resettlement, and the UNHCR says it cannot help, since migration to Australia under nonrefugee programs is not part of its mandate. In any case, even if there were such a thing as a functional ‘queue’ for refugees to get to Australia, many people coming on boats would probably not know about it, or know how to join it. Many of the more recently arrived boat people are Afghans and Iraqis who have come to Australia from Iran, Pakistan and other countries in West Asia and the Middle East.Yet, until July 2001, no Australian immigration staff were stationed in Iran to process visa applications. In Iraq there is not even an Australian embassy. The Australian embassy in Damascus closed in August 1999, and visa applications from people living in Syria must be processed in Beirut. There were no DIMIA officials in Afghanistan under the Taliban. During the war in the Balkans, refugees from Bosnia or Kosovo who wanted to seek resettlement in Australia had to lodge applications with the Australian embassy in Belgrade, the headquarters of the very regime that was oppressing them. Initially, their applications would be handled by locally engaged Serbian staff. Similar problems exist in other refugee-producing, or refugee-sheltering countries, as the Immigration department explicitly recognised in its 1994 annual report. It noted that the offshore refugee program was hampered because people were ‘in countries where conditions are changing constantly and access is difficult for Australian migration officials’. In other words, Australian

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officials often cannot reach those in need, and those in need often cannot reach Australian officials. In spite of this, would-be refugees are repeatedly told that they should apply to come to Australia through ‘the proper channels’. Even if refugees can reach an Australian diplomatic post, they may find the door shut in their face.As former Jakarta correspondent Louise Williams has documented, during the late-Suharto era and the earlyHabibie era, East Timorese wanting to come to Australia to study had to fill out their visa application forms on the footpath. The Australian embassy would not even allow East Timorese to enter the diplomatic compound for fear that they might embarrass Canberra by seeking asylum there. In so-called ‘refugee-producing countries’, people seeking to come to Australia on tourist or student visas will be assessed against a ‘risk profile’ to weed out any applicants deemed likely to seek asylum after arrival. So, for example, in October 2000 two Pakistanis were unable to take up invitations to attend an international conference in Melbourne because their visa applications were rejected. Even applications for transit visas may be subject to scrutiny. Soon after the Fiji hostage crisis and coup of May 2000, the federal government introduced a visa requirement for citizens of Fiji wishing to transit through Australia to other destinations. This was presented as a measure designed to prevent George Speight, the coup-leader, and his undesirable associates from sneaking into the country, but it also created a frontline barrier to potential asylum-seekers. The notion of a ‘queue-jumper’ is largely something manufactured by government. Mr Ruddock has given new impetus to the term by collapsing Australia’s onshore and offshore refugee programs into one category. This means that every ‘boat person’ who is granted refugee status in Australia denies a visa to a refugee applying from offshore, from one of those overworked posts such as Islamabad or Nairobi; each one of them denies a visa to a refugee waiting patiently, in the minister’s mind at least, in some squalid and crowded camp. The more refugees who arrive uninvited on our shores, the fewer Australia will resettle from overseas.This wasn’t always the case. Under the previous minister, Nick Bolkus, the two categories were kept separate, so that short-term fluctuations in the arrival of asylum seekers in Australia did not disrupt the operations of the offshore program. By collapsing the onshore and offshore categories into one, and by freezing all offshore applications in the 1999–2000 financial year because of the large number of boat arrivals, Mr Ruddock pits communities against one another: a Somali family waiting for a needy relative to be granted a visa in Nairobi could feel understandably resentful towards an Afghan who comes by boat and is granted refugee status

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onshore. Yet, both are refugees in fear of persecution and in need of resettlement.Who dares judge which one is the more deserving? Australia effectively divides refugees into categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. ‘Good’ refugees are selected through our diplomatic missions overseas; their plane fare to Australia is paid by the Commonwealth and they are immediately entitled to permanent residency and to the full range of refugee resettlement assistance programs. ‘Bad’ refugees get here under their own steam, and are locked up until their case is determined.After release, these ‘bad’ refugees receive a three-year temporary protection visa, which means having to live with continued uncertainty and to remain isolated from family members in other countries because they cannot travel outside Australia.The case of Mr Kayani, the Pakistani who set himself alight outside Parliament House, is an indication of the kind of distress that can result. The situation that caused Shahraz Kayani such emotional agony — living as a refugee in Australia but separated from his immediate family — is now replicated by thousands of people released from immigration detention centres since late 1999.‘Bad’ refugees receive a special assistance allowance (equivalent to 90 per cent of the dole), access to Medicare, rent assistance and work rights, but they are barred from the benefits available to ‘good’ refugees, such as temporary housing and English tuition. ‘Bad’ refugees who wish to study must pay, up front, the full fees that apply to an overseas student. The new temporary protection visas were implemented in October 1999 to deter asylum seekers from coming to Australia by plane or boat.They did not come into legal force until 20 October 1999, but a quick glance at the Immigration department fact sheet on 1999 boatarrivals reveals that the new visas effectively came into operation from 24 August onwards. Between those two dates sixteen boats arrived, carrying a total of 504 people between them. Of those 504 boat people, 439 have been recognised as Convention refugees in need of protection, but only 25 have been granted permanent protection visas. The rest have had to make do with temporary protection visas. In Perth eight Afghan refugees camped out in Bateman Park in protest over this issue. Although Coastwatch officials had picked them up on Ashmore Reef on 26 August 1999, almost two months before the new, restrictive, temporary visa came into effect, the refugees were unable to see a lawyer until 17 October. By that time, they were told, it was too late to lodge their applications for refugee status under the old rules. Khalil is in the same situation and feels aggrieved for similar reasons. He says he arrived in Australia in late September 1999, immediately requested refugee status, and was interviewed by a DIMA officer. It was more than a month before any follow-up occurred, he says, and he was not given an application form to fill in until after the new regulations

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came into force.Together with more than one hundred other detainees at Curtin, he wrote to Philip Ruddock in imperfect, but impeccably polite English:‘… with consideration of the fact that the enactment of the new law apply’s only to the future cases not the previous ones, our request from the honourable minister with respect to all law of the land is to consider and apply the former law about the refuges, to us, not the new regulations. If we were not able to submit the application for protection visa to authorities before 20/10/99 that was not our fault. Since as a helpless and oppressed people we are in detention long time before 20/10/99, we don’t even have our own choice for eating and sleeping how, then, could we have access to solicitors and authorities dealing with the matter?’ Khalil and his fellow-detainees did not receive a reply to their letter. The restrictions placed on him by the stringent conditions of the temporary protection visa leave Khalil deeply troubled about his future. More than anything else, he wants to study, but this is impossible unless he can find thousands of dollars to pay the up-front fees as an overseas student.When I point out that at least he has permission to work and earn money, he becomes indignant. ‘The government has given me protection and I want to give something back to Australia,’ he retorts. ‘If I cannot study, how then can I help Australia? I cannot even help myself. Someone who cannot help society can become a robber, can steal, can become corrupt,’ says Khalil.‘I want to be a human, I want to be a perfect man in society. I don’t want to turn to drink or drugs. Australia is a democracy. Everyone has human rights, but not me. Now I am feeling that I am also persecuted by Australia.’ Government policy has ensured that Khalil’s integration with this society will be protracted and painful. Khalil’s boat has been allowed behind the breakwater to shelter from a wild sea, but he still has no place to drop anchor. He has been granted physical safety in Australia, but no emotional mooring. In August 1998 Michael Wooldridge (federal minister for Health until November 2001) launched a GP’s manual on refugee health. In his speech he noted that ‘creating uncertainty and insecurity … is one of the most dangerous ways to add to the harm that torturers do’. At the launch the minister attacked the views of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party for its ‘spurious claim … that, at best, Australia should only be a temporary haven for refugees before they are sent back again when “things are better”’. Dr Wooldridge warned that the policies of One Nation would ‘continue the suffering of refugees who have been tortured and could well complete the insidious work that torture began’. One year later, One Nation’s ‘deeply flawed and dangerous’ proposal was approved as official policy for all refugees who arrive in Australia without a valid visa.

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The regulations could have been disallowed by a combined opposition vote in the Senate. But the federal Labor Party decided to vote with the government, even though Con Sciacca, the shadow minister for Immigration, told the ABC’s ‘AM’ program that the new measures ‘would not stop one illegal immigrant from coming to this country’. He pointed out that Labor had tried a similar approach in government in 1990 and abandoned it as a costly failure.Among other problems, the policy results in double-handling, because each asylum case has to be assessed twice: once when the applicant arrives in Australia and again when their temporary visa expires. So, why did the Labor opposition support a government policy which is a proven failure — one that punishes vulnerable people? The answer is that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) was too scared to take a principled stand. Caucus believed that to oppose the changes in the Senate would be like handing the Coalition a big stick with which to beat up the Labor Party; it feared that the government would blame the opposition every time another refugee boat landed on our shores. The ALP’s lack of spine is a symptom of the Hansonist poison that continues to course through the Australian body politic; its debilitating effects further exaggerated by breathing in an atmosphere of panic, and being fed a diet of animosity. By playing on deeply rooted popular fears, the government has engendered a mood of crisis around the issue of boat-arrivals and promoted an attitude of hostility towards asylum seekers and refugees. Previous Labor governments did the same thing and much of the media has gone along for the ride. < > There is a deeply held, yet irrational anxiety that Australia is perpetually in danger of being overrun; that our sovereignty is brittle and our borders are weak. It is as though this continent were a rickety lifeboat, and all the world’s oppressed and poor are desperately swimming towards us, threatening to drag us under. This is clear in the metaphors used to describe unauthorised boatarrivals, which are invariably compared to natural disasters. We are warned that we are in danger of being ‘swamped’ by ‘a flood tide’ of ‘illegal immigrants’ (or simply ‘illegals’). They threaten to ‘inundate’ us in ‘waves’, and even in ‘tsunamis’. There is a ‘rising tide’ of would-be immigrants, reported to be ‘massing in their thousands’ in nearby Indonesia. This imagery is disturbingly reminiscent of the language used to describe Chinese immigration a century ago. As historian David Walker writes in Anxious Nation:‘The Chinese were presented as a vast mass of humanity … Their movements were described as tidal.

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They “flooded” into the colonies … Floods and tides obliterate boundaries and destroy recognised landmarks.They carry all before them.’ In celebrating the centenary of federation, we should remember that fear of Asian immigration was one of the issues that helped pull the States together; that one of the first pieces of legislation passed in the new parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. The birth of the Commonwealth also marked the beginnings of the racist White Australia policy. Then, Chinese immigrants were accused of bringing with them all manner of vice and disease.Today, Senator Ross Lightfoot sounds a similar warning on the boat people. In a letter to the editor published in the Australian he wrote, ‘these people are criminals — worse, if they bring with them communicable, pandemic, epidemic or parasitic diseases (and they are from areas where contagious diseases are rampant), then innocent Australians could suffer’. The boat people, the senator claims, ‘threaten the peace of mind and sense of security of many Australians, by way of their divergent lifestyle, culture, outlook and values’. The senator claims to speak on behalf of ordinary Australians. Yet, popular opinion on refugee issues in Australia is neither uniform nor logical. For example, at first glance most Australians would probably support a law that prevented claims for refugee status on the basis of China’s one-child policy; nevertheless, we are outraged to learn that a Chinese woman, eight months pregnant, was deported from Australia and suffered a forced abortion on her return home.The public showed great generosity towards the Kosovars and the East Timorese who came here under the ‘safe-haven’ visas, and there was a popular appeal to allow some of them to settle here; even so, there is huge public animosity towards Afghans and Iraqis arriving by boat. As arrival numbers peaked late in 1999, the minister for Immigration, Mr Ruddock, fanned the panic with talk of ‘a national emergency’ and, in one press release, he invoked the language of war, referring to an ‘assault to our borders’.The media extended the imagery with words like ‘invasion’ and ‘armada’. Again, this plays on deep-seated fears of invasion and the historical anxiety about the empty and defenceless north of Australia. In the late nineteenth century the radical utopian and labour activist William Lane developed a theory of ‘swarming populations’. He believed that nations, like beehives, reached a critical stage of over-population, at which point mass emigration became inevitable. According to David Walker, Lane calculated that China had an annual ‘swarming population’ of 65 million and believed that there was no land ‘so convenient and so promising, so unoccupied yet so hospitable’ as Australia. There was a rash of invasion narratives around this time, in which a defenceless and morally weak Australia was overrun by more calculating and ruthless Asians.

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The genre is still with us. In 1991 Eric Willmot published a novel called Below the Line, in which Australia is divided along the old Brisbane Line. The area above the line is known as ‘South Irian’ after being overrun by Indonesians, who set up a puppet-government, installing an Aboriginal man as president. Indonesia launched the invasion by hiding ‘forward spike troops’ among waves of refugees. With hundreds and thousands of boat people landing on the northern coastline, Australia was ‘being invaded in an insidious and unrecognisable way’. Below the Line may not have been a particularly successful novel, but it is an indication of the continued currency of the invasion-fear in the public mind. In a commentary piece recently the historian Geoffrey Blainey also revived the theory of ‘the empty north’. Referring to the arrival of boat people on the New South Wales coast, he warned:‘… it is not certain whether Australia in the next 200 years will be allowed to retain the whole of such a land mass and simultaneously insist that it must remain sparsely populated.This, in human terms, is one of the last of the world’s empty zones … In nearer Asia, as distinct from Europe, governments might not always see merit in Australia occupying such a huge area, on the doorstep of Asia, and refusing to allow the normal processes of human settlement inside it.’ More popular than Blainey’s writings is the teenage fiction of John Marsden. In his invasion series that begins with the novel Tomorrow, when the war began, a group of resourceful, rural schoolkids find themselves cast in the role of bush guerrillas, carrying out hit-and-run attacks against a foreign invader. In the tradition of the nineteenth century invasion narrative, Australia is portrayed as naive and complacent, a target ripe for the picking. As one teenage character says to another: ‘Corrie, we were still innocent. Right up to yesterday.We didn’t believe in Santa Claus but we believed in our other fantasies.You said it.You said the big one. We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy. Now we know we’re not, and like you said, we’ll never feel safe again, and so it’s bye-bye innocence.’ Marsden’s war scenario is dressed somewhat uncomfortably in the clothes of social justice and multiculturalism. The aggressor is never identified by race or nationality and the most astute and morally virtuous of the teenagers recognises the invasion was driven by poverty: ‘… if you’d lived your whole life in a slum, starving, unemployed, always ill, and you saw the people across the road sunbaking and eating ice cream every day, then after a while you’d convince yourself that taking their wealth and sharing it around your neighbours isn’t such a terrible thing to do.’ Despite the trimmings, Marsden’s fantasy series conforms to the key element of William Lane’s nineteenth century beehive analogy — the

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belief that plentiful Australia is at risk from over-populated countries elsewhere:‘They came swarming across the land, like locusts, like mice, like Paterson’s Curse. We should have been used to plagues in our country but this was the most swift, sudden and successful plague ever. They were too cunning, too fierce and too well organised. The more I’ve learnt about them, the more I can see that they must have been planning it for years.’ Tomorrow, when the war began went through three editions and nineteen reprints in the six years following its first publication in 1993. In the island continent the fear of invasion is alive and well. If this helps to explain the panicked reaction to unauthorised boat arrivals, then it also underlines the need for a sober and dispassionate assessment of the ‘threat’ that they pose to national security. Between November 1989 and November 2001, 259 boats landed in Australia without authorisation, carrying a total of 13,489 people. Seventy per cent of those people arrived after July 1999 as smugglers began organising bigger boats carrying more passengers, representing a quantitative and qualitative shift in the nature of the problem. However, the number of boat arrivals is still dwarfed by the number of overstayers. As of 30 June 2000, there were thought to be close to 60,000 people in Australia who had failed to leave before their visas expired. More than a quarter of these overstayers had been in the country for more than nine years. The largest groups of overstayers are from the United Kingdom (10 per cent) and the United States (8 per cent).Their presence is just as illegal as that of the boat people, but it does not cause a public panic. Nor do overstayers usually get locked up. Once found, most are given a bridging visa on an undertaking that they leave the country voluntarily by a certain date (this is known as a ‘monitored departure’). Others leave at their own expense, but are escorted to the airport by immigration officials to ensure that they actually get on a plane and go (a ‘supervised departure’). Only a small proportion of overstayers are placed in detention before being forcibly removed from Australia. It has become routine to talk of a ‘crisis’ when referring to the boat arrivals, but such words should not be used lightly. At the same time that the number of boat arrivals began to rise in Australia in the last quarter of 1999, Tanzania received 50,000 refugees from Burundi. At one point 25,000 people crossed from East to West Timor in a single day. In the first eight months of 1979, 531 boats arrived in Hong Kong carrying 46,000 refugees from Vietnam. Iran lives with the daily crisis of 1.5 million Afghan refugees and 400,000 Iraqis. Media reports rarely put Australia’s ‘crisis’ in this international context. We seem to be fixated by the pull factors — the attraction that brings people to Australia — rather than the push factors that force them to leave their homes in the first place. There is little analysis of

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why it is now Afghans and Iraqis seeking to come to Australia, rather than Vietnamese, or Chinese or Khmer, who made up the previous four peaks on the boat-arrival charts. Could it be that they come here for the same reasons that they seek refuge in other countries? In 1999 more than 50,000 people from Iraq and Afghanistan sought asylum in Europe. Khalil’s story provides an insight into why many Afghans do not feel safe sheltering in Pakistan and seek to move on. The situation is similar for refugees in Iran. In the first months of 2000 there were numerous reports of Iranian authorities forcing refugees back across the border to Afghanistan. Iraqi refugees were also being deported, under a law that decreed all unregistered refugees had to leave Iran before the end of March, a deadline that was subsequently extended. It is no surprise that Iraqi refugees will try to seek out the services of a people-smuggler rather than be sent back to their homeland under Saddam Hussein. In November 1999 Amnesty International reported that: ‘Gross human rights violations are taking place systematically in Iraq. They range from arbitrary arrest and detention, to torture, extrajudicial and judicial executions after unfair summary trials, ‘disappearances’, and forcible expulsions on the basis of ethnic origin.’ Australia supports the decade-old economic embargo against Iraq, which has had a crushing impact on the civilian population.According to a United Nations expert committee reporting to the Security Council, the embargo has led to ‘an acute deterioration in the living conditions of the Iraqi population and severe strains on its social fabric’. The committee concluded that ‘almost the whole young child population was affected by a shift in their nutritional status towards malnutrition’; it further concluded that infant mortality rates in Iraq are now among the highest in the world and that only 41 per cent of the population has regular access to clean water. These push factors are rarely mentioned in media coverage of the boat people story.To ignore the varied and complex motivations of asylum seekers is flawed journalism; to attack their credibility is a calculated political act. This is a well-practised art. Gareth Evans and Bob Hawke publicly questioned the validity of applicants for refugee status from Cambodia, because their arrival in Australia raised doubts about the success of the Canberra-initiated Cambodian peace-plan; the Suharto-friendly Paul Keating questioned the legitimacy of East Timorese asylum-seekers on the basis that they should go to Portugal. The current minister for Immigration also applies in liberal doses the acid of disbelief to asylum seekers; the media generally allow him to get away with it: the effects are corrosive. The public affairs officer from DIMA told me the hunger-strikers at Curtin detention centre were upset because they had been given

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unrealistic expectations by the people who smuggled them to Australia. He said that they had been told they would end up in Sydney and Melbourne and be able to work straightaway. I asked how he knew that this was the case, given that he otherwise seemed to have a pretty sketchy grasp of their situation. He answered that the minister, Mr Ruddock, had said so. At other times the minister has run exactly the opposite line, saying that asylum seekers ‘know exactly what is going to happen to them’ when they arrive in Australia. He told Paul Heinrichs of the Age that the asylum seekers ‘know they are going to be detained, they have a rough idea how long, they know the procedures, they have been fully schooled on what they need to say’. Mr Ruddock said that they even have the audacity to ask for Pert 2-in-1 shampoo and for orthodontic treatment for their kids. The minister obviously finds it hard to believe that someone with a bit of money can be a refugee. By the same token, if you have no money, you can’t be a refugee either; then, you must be an economic migrant in search of a better life. In an interview with Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Mr Ruddock claimed that the ‘so called boat people are flying first class into Indonesia and Malaysia before boarding rickety vessels for Australia’. The interview was carried on the front page, under the screaming banner headline ‘Alien Scam’.The article claimed to be an ‘insight’ report into the problem of illegal immigration. In fact, it was little more than a series of unsubstantiated and tendentious assertions by unnamed departmental officials. The article concluded that boat people were ‘exploiting a loophole in migration laws that grants people from Iraq and Afghanistan almost certain permanent residency’.What the Herald Sun calls a ‘loophole’ is in fact Australia’s international obligation to offer protection to people at risk of persecution. < > The Curtin hunger-strikers drew attention to themselves, but failed to get the Australian media to take a serious look at conditions in the camp, or to fundamentally question the policy of mandatory detention. They also failed to achieve their primary demands: they were not moved to an open camp in the city. However, their dramatic action was not in vain. Dr Alsalami spent most of his forty-eight hours at Curtin in long and painful negotiations; in going back and forth between the detainees and representatives from DIMA and ACM. Emotionally, it was an intense and exhausting experience, but eventually a settlement was reached that promised improvements in the camp. Detainees now have

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access to four telephones and a fax machine; they would also now be allowed to receive visitors, were any able to make it all that way to Curtin.Television, video and newspapers are available in the detention centre. According to the Immigration department, children detained at Curtin are now taken on a weekly excursion to Derby to visit the swimming pool; in September 2000, a year after Curtin was recommissioned as a detention centre, a playground was belatedly erected within the camp. It was also revealed that charges of child sexual abuse have been laid against two male detainees at Curtin, prompting the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission to repeat its concern ‘that the detention environment places children at risk of sexual and physical abuse’. After inspecting the detention centre in late July 2000, the Commission noted that it was normal for staff at Curtin to call detainees by a number rather than by name, a practice which breaches one of the government’s primary standards for immigration detention — namely, that ‘each detainee is treated with respect and dignity’.The Immigration department insists that numbers are only used ‘to ensure that there is no misunderstanding due to mispronunciation when calling a detainee to the administration area’, but anecdotal evidence from former detainees suggests the practice has been routine in Curtin and elsewhere. In the report on its July 2000 inspection, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission noted improvements in the ‘comfort, utility and aesthetics’ of the centre, and welcomed the creation of a consultative committee to provide a formal mechanism for communication between detainees and the management. Dr Alsalami kept in touch with the people he met at Curtin and, like the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, says that conditions did improve for the detainees. As he puts it: ‘Definitely, they made their point by the hunger strike’. Yet, it seems the government failed to draw a more general lesson from the events of February 2000 and heed the sober counsel of the moderate Dr Alsalami. In the weeks and months that followed, not just Curtin but all of Australia’s immigration detention centres became sites of protests, riots, hunger strikes, suicide attempts and acts of self-harm, including lip-stitching. In January 2002, two years after the Curtin hunger strike, hundreds of detainees at Woomera in South Australia began refusing food and more than forty resorted to sewing shut their mouths. Annie Sparrow was working as a doctor in Woomera at the time. Four months later, the memory of what she had witnessed still brought her to tears.‘It was too sad for words,’ she told me. ‘I saw people stitching their lips who felt forgotten, people who had been there upwards of eight months or even a year, people who had done their utmost to comply with detention centre rules and immigration department requirements during that

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time, and who had never before been part of the hunger strikes or the riots.’ She says people were driven to such an extreme measure because the only form of control they had left was what went in and out of their mouths. ‘By lip-stitching they are saying “we are absolutely helpless”. It is the deepest expression of despair.’

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Until recently Australians were not accustomed to seeing water cannon and tear gas in action. Now reports of tear gas and water hoses being used to quell riots in remote detention centres are all too familiar. In the course of 2001 there were at least eight major disturbances at immigration detention facilities, three in Port Hedland, three in Curtin and two in Woomera.There were further outbreaks of unrest at all three centres in the first quarter of 2002. In some cases detainees set fires and razed buildings, and wielded bed-posts and iron railings as weapons in their clashes with guards, who responded not only with tear gas and water cannon but also with batons and capsicum spray. The first major detention-centre riot occurred at Woomera in August 2000, when water cannon was used as a form of crowd control for the first time in Australia’s history.The August riot followed a mass break-out and protest in June. After that, the authorities had clearly prepared for further trouble — an old RAAF fire-truck fitted with water cannon had not been made ready at Woomera by chance. Perhaps detention-centre administrators recognised the shortcomings of their earlier fall-back plan, under which a local emergency services crew was put on stand-by to provide makeshift crowd-control. I had discovered their plan when I visited Woomera in April 2000. Four months before the riot, and less than six months after Woomera had begun operations, it was blindingly obvious that very serious problems existed at the detention centre. < > There were bright lights, sudden and sharp against the dark horizon.At first I thought that must be the town itself. It was after midnight. The Greyhound was six hours north of Adelaide and we were due to arrive at Woomera any moment now. But then the coach turned right, off the

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highway, and travelled down a neatly kerbed, modestly lit street. We could have been back in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. This, I realised, was Woomera — tidy town par excellence. The floodlights on the desert horizon had been my first glimpse of its satellite suburb, Woomera West, the site of Australia’s largest detention centre. With its population of around 1400, the detention centre held almost five times more people than the town itself. The bus driver dropped me off next to the cinema and pointed the way to the hotel, the Eldo — not, as I first thought, a contraction of Eldorado but the acronym from European Launcher Development Organisation, the body responsible for the Blue Streak, the Redstone and other rockets launched at Woomera during the 1950s and 1960s, and now on proud display at the missile park by the town’s main intersection. The rocket range gave life to Woomera. In its heyday the town boasted a population of around 7000 people, though access was restricted to authorised personnel until 1982. Today Woomera is still run by the Defence department, with a mayor, or ‘area administrator’, appointed by Canberra. When work on the rocket range slowed, the town was sustained by another secretive military installation — the satellite-tracking station at nearby Nurrungar, with its giant ray domes, known as the golf balls in the donga (or desert). Now that too has gone. The last United States military personnel have pulled out, leaving Woomera depleted and in need of a new industry. When there was a sharp increase in arrivals of boat people on Australia’s northern coasts, it appeared to offer a nice fit with the town’s under-utilised facilities and its isolation. The detention centre had certainly been a lifeline for the Eldo Hotel. As I walked there from the bus stop,Woomera appeared deserted, apart from a plague of grasshoppers, but behind the Eldo’s formidable brick walls the Boomerang Bar was doing good business. About thirty people, men and women, were playing pool and drinking, while the juke box sang ‘I wanna have sex, on the beach, on your naked body’. Several patrons were wearing sandy brown uniforms, and had ID tags looped onto their belts.The Eldo had become the main wateringhole and feeding-place for the one hundred or so guards employed by Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), which was running the detention centre. Officially known as the Woomera Immigration and Reception Processing Centre, the detention centre was being run by ACM under contract from the Immigration department. The next morning I meet Dr Tom Atherton, the local Uniting Church minister, who takes me on a tour of the town. ‘The American presence defined the town. Now it has no definition,’ he says. ‘Woomera is in mourning.’ If I need evidence to support his claim, then

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I find it at the local snack bar, where we stop for a cappuccino and a chat with the proprietor Susan Rotherham. She had just farewelled her sister-in-law, who’d left Woomera after twenty-nine years, to move to Darwin.‘People want to stay here,’ she says,‘but they just can’t get a job.’ I ask about the detention centre. Isn’t that providing work? ‘We were told it was going to boost the town,’ she replies,‘but so far it hasn’t done that.’ In fact, some locals are working in the administration section of the camp, others are working in the kitchen and tradespeople are getting plenty of jobs in construction.The local supermarket is doing OK too, selling cigarettes, biscuits, drinks and other goods to the detainees via a weekly order service.The detainees pay for the goods with money that they brought with them to Australia, or with money earnt working in the camp. The pay is low and the prices high. A former detainee who worked five-and-a-half hours a day in the detention centre kitchen said she earned credits of $30 per week. She said a one-litre bottle of softdrink cost $5, and a Mars bar cost $4. Susan Rotherham’s cafe is not sharing in this lucrative, if rather questionable trade. But her main gripe is that the detention centre guards, or officers, are flown in and out of Woomera on six-week turn-arounds. She claims that they earn $13,000 for a six-week stint (a claim I hear repeated by many others in Woomera), but says that very little of the money stays in the town.‘It’s an obscene waste of money,’ she says, and she wants to see the guards, and their families, stationed permanently in the town to help bring Woomera back to life. After all, it’s not as if Woomera is short of accommodation. Tom Atherton drives me past rows of vacant transportable houses, all for sale, and blocks of empty brick flats. He shows me the town’s three ovals, one with floodlights ‘as good as the MCG’, the swimming pool, the bowling alley, the community hospital and the miraculous green lawns of Breen Park. By the standards of rural Australia, Woomera is massively over-supplied with services. After the Americans left, the population plummeted. In October 1999 there were 1200 people; six months later, at the end of March 2000, just 325 and falling. Of course, the exotic new residents brought involuntarily to Woomera West were not included in this head count.Tom, who left Woomera soon after my visit, had sadly watched his own congregation shrink from seventy to seven.At least the establishment of the detention centre down the road provided a new focus for the final months of his ministry. It was early November 1999, the start of the fierce South Australian summer, and five months before my visit, when the government announced that four hundred ‘illegal immigrants’ would be detained at Woomera West. They were to be housed in former army barracks, which were, according to Mr Ruddock, ‘not thought appropriate for

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air-conditioning’. He described them as having ‘flow-through ventilation’. Tom Atherton was concerned. Woomera is a town where temperatures can soar into the high forties, where even the local boarding-kennels are air-conditioned. Together with the local priest, Father Jim Monaghan,Tom went on television and, in his own words, ‘squealed about the air-con’. The public response was immediate and vitriolic: twenty-five phone calls and an equal number of letters, almost all of them hostile. He was called ‘a dickhead’ and told to ‘fill his pews and mind his own business’.According to some of his callers, the ‘invaders’ from the Middle East would ‘jump the fence and breed like rabbits’. Undaunted, Tom agreed to speak about the issue on the John Laws program. He fielded more abusive calls, and weathered Laws’s own scorn.‘If you’re so worried about it, why don’t you pay for the air conditioners yourself,’ Laws said. ‘Put your money where your mouth is.’ ‘I wasn’t quick enough,’ says Tom, ruefully adding that he should have said something in response. Tom Atherton is no firebrand.You don’t send a rabble-rouser to be Uniting Church minister in a defence town like Woomera.He is loquacious, but his views are considered. He has a thoughtful, inquiring manner that betrays his academic training.Tom was badly burned by his media experience, but he continued to speak out about conditions in the detention centre. By the time we meet in April he has realised that airconditioning was the wrong issue to focus on. Now, four months after the Woomera detention centre opened, his concern is less for the detainees’ physical wellbeing than for their mental and spiritual health. The mood of the detainees swings from ‘excited and excitable’ to ‘flat and frustrated’, he tells me.‘Up and down, and looking for signs in your eyes of help. It’s a classic sign of depression.That is their condition,’ he says. ‘To slap them in the clink in this environment is, I think, a touch inhumane.’ Tom Atherton gained some insight into the wellbeing of the detainees because, occasionally at least, he was allowed a glimpse behind the barbed wire. Every second Monday Tom and his Catholic counterpart, Father Jim Monaghan, held a joint worship for non-Muslims. (Islamic observances were conducted by clerics among the detainees.) Around 150 people attended the service. Most were not actually Christians at all, but followers of the Gnostic Mandaean sect from southern Iraq, a sect which was traditionally hostile to Christianity.The prophet of the Mandaeans is John the Baptist and their liturgy is in ancient Aramaic, the language of Christ himself. They are known in Iraq as ‘Subbi’ or ‘baptisers’, because ritual immersion is a key feature of their religious practice. It is a rite which cannot be observed in the detention centre.

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The worship service would begin with a simple song, jointly sung, in English. Then Father Jim would read a lection from the Old Testament and Tom would give a homily, with one member of the congregation providing simultaneous translation into Arabic. Tom tried to identify with the situation of the detainees:‘My themes have been Jesus the refugee, or Abraham the Iraqi.These guys are in prison and there is a long history of Jewish and Christian people being in prison and of having to go to a foreign country. There are many Old Testament heroes like Abraham or Jesus himself, who had to flee a country, or go to another one, unknown and insecure.’ A couple of guards would sit in on the worship, and word got back to Tom that his homilies were regarded as too political. ‘It is not just political, it is theological,’ he retorts.‘God identifies with the depressed, the under-privileged and the poor, the wretched of the earth — and they are in that category. So we love them and God loves them; it is the fundamental Christian gospel.’ The ecumenical service may not seem entirely appropriate for members of a sect that officially regards Jesus as an apostate, but Tom says the response was very positive. ‘You can tell by their eyes, you know.Their eyes light up and of course they sense that this guy has an affection for them.They seize on the potential helpers, as we all would, caught in prison or in detention.’ Father Jim Monaghan agrees: ‘I mean it is not that we’ve got anything terribly flash to offer, but we’d be the only visitors that they would have that aren’t there in some official capacity. And so we have no particular axe to grind or whatever, and so they can relax a bit with us. It is a social event because we go in with some simple little songs in English that are a bit bouncy and happy. And as everybody’s energy runs out with trying to translate everything, then we just kind of devolve into sitting down and eating a pile of cakes and lollies and things like that.’ Children made up one-third of the non-Muslim congregation.Tom Atherton engaged them by trying out his limited Arabic:‘Oh dear God, my Arabic’s pathetic,’ he says.‘How old is this child, I ask. I can say five but I can’t say six, so they follow me around trying to correct my Arabic. They feel empowered because I am struggling with their language, rather than be disempowered because they are struggling with my language.’ Both Tom and Jim believed that, at the very least, the children should be allowed to leave the detention centre for outings, to make use of Woomera’s vastly under-utilised facilities: ‘It’s just such a waste of resources that those things are not used and it is so cruel to keep children cooped up like that,’ says the priest. ‘The security issue would be minimal, because the children are not going to run away, they’re not

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going to leave without their parents.You could hold the parents hostage in the camp, against the return of the children, if you wanted to be as bloody-minded as that. But why not let the whole family group come out and have a picnic or something, or why not let the kids come out and play on an oval.’ When I met Jim and Tom, in April 2000, their concern for the welfare of the detainees had just escalated. For the previous two Mondays they had not been allowed into the detention centre.They were told to suspend their worship visits because Shiah Muslims in the camp were preparing to celebrate the tenth day of the month of Muharram, which commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the emotional highpoint of their religious calendar. The two clerics found it unfair for minority groups to be prevented from celebrating their faith because a more dominant religious community was preparing for a festival, and wondered whether the Shiah feast-day is the only reason for their exclusion from the camp. DIMIA is reluctant to have independent observers monitor conditions in its detention centres, particularly when things are tense. However, as Tom and Jim point out, external visitors provide some diversion for the detainees.The chance to speak to a neutral outsider is a way to let off steam, to gain perspective and to counter the cauldron effect of extended detention. Proof that the atmosphere in the camp is stretched to breaking point comes on the night of Monday, 10 April.There is a disturbance, a fence is pushed over and two detainees escape. The men miraculously make it as far as Port Augusta, 170 km south of Woomera, but are arrested when they ask a service-station attendant to change US dollars and call a taxi. The cause of the disturbance at the camp, and the details of exactly what happened, remain sketchy. According to an Immigration department spokeswoman, ‘the violent behaviour of a large number of detainees … resulted in significant damage to Commonwealth property’. Certainly, the situation was serious enough for detention centre authorities to call out the local fire-brigade — and not for a fire. Lynton Stephens was the doctor at Woomera hospital at the time. When he saw the fire-truck heading up to the camp, he naturally made some calls to find out what was going on. According to the doctor, the truck was parked next to the detention centre fence, its lights flashing and siren blaring, with an officer sitting ready at the water cannon. Lynton Stephens understands that this was meant primarily as a form of intimidation, to deter the detainees from approaching the fence, but that if push had come to shove, the water cannon would have been used — if, for example, a group of detainees had attempted to scale the fence and breach the roll of razor wire that runs along the top.

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According to other sources in the town, the fire-truck had also been called out to the detention centre in similar circumstances on at least one prior occasion. Dr Stephens was deeply concerned about the use of the fire-truck as a form of crowd control because Woomera Emergency Services also run the local ambulance. The same officers perform both tasks. So, if water cannon were used, then an emergency services officer could find himself squirting detainees off the fence at one moment, and rushing back to pick up the injured in an ambulance straight after. When I asked the Woomera Area Administrator, Joe Van Homelen, about the incident, he referred me to ADI Ltd, the now-privatised corporation formerly known as Australian Defence Industries, which runs the Woomera Emergency Services on a commercial basis. A company official at ADI referred me back to Joe Van Homelen, saying nothing happens without the Area Administrator’s knowledge. Both men confirmed that the truck had been called out to the detention centre, but refused to discuss the circumstances in which the call-out had occurred. Dr Stephens’s concerns did not end with the fire-truck. When the detention centre opened, he agreed to provide medical services to the detainees. It was a lucrative adjunct to his job at the hospital, which, with the declining town population, no longer kept him at full stretch. But Dr Stephens became concerned at the way the camp clinic was set up. He believed nurses were getting out of their depth and carrying out procedures that would ordinarily require greater supervision. Dr Stephens cited the use of the sedative midazolam, given intravenously to calm a detainee who was extremely agitated. Dr Stephens says that midazolam is a strong respiratory suppressant that can slow breathing and lower blood pressure to dangerous levels. He says that to administer it intravenously requires greater monitoring than was possible in the detention centre clinic. In any business it is essential to minimise costs and ACM runs the Woomera detention centre on a commercial basis. In simple terms, the company will turn a profit only if the cost of running the camp is less than the price the government pays to ACM for the service of keeping people locked up, fed and healthy. Dr Stephens believes that in the medical arena this creates a conflict of interest. Although he was never aware of any policy directives to limit or cap medical treatment, he did run up against some obstacles to routine practice. For example, Dr Stephens attended one detainee who was suffering from painful gastric reflux.The patient had already been treated with the standard medication Zantac, but had not responded. So Dr Stephens wrote out a script for a more expensive drug called Omeprazole, a more powerful medication used to treat reflux oesophagitus and ulcers.Two weeks later, the patient presented once again and the symptoms were undiminished.

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Upon inquiry, Dr Stephens discovered that his prescription had never been filled. He learnt that a sister in the clinic had torn up the script and thrown it in the bin, apparently because the medication was too expensive. The detainee eventually obtained his medication, but suffered two weeks of needless discomfort in the meantime. In mid-February 2000 Lynton Stephens chose not to continue the work at the detention centre. He wrote to ACM, telling the company that, with 1400 inmates, the detention centre required the services of a full-time medical practitioner. Dr Stephens told me that the medical issues in the camp were complicated by the fact that many of the detainees were victims of severe torture and trauma; on several occasions during treatment sessions, Dr Stephens came across the scars of Taliban whips on the chests and backs of detainees from Afghanistan. I sought a response from ACM to Dr Stephens’s concerns, but my phone calls and emails went unanswered. As well as taking me on a tour of the town, Tom Atherton, the Uniting Church minister, was kind enough to lend me his car so that I could drive the few kilometres out to the detention centre. I would have walked, but I thought that trudging up the highway would make me a bit conspicuous in a town that seems to have more cars than people. I need not have worried, because I was destined to become conspicuous anyway. I drive as far as I am permitted.There is a gate across the road, with a large red stop-sign and a warning: ‘NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY. BEYOND THIS POINT TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.’ The gate is more of a symbolic barrier than an effective one. To the left it abuts the property of the local earthmoving firm, Wagnitz Building Contractors. To the right it is attached to a cyclone fence, which stops abruptly just 15 metres beyond the bitumen. The truncated fence-line is forlorn against the vastness of the desert. It would be a simple matter to skirt the fence and walk on, to reach the detention centre proper. The only thing that stops me doing so is the presence of a uniformed guard sitting sentry in a pre-fab hut next to the gate. One side of the gate is open, allowing vehicles to trickle in and out; builders in utes and four-wheel drives, trucks delivering supplies; lawyers or immigration department officials in city sedans. Most just honk or wave at the guard and drive cheerfully on. It is evident from the guard’s interest in the number plate of Tom’s car, which she notes down assiduously, that I won’t be granted the same liberty. My official request for permission to visit the camp had already been rejected in Canberra. I park the car and walk away from the gate and around the back of the Wagnitz office. Here a semi-trailer is busy delivering a load of metal

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and a broad young bloke in a ’dozer is scooping up sand to mix concrete.Wagnitz is evidently doing well from the expansion of Woomera West. I ask the ’dozer driver for permission to walk across the property to get a closer look at the detention centre. He gives me a sunburnt grin and waves me forward, a security pass dangling from the belt loop of his jeans. ‘Don’t get too adventurous,’ he says, ‘or they’ll be out after you, quick smart.’ Behind Wagnitz lies a tangle of old junk: scrap-metal, second-hand timber, an abandoned school-desk sinking into the red sand. There is also a ramshackle collection of outhouses and bare dirt paddocks housing bored ponies. I feel like a skulking schoolboy as I make my way along the fence-line, but I also enjoy a boyish sensation of victory as I realise that I am now well past the gate on the road and into forbidden territory. I push forward as far as I dare, to get a closer look. The perimeter fence is at least 4 m high, the tips of the posts angled inwards and topped with a forbidding coil of barbed wire. One section of the fence is sagging; presumably at the point it was pushed over during the disturbances of 10 April, when the two detainees absconded. A banner in Persian is strung against the wire; red writing on yellow cloth — not a protest banner, I find out later, but a devotional exhortation to mark the tenth day of Muharram. Behind the fence I can see low-slung buildings. As the camp population has rocketed upwards, the original 1950s brick barracks with their ‘flow-through ventilation’ have been augmented by prefabricated, transportable buildings that are equipped with air-conditioning. There are also two rows of large, dark green canvas tents.The tents appear empty and I learn later that they are intended to accommodate the overflow, should there be a sudden influx of new arrivals. A cooling breeze takes the heat out of the day and keeps the sticky South Australian flies circulating. I am too far away to make contact with anyone, but I can catch a glimpse of life behind the wire. A child sitting in the shade, a woman carrying a blouse just washed, a young man with his head wrapped in a T-shirt as shelter against the sun.They are stick figures beneath an immense and glorious sky. The boss at Wagnitz is friendly but turns down the offer of a chat. I want to know what he is actually building out at Woomera West. He waves a fat contract in the air, which he’s just received from the construction company Thiess. ‘There’s lots of legal stuff in here and I haven’t read it yet,’ he says. I get the impression that had I arrived earlier, before that intimidating contract landed on his desk, then he might have been more forthcoming. That reluctance to talk about what goes on at Woomera West is shared by other contractors at the site. Most, like the guards, have signed

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secrecy clauses, and are required to report any media approaches to ACM management. Still, word filters out, in various ways. It is 2 pm in the afternoon when I walk past the offices of the Woomera Area Board, where the sign in the window says ‘Dog licences may be paid here’. Across the road a blue-and-white minibus pulls out of the community hospital. The driver is wearing the ACM uniform and the four or five passengers appear to hail from the Middle East. One wears a black Nike baseball cap and trails an arm out the window, a piece of paper folded carefully between two fingers.The man catches my eye, glances from me to the paper, which he waggles almost imperceptibly, then glances away at the ground. I give a quick nod and he lets the paper drop.The bus drives off, and, endeavouring to affect an air of nonchalance, I saunter over to retrieve his missive. It is an envelope; scrawled on the outside, back and front, are the words ‘S.O.S. Please help us’. Inside are two letters in broken English.The first, again under the heading S.O.S., contains the following request: 'HDU P\ IULHQG :H DUH KRPOHVV LPLJUDQW·V WKDW ZH OLYH LQ :RRPHUD GHWHQWLRQ FHQWUH:HKDYHQRWKLQJVWROLYHDQGZHDUHLQEDGVLWXDWLRQSOHDVHFDOO81RIILFH IRUXV7KDQN\RXIRU\RXUNLQG

The second letter is in the same handwriting, and is more personal: 'HDUP\IULHQG,·P,UDQLDQKRPHOHVVLPLJUDQWP\QDPHLV$ DQGQRERG\NQRZ WKDW , KDYH DUULYHG WR$XVWUDOLD RU QRW SOHDVH FDOO P\ SKRQH QXPEHU LQ ,UDQ RQ KXPDQLW\WKDQN\RXIRU\RXUNLQGWKLVLVDELJKHOSIRUPH

There are two names and two Iranian phone-numbers at the bottom of the page. I was not alone in receiving this kind of plea from detainees at Woomera. Lawyers, migration agents, medical staff and others visiting the camp told tales of similar folded notes tucked discreetly into their palms, out of sight of the guards. Most were requests to contact relatives in the Middle East. Some recipients dared not fulfil the request, believing that it was a federal offence to do so. Others went ahead and made the phone calls, as I did. (The Iranian men who contacted me were eventually recognised as refugees and granted visas to stay in Australia, but only after spending almost a year in detention.) One such entreaty came from an Islamic cleric, or mufti. His request was carried out and the mufti’s family in the Middle East was alerted to his whereabouts after months of worry.They had had no news and feared the worst. The mufti was a big, austere man with a beard to match his position; a man of authority and stature amongst the Woomera detainees. When he learnt that a message had at last been transmitted to his family, the mufti initially tried to control his emotions. But months of suppressed anxiety were too much for him; deep

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guttural moans racked his body and his relief burst forth into tears. According to clause 11.1 of the Commonwealth’s Immigration Detention Standards, ‘Contact between detainees and their families, friends and the community is permitted and encouraged except when in separation detention. The contact is facilitated through detainee access to telephones, through regular visits and letters.’ Indeed, in Port Hedland detention centre in Western Australia, in Maribyrnong in Melbourne and in Villawood in Sydney, detainees have access to a pay-phone. By working in the kitchen, they can earn money to buy a phonecard, or else they can buy one with whatever money they had with them on arrival in Australia. After the hunger strike at Curtin, the camp there also has a pay-phone. In Woomera, after four-and-a-half months of operation, there was no public phone for the detainees to use.The explanation given for this was that Woomera West was still ‘a site under construction’. A spokesman from the minister’s office told me alternatives were being investigated, such as the use of mobile phones, until a fixed phone-line could be installed. As far as I could ascertain from other sources, there was no technical reason why a phone could not have been installed immediately. However, there is another obstacle to phone contact, and this is where the rider ‘except when in separation detention’ of clause 11.1 comes into play. It is DIMIA policy to hold new arrivals separate from detainees who have already passed through the primary stage of an application for political asylum. One reasonable justification for separation detention is that it allows new arrivals to be screened for infectious diseases, but this is a matter that can be resolved quickly.The other aim of separation detention is to prevent ‘coaching’. DIMIA believes that if new arrivals mix with longer-term residents, or are able to contact people outside the camp by telephone, then they will be ‘coached’ on their rights — rights of which they are not otherwise informed. For example, detainees may learn that they have the right to see a lawyer and to apply for refugee status. DIMIA also fears that they may be ‘coached’ on how to handle the interview section of the asylum process, an interview which can transform their official status from the damning classification of ‘illegal immigrant’ to the liberating status of ‘refugee’. Detention centres like Villawood and Port Hedland have different sections for different classes of detainee. Until mid-May 2000 Woomera still had only one combined area, which meant that all detainees were effectively being held in separation detention, regardless of how far their refugee application had progressed. DIMIA’s preoccupation with ‘coaching’ suggests that there is little official confidence in Australia’s much-vaunted refugee-determination procedures, or in the capacity of departmental delegates to distinguish

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between a genuine story of persecution and one quickly stitched together after a few quick words of advice. And, problematic as the department’s logic may be, the coaching issue does not explain why detainees could not even send out letters.The detention centre opened at the end of November 1999; but it was mid-March, another threeand-a-half months, before any mail from the detainees started passing through the Woomera post office.When I raised the issue of mail with the department, a spokesman told me: ‘There are no restrictions on detainees’ correspondence at any detention centre’. I pressed the matter and rephrased my question.‘Had there been any such restrictions in the past?’ I asked. The answer came back, also rephrased:‘DIMA’s communications policy in respect of detainees at all detention centres allows for them to send and receive mail.This policy has been in place for a considerable time and pre-dates the opening of Woomera.’ A fundamental question remains unanswered: if Commonwealth policy was fully implemented at Woomera, if detainees had the right to send out mail, and were informed of that right, then why were they surreptitiously pressing secret notes into the hands of visitors, or dropping them from the window of a mini-bus? ‘Some of the detainees have said to me that they feel lost,’ says the Reverend Tom Atherton.‘They have fallen off the planet and their relatives back home in Iraq, or wherever, might think that they are dead … because boats do sink.’ On the day that I travelled to Woomera, Mr Ruddock announced that up to 220 boat people had died while attempting the crossing from Java to Christmas Island, after their vessel went missing in monsoonal seas. Obviously, such news must cause acute distress to families back in Iraq or Iran, who know that their brother or son or granddaughter is attempting that same journey. Yet, at Woomera, the minister’s department was holding 1400 people incommunicado, and some of them had been in that situation for at least four months. ‘There’s the Red Cross for prisoners of war, there’s an ability for that basic information to get communicated,’ says the local priest, Father Jim Monaghan. ‘If you are a prisoner in an Australian jail, you are allowed to make a phone call, and these people, who have not actually committed a crime, and who certainly have not been charged with anything, are not allowed those ordinary, very basic human rights, which are rights, but which are being treated as privileges and withheld from them.’ The priest describes the Woomera detention centre as an ugly kind of environment: ‘It’s degrading, and if there was some family of mine locked up behind there, I’d be very angry, I reckon. I’d be militantly against it.As it is, even with these people who I don’t know from a bar of soap, it just looks wrong, it just looks how you would cage up stray animals or something like that.’

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Father Jim draws a parallel between the uncertainty experienced by the townsfolk of Woomera and that of the plight of the detainees up the road. As the Americans left and facilities closed down, rumours began to spring up. One concerned the fate of the bowling alley, with stories that it would be moved to Kalgoorlie, or Roxby Downs or Alice Springs. Finally, it was confirmed that the bowling alley would stay. But, says the priest, the rumours were debilitating to the community and give a suggestion of the much greater turmoil that must be in the hearts of the detainees:‘With very little information coming in to them, apart from scraps here and there, rumours, gossip, a few words from a guard and recalling what they might have heard in Indonesia on the journey or what the people-smugglers might have told them and their experience with the various layers of bureaucracy that they are meeting, it must be terribly draining, and internally it must lead to a real imbalance of emotions in people.’ In early June 2000 that ‘imbalance of emotions’ tipped off the scale. After three days of protests, around 500 detainees pushed down a perimeter fence and marched into town, carrying banners and chanting ‘freedom’. The men organised prayer-sessions in the car-park, while their children made a beeline for the playground. (A set of plastic play equipment had been donated to the detention centre but was still lying around unassembled.) There were some clashes during the initial break-out; three ACM officers were reported injured and several detainees claimed to have been beaten. Later, in the town centre another ACM guard was punched to the ground and kicked. Overall, though, the protest was disciplined and peaceful and the authorities also acted with restraint, waiting for the passion of events to run its course before negotiating a return to the detention centre. As the protest dragged on overnight, children and nursing mothers were fed and supplied with blankets against the cold.When the final back-down came the next day, the detainees managed to save face by insisting that they return to the camp via the local church. A pause in its quiet surrounds allowed them to maintain some dignity and to exert a degree of control over the humiliating process of their re-incarceration. According to sources in the town, the June protest coincided with a rumour in the camp that no one would be given a visa until after the Sydney Olympics.The story was baseless, but its spark fell on dry tinder. In six months of operation not a single person had been released from the Woomera camp. Detainees believed the Olympics rumour because it accorded with their distorted reality. They had no objective context against which to assess the validity of such information. In late May 2000 — six weeks after my visit, and six months after the camp opened — a pay-phone was installed at Woomera. Detainees with the money to buy a phonecard could at last make direct contact

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with their families overseas; visitors described long queues as detainees waited their turn to speak to anxious relatives. However, at first the payphone could only be used to make international calls. A Woomera detainee was not at liberty to call people in Australia, such as members of their own ethnic community, lawyers or, of course, journalists. Although they now had television in the camp, the detainees were only allowed to watch sport and movies, not news programs.There was still no access to newspapers nor to radio. Apart from the Olympics rumour, other events may also have contributed to the uncertainty in June. In mid-May construction was completed on a second stage at the detention centre. Detainees could now be divided into two groups: those who had entered the refugee-determination process, and those who had failed to cross that initial threshold and now faced removal from Australia. Initially, some 180 detainees were separated out, causing considerable distress in the camp. In one case a brother and sister found themselves on opposite sides of the wire. After the June protest I rang Father Jim Monaghan to get his perspective on events, but he said he could no longer speak to me about the situation in the detention centre. Since our meeting in Woomera in April, the Immigration department had made it clear that the priest was not exempt from the conditions that applied to other people going in and out of the camp for professional reasons: contact with the media was not appropriate. Shortly after the June break-out, the minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, paid a visit to Woomera. The camp was quickly spruced up in his honour; pot-plants were put out in front of the detention centre offices; the gravel was raked and wayward plastic bags were tidied away. A few weeks later the first Woomera detainees were released into the community. The minister denies that the releases were accelerated owing to the protest in the camp, but some lawyers who worked at Woomera are mystified as to why the process of refugee determination had been taking so long, particularly for clear-cut cases.There are claims of a deliberate go-slow; allegations that the long delays were meant to serve as an additional form of deterrence to future boat-arrivals. Given the cost of keeping people in detention, I find such theories hard to believe. The minister’s own explanation is that delays are caused by the difficulty of carrying out character checks, to ensure that the people about to be released do not pose a threat to society. As someone with detailed knowledge of the system explained to me, this means that people are held in detention, even after DIMIA is satisfied that they meet the Convention definition of a refugee, until they are given a security clearance by ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation). ASIO — referred to euphemistically by DIMIA officials as ‘another

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organisation’ — was ill-equipped to deal with the sharp increase in applications for asylum and had been struggling to work through the backlog of checks. Since the Woomera asylum seekers were ignorant of this background, there is little doubt that the chain of events would have left them with the impression that dramatic protest was the only way to draw attention to their plight. From their perspective, the June demonstration drew a visit from the minister and was promptly followed by the release of some detainees. This might help explain what happened two months later, in late August 2000. < > ‘It just washes them away like rag dolls,’ said Dave Kirby, as he relayed the action to ABC Radio via mobile phone. Mr Kirby was standing on the roof of his Shell service station several hundred metres from the Woomera detention centre, describing how a determined group of detainees tried repeatedly to push their way through the fence, only to be forced back by the jet of water. ‘It blasts them away from the fence and they get back up again and come charging in.’ An Immigration department spokesman later confirmed to me that the ‘security forces’ who fired tear gas and sprayed water from the water cannon (or ‘fire hoses’, as he put it) were not public officers in the service of the state; they were private guards employed by ACM, the commercial company that runs the detention centre. The ACM guards were backed up by South Australian police and by members of the federal government security agency, Australian Protective Service. In all, some 300 officers were deployed to contain the eighty or so rioters.The government said that the rioters converted fenceposts into spears and clubs, and fired stones at the guards with home-made slingshots. It said thirty-two security guards were injured. According to the Australian, ‘when the guards themselves read this figure in the press … they chortled at the number and official description of “soft tissue injuries”’. The Immigration department later allowed journalists to inspect and photograph six buildings that were torched during the unrest, but no injured guards were made available for interview.The trouble began on a Saturday night, when guards used tear gas to assert control over detainees throwing stones, but it was Monday morning before journalists got wind of the story and rushed to Woomera. Dave Kirby’s roof was about as close as they could get to the action. The scenes at Woomera were ugly, and did great damage to the reputation of asylum seekers and refugees. Subsequent riots there, and at other detention centres, have reinforced popular perceptions that people who come to this country uninvited are dangerous criminal

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elements who pose a threat to the peace and security of Australian society. If they riot and burn down buildings, the reasoning goes, then they are not the sort of people we want in this country.The riots are taken as proof of why mandatory detention is necessary. An alternative view is that the frequency of violence in Australia’s detention centres shows that the system itself is seriously flawed. The recent statistical record shows that the majority of asylum seekers who enter Australia’s detention system will ultimately be recognised as refugees under the 1951 Convention and released into the community after detailed background and character checks carried out by federal government agencies, including ASIO. In other words, most people passing through Australia’s detention centres are fleeing persecution and most are of good character.Those involved in acts of violence are usually young men but there are also women and children locked up in the detention centres.This means that women and children are being placed in a situation where, on the basis of recent experience, it can be predicted that violence is likely to break out. A situation where — if the Immigration department is to be believed — some detainees are stockpiling caches of weapons. A situation of considerable risk and great stress. Nine hundred children passed through Australia’s detention centres in the year 2000.Thirty of them were detained for more than a year. The great majority of the 732 people held at Woomera at the time of the first riot in August 2000 kept well away from the violence. The detainees were a mix of nationalities including Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans, Kurds, Palestinians and Pakistanis.There were Shiah and Sunni Muslims, Christians and members of minority Gnostic sects.There were perhaps as many as one hundred children in the camp, and some people had been held at Woomera continuously since the centre opened nine months earlier. There are known to have been incidents of rape in the camp and some detainees carry a burden of extreme personal trauma, due to torture, incarceration or other abuses in their homeland. The minister for Immigration, Mr Ruddock, suggested that the unrest could only have been provoked from outside. He blamed ‘wellmeaning’ groups like the Refugee Council of Australia for sparking the violence, accusing them of encouraging detainees to protest in the hope of obtaining a better deal from the government. It is hard to see how the Refugee Council might have incited such activity, given that the detainees had been kept in virtual isolation from the outside world, without access to newspapers, radio or television. In the weeks immediately preceding the riot, hundreds of people had been released from Woomera after being officially recognised as refugees. The minister suggested that the ringleaders were people who had failed to jump that hurdle and now faced imminent removal from Australia. It is not hard to imagine the build-up of tension as some detainees walked

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free, while others received rejection notices. However, at the time of the riot, only a handful of people had actually exhausted their appeal rights and been finally refused refugee status. Largely overlooked in the discussion of the Woomera violence was the existence of another larger group of around sixty detainees; they, arguably, had greater reason to feel aggrieved because they had been excluded from the process of seeking asylum altogether. These were people ‘screened out’ at the compliance interview conducted shortly after they stepped off a boat onto Australian soil. It was determined that they ‘had not sought to engage Australia’s protection obligations’ because they had not mentioned the words ‘refugee’ or ‘asylum’, or indicated any serious fear of returning to their homeland in their first contact with Australian officials. A mother may have said, for example, that she came to Australia ‘for the sake of her children’.That comment would not be interpreted as a call for Australia to consider her a refugee. She would not be informed of her right to apply for refugee status, nor of her right to see a lawyer. The Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1988, states (in Principle 13):‘Any person shall at the moment of arrest and at the commencement of detention or imprisonment, or promptly thereafter, be provided by the authority responsible for his arrest, detention or imprisonment, respectively with information on and an explanation of his rights and how to avail himself of such rights’.The Body of Principles goes on to say (in Principle 17) that a detainee is entitled to legal counsel and ‘shall be informed of his right by the competent authority promptly after his arrest’. Unfortunately, these international principles do not find watertight backing in Australia’s Migration Act. In fact, Section 193 of the Act effectively removes any obligation on an officer of the Commonwealth to inform a detainee of his or her legal rights, if that detainee has not successfully cleared immigration. Boat people seeking asylum fall into this category and since late 1994 it has become routine departmental practice not to advise them of their right to see a lawyer or of their right to apply for refugee status. Those people in Woomera who were ‘screened out’ at the first hurdle had watched other detainees receive professional advice, had seen them lodge formal applications for protection visas and heard about their interviews with Immigration department officials. The ‘screened out’ detainees had no real understanding of why they were being refused the same opportunity and in the weeks before the riot some of them became frantic and despairing. It is quite possible that this was a primary cause of the violence at Woomera in August 2000. It has been documented by ABC TV’s ‘Lateline’ that a similar situation was the spark for violence that broke out at the Curtin

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detention centre almost one year later on 1 June 2001. An Immigration department press release said the disturbance involved a group of about fifty people who had been told that they had ‘no legal basis on which to remain in Australia’. What the press release did not say was that these fifty people were Hazaras from Afghanistan, members of an ethnic group known to suffer intense persecution by the ruling Taliban militia. Nor did it reveal that the claims for refugee status by this group had not been formally assessed — like the inmates in Woomera, they had been ruled out of the system altogether after a cursory on-arrival interview, when it was deemed that they were not seeking to engage Australia’s protection obligation under the 1951 Refugee Convention.The Hazaras had been held in separation detention for up to three months, without access to telephone, television or radio.Their repeated requests to see a lawyer had produced no results, except taunting from guards who told them they would first have to find the money to pay for one. The Hazaras went on a hunger strike and after several days a group of ten men who continued to refuse food were moved to an isolation block.There they began bashing their heads against the walls and slashing themselves. When one of the Hazara men collapsed, his friends mistakenly believed that he had died, and the unrest escalated into a riot. The Hazara men were later admitted into the refugee-determination process, found to be refugees and given temporary protection visas to stay in Australia. In late May 2001, after five major disturbances at Port Hedland and Curtin in as many months, the Secretary of the Immigration department, Bill Farmer, told a Senate committee that the population of Australia’s detention centres was becoming ‘increasingly noncompliant’. He suggested that the escalating violence in the centres reflected the fact that there was a growing proportion of detainees who had had their applications for refugee status rejected. Mr Farmer said that around one in three detainees were now in this category. In theory, these ‘failed’ asylum seekers are awaiting removal from Australia; in practice, many of them face indefinite detention because there is nowhere for Australia to send them. Australia has agreements with some countries, such as China, to return nationals who arrive here without authorisation, but such agreements are largely lacking in the Middle East. Australia has no diplomatic ties with Iraq and so cannot return people there. It is very difficult to find countries willing to accept the return of displaced Palestinians. (The only country to which Australia returned Palestinians between July 1999 and April 2002 was Syria.) Until the fall of the Taliban it was impossible to conceive of returning people to Afghanistan. Iran will only accept the return of people who depart Australia voluntarily.

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Of the 1550 people in immigration detention in Australia in April 2002, one had been recognised as a refugee and was awaiting release into the community. The rest could be divided into three broad categories. The first group (444 detainees) had never sought asylum (and were presumably ‘overstayers’ who had failed to leave Australia after their visas expired). The second group (589 detainees) were in the process of applying for refugee status (including court appeals). The final group (516 people) were ‘failed’ asylum seekers awaiting removal from Australia.These detainees had either been rejected at all levels of the refugee-determination process, or had been ‘screened out’ of the process on arrival. The majority of these detainees (334 people) had been in detention for at least one year. Most of these ‘lifers’ (as they are disparagingly called by some detention-centre officers) were Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians and Palestinians. Among them were nine people who had been locked up for more than three years. It is hardly surprising that some of these detainees may feel — in Mr Farmer’s words — that ‘they have nothing to lose’. While Australian diplomats and immigration officials try to twist the arms of foreign governments, hundreds of people face indefinite detention. Their only ‘crime’ is that their claim for refugee status was not strong enough. This does not mean that they sought to abuse the system (although some abuse no doubt occurs). For most asylum seekers the difference between success and failure is a matter of degree.As Guy Goodwin-Gill, professor of International Refugee Law at Oxford University, told me in an interview, amongst those who fail to qualify as refugees under the 1951 Convention, ‘we do often find a very significant number who have valid reasons, other valid reasons, for not at present being required to return to their countries’. Under most European systems, such people are allowed to remain in the host country, although not necessarily with the same entitlements as a Convention refugee. Under Australia’s all-or-nothing system they risk being locked up indefinitely, unless the minister for Immigration chooses to use his discretion to grant them a visa. To acknowledge the conditions that may give rise to violence in the detention centres is not to excuse arson, riots and attacks on staff. Detainees who commit criminal acts should be prosecuted. Legal proceedings can also help to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounds the detention centres, clarifying what took place and why detainees were moved to violence. We know, for example, that violence in Port Hedland on 11 May 2001 was sparked when an Iranian teenager resisted ACM officers who were attempting to move him, along with four men, to the police lockup.What happened next is disputed. According to one account, baton-wielding guards beat the Iranian youth, even though he was handcuffed. The minister’s office denies this and says

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that the riot began because ‘someone had started screaming that officers were beating them’ — in other words, a deliberate false alarm. It’s hard to believe that guards would beat a handcuffed detainee. But we know that this is exactly what happened just a few months earlier, in January 2001, when an officer twice beat a detainee with a baton on the arms, legs and body. During the first attack the detainee was held by other guards; during the second attack he was handcuffed on a bed. The officer was the centre’s operations manager, effectively second-incharge at Port Hedland.After pleading guilty to the attack, he was given a suspended sentence by the South Hedland Magistrates Court. This bashing occurred directly before a riot at Port Hedland on 21 January and was probably the catalyst for that unrest. After the riot the minister called for greater powers for detention-centre officers. He wanted to make it easier to use sedatives — or chemical restraints — to control threatening behaviour by detainees and he wanted to give ACM officers the power to conduct strip searches, including searches of children as young as ten years of age. After some amendment, this measure was passed through parliament with the support of the opposition Labor Party. It is a disturbing sequence of events. An officer brutally bashes a detainee, other detainees riot and the minister’s solution is to give the officers even more power. If any of Australia’s correctional institutions were to have such an appalling record of violence it would be seen as cause for a judicial inquiry to take place into the operation of the prison system. As Professor Richard Harding, the inspector of Custodial Services in Western Australia commented on ABC TV’s ‘Lateline’ program, if a riot breaks out in a closed institution ‘it is always because the bulk of the population find what is going on unacceptable’. If the conditions in the immigration detention centres were replicated in Australia’s jails, he said, ‘they would become ungovernable’. < > One year after my visit to Woomera, the construction program that had kept Wagnitz Building Contractors so busy was completed, and the facility was equipped to incarcerate up to 2000 people as Australia’s premier immigration detention centre. It was divided by internal fences into different compounds, called Oscar, India, November, Sierra and Mike, so that new arrivals could be kept apart from detainees whose applications for refugee status were in progress, and so that detainees who were regarded as difficult to manage could be separated out.The Immigration department spent $20 million on the capital works, including $1.7 million to upgrade the perimeter fence that was pushed over in the June 2000 protest. The cyclone-mesh, 4 m in height and

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topped with barbed wire, was augmented with a much more solid, and even more forbidding barrier, made from closely spaced steel palisades. In addition to the added security, some improvements were made to camp life. Radios confiscated from detainees upon their arrival were given back, and from October 2000 daily newspapers were delivered to the camp for the detainees (although deliveries were halted again whenever there was any trouble). It became possible to make local calls from the pay-phone (as long as you had the money to purchase a card to operate the phone). A better equipped medical centre was opened. It had a first-aid area with three beds and two separate consulting rooms.The centre was staffed with general and psychiatric nurses, psychologists and medical practitioners. The doctors worked Monday to Friday and a doctor was on call overnight and throughout the weekend. Nurses were rostered to work day and night shifts so that the medical centre was always attended by at least one nurse. Psychologists’ services were provided during the day. Belatedly, DIMA and ACM also took up the suggestion made months earlier by the Reverend Tom Atherton and Father Jim Monaghan, and organised excursions into Woomera township for children and adults to visit the swimming pool. On weekdays children were also given the opportunity to leave the camp in the mornings to attend classes at Woomera’s disused Catholic primary school (although the right to schooling would be withheld if a child was perceived to be misbehaving in the detention centre). Despite the improvements Woomera could not throw off its reputation as a ‘hell-hole’ and the centre continued to be plagued by outbreaks of unrest, hunger strikes, suicide attempts and acts of self-harm. Psychologist Lyn Bender went to work at Woomera in early March 2002. She had responded to an advertisement inviting expressions of interest to work in the detention centres.Within a week of putting her CV in the mail, she was called by ACM to ask if she could start at Woomera immediately. Lyn Bender was amazed to be offered the work without any kind of interview, not even questions over the telephone. ‘It seems a pretty strange way to hire staff for such a stressful and unusual job,’ she says. On the day she arrived, the first thing Lyn Bender saw was around fifteen people lying in shallow graves that they had cut from the rockhard ground. Some had asked their fellow detainees to ‘bury’ them by shovelling dirt into the graves until only their faces were left exposed and some ended up in the medical centre suffering from dehydration after lying all day in the hot sun.The protesters were mostly Iraqis.They had made signs saying things like ‘If you are going to kill us, then let us die!’,‘Try to think of our position’, or simply ‘Help us please!’ Some of the protesters were on hunger strike and some drank shampoo. Some

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slept in their graves overnight. Other hunger-striking detainees camped out near by, constructing makeshift shelters from blankets. Lyn Bender was appalled. ‘I didn’t see it as a staged thing,’ she says. ‘It was just so confronting.’ Psychiatric nurse Dr Glenda Koutroulis had already been employed at Woomera for about a week. She says it was ‘chilling’ to watch the men at work and then realise that they were digging graves. She saw the protest as a symbolic expression of the way the men felt. ‘They would often say to me that they were dead in Woomera,’ she says. ‘They would often say to me “We would be better off in our own country where death would be quicker. Here it is like torture, it goes on and on and on and on.”’ Lyn Bender has worked as a registered psychologist since 1990 and has a master’s degree in Education, with a major in counselling. She spent eleven years working for the Melbourne Lifeline service, the last four as manager. Dr Glenda Koutroulis is a psychiatric nurse who has a doctorate in sociology. She has been working in the medical system for thirty years. Nothing either woman had done previously in their professional lives prepared them for Woomera. A few days into the job, Lyn Bender was confronted by a man with a razor threatening to cut his throat. One of Dr Koutroulis’s first experiences was to have a group of boys flock around her with stones and pieces of glass in their hands. ‘They were saying “Miss! Miss! We cut ourselves! We cut ourselves! Cutting good! Cutting very good! We get visa!”’ She says she had the impression she was working in a giant intensive-care unit.‘I have never come across a confined population of people who exhibit such distress,’ she says. ‘There were people with their heads hung low behind the wire.There was no range of expression, there was no animation.’ After working at Woomera both women felt compelled to speak out, despite the secrecy provisions in their contracts with ACM. Interviewed independently of one another, they gave consistent accounts of the extent of the problems. Both women say that during the six weeks they worked at Woomera there were daily incidents of self-harm. On some days extra mattresses had to be put on the floor of the clinic to treat all the wounded. During the same six-week period they estimate that there were around fifteen suicide attempts serious enough to require the detainee be taken to hospital for a medical examination. Hanging was most common, although there were also overdoses and wrist-slashing. In one case during a riot at the centre, a woman who had been experiencing bouts of psychosis walked into a burning building. In another incident a young boy deliberately drank shampoo. Sometimes suicide attempts and acts of self-harm were not taken seriously by the guards, and detainees were not always referred to the medical centre nurse or to the psychologist for attention. ‘I can’t think of any other place where I have worked where attempting to

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hang yourself would not be considered a serious suicide attempt,’ says Dr Koutroulis.To treat the suicide attempts as ‘sham’, she says, displays a crass approach to the problem that diminishes and demeans how people are feeling. ‘It is just another component of the disrespect that the people felt there.’ The most fundamental problem when Lyn Bender and Glenda Koutroulis started at Woomera was not a shortage of medical staff. At that time five hundred detainees were attended by two doctors, three psychiatric nurses, three general nurses and two psychologists, although the number of health personnel would vary over time according to how many people were in detention. Most medical professionals were employed on short-term contracts, so that staffing could be cut back quickly if the number of detainees went down, or increased quickly if there was an upsurge in numbers, or in the level of protests and disturbances. Regardless of the size of the medical team, Lyn Bender says, it could not adequately address the detainees’ problems because they were confronting symptoms of psychological distress caused by the detention itself. Lyn Bender says a visit to the clinic to complain about a headache, a stomach ache or a sore foot was the only legitimate way in which detainees could seek some sort of care. Not that she thinks that patients were malingering. She believes that most genuinely experienced pain produced ‘by the stress, the constriction, the boredom, the uncertainty, the fear, the trauma’. She says the detainees would come into the medical centre because they could not stand it in the compound any more. When they could not stand the medical centre anymore they would go back. Then they might commit an act of self-harm, which led to them being separated out and put in an observation room. When they could not stand the observation room any more, they would return to the compound once again. ‘It was like birds flapping against a cage,’ she says. ‘No place was any good, but they just had to keep moving.’ Dr Koutroulis cites the case of one disturbed man who was comforted by being in the medical centre, but who was not allowed to stay there. She says he would collapse in the compound in a screaming fit, having lost all sense of where he was. Fellow detainees or ACM officers would bring him to the medical centre for treatment and he would settle down. After an hour or two he would be taken back to the compound and he would collapse screaming once again. Dr Koutroulis says this would happen ‘over and over and over again, three or four times a day’. Many detainees were prescribed anti-depressants and sleeping tablets. Some had become heavily reliant on the pain-killer Panadeine Forte, which contains the opiate codeine. Staff in the medical centre would joke about them getting their daily fix. Dr Koutroulis says to view them as ‘addicts’ was misleading because it ignored the dynamics

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of detention-centre life. She says that forced withdrawal in detention ‘could give rise to more risky and hurtful behaviours’ than the continued prescription of Panadeine Forte under medical supervision. Lyn Bender says that ACM was ‘very proud of the fact that there had never been a “successful” suicide at Woomera’. The company had deployed High Risk Assessment Teams, whose job was to keep watch on anyone who had committed or seriously threatened self-harm. Sometimes there were as many as sixty people on the high-risk watch list during Lyn Bender’s time at Woomera and there were never less than forty. In the most serious cases the detainee would be put in solitary ‘observation rooms’ and checked every two minutes. Detainees judged to be slightly less volatile would be checked every fifteen minutes, which would almost certainly involve being woken up at night by the beam of a torch and the squawk of an officer’s walky-talky. After that the level of observation might be reduced to once every thirty minutes, or once every one or two hours, depending on the risk assessment of the detainee in question. Lyn Bender says that the assessment teams did ‘foil the suicides’ but did not ‘reduce the behaviours’ associated with acts of self-harm. ‘The whole way of managing suicide was inappropriate and based on their [ACM’s] fear of liability, not on the good of the person.’ According to Dr Koutroulis, the word ‘prevention’ was not in the vocabulary at Woomera. One day she asked an officer for the name of a detainee who had attempted suicide.The officer replied ‘I don’t know. I don’t get that fucking close to them.’ Like many staff, the officer would simply call detainees by the immigration department code number given to them on arrival in Australia. Dr Koutroulis says the detainees ‘were always being herded and called by a number’ and eventually came to see themselves as animals and to see Woomera as a zoo. She witnessed medications being dispensed to detainees through the wire mesh of security fences so that nurses would not have to enter the compound. Dr Koutroulis describes it as the most degrading experience of her professional life. One detainee said to her,‘If you Australians think that I am an animal, then tell me that I am an animal so that I come to think of myself as an animal and don’t expect to be treated like a human’. The assessments of life in Woomera offered by Lyn Bender and Glenda Koutroulis are based on only six weeks’ experience working in the detention centre in March and April 2002 but the general thrust of their comments is supported by another psychologist with more extensive experience there. Harold Bilboe worked at Woomera for a total of fourteen months between September 2000 and January 2002. He says that long-term detention ‘raises serious clinical concerns’ because it results in the ‘traumatising’ of individuals in a way that could have a

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long-term psychological impact on both adults and children. Harold Bilboe was particularly alarmed by the case of a six-year-old Iranian boy called Shayan Badraie, who became the subject of national debate in the media in August 2001, after ABC TV’s ‘Four Corners’ program broadcast footage smuggled out of Villawood detention centre. The secretly recorded video pictures showed the boy lying listlessly in his parents’ arms while Shayan’s father Mohammad described his son’s condition. ‘Our child won’t drink water, he won’t eat and he doesn’t move for four or five days at a time. He’s very fearful and anxious and just sits in a corner not speaking.’ By the time the footage was recorded, Shayan and his family had already been in detention for seventeen months. Harold Bilboe had met the family when he first went to work at Woomera.‘That child was normal when he arrived at Woomera,’ he says. ‘He witnessed incidents of violence and self-harm and became more and more withdrawn.’ When the parents’ claim for refugee status was rejected at the Refugee Review Tribunal, the family was moved from the main compound into the Sierra compound, where self-harm and conflict were ‘a daily occurrence’. Harold Bilboe says Sierra was used to hold ‘high-risk’ and ‘difficult’ detainees and the Badraie family was the only family in the compound.At the time, the ratio of men to women in Sierra was about sixty to one. As a result women did not leave their rooms, even to eat meals. Harold Bilboe says it was ‘totally inappropriate’ for the family to be detained there. As Shayan’s contact with other children diminished and the general incidence of self-harm and violence around him increased, so the boy’s withdrawal accelerated. Harold Bilboe wrote a report to ACM (and copied to DIMA) urging that Shayan and his family be transferred elsewhere. There was no action. He wrote another report. Still there was no response. Two months later, after Harold Bilboe wrote a third report, the Badraie family was finally transferred to Villawood. The psychologist was surprised that no one in the new detention centre bothered to make contact with him to discuss the case or seek background information on Shayan’s condition.After the ‘Four Corners’ program went to air, the Immigration minister suggested that Shayan’s malaise was the result of pre-existing family problems. He was echoed by some media commentators, who hinted that Shayan’s parents had encouraged him to refuse food and drink as a way of getting the family out of detention. Harold Bilboe says it is outrageous to blame the parents in this way. Finally, in August 2002, after the Federal Court directed the Refugee Review Tribunal to reconsider the Badraie case, Shayan and his family were recognised as refugees and granted temporary protection visas to stay in Australia. Lyn Bender’s advocacy for her clients in Woomera did not endear her to ACM and two days before the end of her contract, she was asked

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to leave. Shortly before midnight, as she was about to knock off from what would be her last shift, a guard asked her to attend to a young man from Iran. He was just seventeen years old when he arrived at Woomera. Now he was an adult, having spent more than twelve months in detention. She took the young man to her office, and, as there were no interpreters available in the detention centre at that time of night, she dialled the Telephone Interpreter Service. As soon as they could communicate, the young man confronted her: ‘Don’t talk to me about hope or patience,’ he said.‘Don’t tell me to wait. I have been here a year and you are my eleventh psychologist.’ He reeled off a list of the anti-depressants and other medication that he was taking, and told her how deeply unhappy he was. ‘I am all on my own. I am the youngest adult in my compound. I have no one to talk to. I am persecuted in my own country and now I am persecuted here too. Why are you doing this? I can’t stand any more.’ The young man had already attempted suicide several times. He had jumped from the roof of a building. He had cut himself. He had drunk shampoo and he had been on a hunger strike. He said he would keep trying to kill himself because he had no hope. After listening for an hour, and acknowledging the truth of his statements, Lyn Bender managed to calm the young man down. But she parted from him with a heavy heart. ‘I felt really terrible because I was leaving,’ she says. ‘He was very much a motherless young kid and there was nothing I could say that would actually provide a bridge of support for him in the future.And I think that is appalling management of suicidal people.’ < > By early 2002 it was clear that the enormous sums of money ploughed into creating a purpose-built immigration detention centre at Woomera had been wasted. The Immigration minister, Philip Ruddock, announced that parts of the facility would be closed and its capacity reduced. The members of his own detention advisory group called on him publicly to shut it down altogether.The government had invested yet more money to construct another centre 200 km further south, at Baxter, near Port Augusta.With a capacity to detain 1200 people, Baxter is only slightly less barren than Woomera, although closer to services.The facility is divided into nine compounds, smaller than those at Woomera, which Mr Ruddock says will make it ‘more effective in distribution and management of detainees’. He also says that the environment ‘without razor wire’ would have ‘much more amenity associated with it’. What he did not say is that the razor wire would be replaced by an electric fence designed to give a non-lethal, but stunning jolt to anyone who tried to scale it.

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On the wall of the dining-room of Woomera’s Eldo Hotel, clashing violently with the electric blue carpet, is a huge patchwork quilt made by local schoolchildren.The quilt celebrates the history of Woomera. It shows black gibber stone against the sandhills and native animals around a waterhole; there is grey-blue saltbush and the brilliant red of the Sturt Desert Pea; there are the domes of the satellite base and its radar dishes, and the dramatic centrepiece — a three-dimensional black and silver rocket, 2 m long, with cloth flames spewing from its tail. I can’t help wondering how the quilt might one day be updated. How will the children of Woomera depict the detention centre up the road with its reputation for suicide attempts, self-mutilation, hunger strikes and riots?

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It was because she was in a hurry that Fatima decided to serve up plain boiled rice with dinner. She will not do it again. In her homeland Fatima would usually fry the rice in a little oil before cooking it and make it fragrant with spices. But that night she was late home from her studies, the kids were hungry and she was in a rush to get them fed. When she brought the steaming bowl to the table, the three children first stared in disbelief, and then burst into tears. For nine-and-a-half months at the detention centre, plain boiled rice had been standard fare at lunch and dinner. It symbolised the monotony of their lives in detention — their boredom, their complete lack of control, their absence of choice. When the children saw their mother put a bowl of plain white rice on the kitchen table, it brought fear and uncertainty welling back up to the surface and tears spilling down their cheeks. They laugh when they tell me this, but the story reveals wounds still tender. It is March 2000 and Fatima and her family have only been ‘outside’ for six months.We are sitting in the sparsely furnished loungeroom of their temporary home in a nondescript street in an industrial Melbourne suburb. They seem to be settling in well. The neighbours’ kids have been knocking on the door, asking Fatima’s children to come out and play, but she wants them to stay inside because it is nearly time to eat. Although our appointment had been arranged long before, my arrival has caught Fatima off-guard.We seem to have got our dates confused and she was not expecting me until the next day. She serves milky tea, intensely sweet and flavoured with cardamom, and apologises for not preparing a traditional meal as she had planned. Instead, Fatima insists on ordering (and paying for) a takeaway treat of pizza and coke. After the meal her two daughters play happily on the carpet, engrossed with their Barbie dolls, while Fatima’s son, the eldest, joins in our conversation.

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Ahmed is still at primary school, but he seems almost grown-up. He is acutely aware of his family’s precarious financial situation and talks about getting a part-time job as soon as he turns fifteen, so that he can contribute to the household income.Ahmed keeps a mindful eye on his little sisters and is attentive towards me as a guest, although initially suspicious about the purpose of my visit. Soon after we begin talking, he discreetly asks Fatima who I am and why I am asking so many questions. Fatima relays the question to me. I tell Ahmed about my plan to write a book about asylum seekers in Australia and that I want to build up a picture of life in detention, particularly as it affects children. My answer seems to allay his concerns and he begins to relax.‘Ahmed is the man of the family,’ jokes Fatima, in gentle praise of his protective attitude towards her. He beams and squirms in his chair with embarrassed pleasure. Ahmed says he wants to study to be a doctor, so that he can help find a cure for cancer. For most of the time in detention he could not even go to school. If his mother had not been so tenacious, Ahmed would have missed a whole year. In Maribyrnong detention centre, where Fatima was held, Ahmed was for a time the only child of primary school age and there were no primary classes on offer. Fatima asked if he could be enrolled outside the detention centre. She was rebuffed, even though a local school was willing to accept him as a pupil and even though she was willing to cover any associated costs from her own savings. Fatima was told that it was impossible for her son to attend an external school because he did not have a valid visa.At that point she might have given up but for some friendly advice from a sympathetic cleaner in the detention centre, who told her that school for her son was a right, not a privilege. This view is supported by the government’s own Immigration Detention Standards. Paragraph 9.4.1 states unequivocally that ‘social and educational programs appropriate to the child’s age and abilities are available to all children in detention’. Fatima pursued the school option and encountered fresh obstacles. First she was told that there was a problem with ensuring Ahmed’s safety, then it was the cost of the uniform, then the problem was with the extra resources required for a detention officer to escort him to and fro. Eventually, with the help of her lawyer and the intervention of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Fatima won the battle, and Ahmed got to go to school. By then he had already been in detention for six months. This was just one of Fatima’s many campaigns in detention; campaigns that, as a fluent English-speaker, she was better equipped to wage than most detainees. ‘At first,’ she says, ‘there were no toys, no pencils, no paper, nothing. Outside, there was just dead grass and one tree. There was no play equipment, not even a soccer ball. It was like leaving the children in the desert.’

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Neither was there any milk for the children.‘The only milk was the coffee milk,’ she tells me, indicating with two fingers on the bottom of a cup how much each person was allowed. By saving her own milk and the coffee milk to which the children were entitled, Fatima managed to prepare a bottle for her youngest, still a toddler, to go to sleep with each night. Other food for children, like cheese and fruit, were also scarce.‘Once a week we got an apple,’ says Fatima,‘and once a week we got a banana. One per person per week.’ Breakfast in the detention centre is served at 7:30 am, lunch at 12:30 pm and dinner at 5 pm.At 9:30 pm there is supper of tea or coffee with sweet biscuits, the culinary high-point of the day, according to Ahmed. ‘Everyone looked forward to the cookies,’ he says. ‘We were supposed to get two each but there were never enough.’ Sometimes one of Fatima’s children would be asleep, or simply not hungry, at the regular mealtime, and she would put something aside in the fridge for later on. Using money she had brought with her to Australia, Fatima also bought supplementary supplies of bread, milk, juice and peanut butter. She tried to avoid bringing these precious extras to the table at mealtimes because then she would feel compelled to share them with other detainees. However, getting to the kitchen out of hours to feed her children depended on the whim of the officer on duty. Again, as a fluent speaker of English, Fatima was in a better position than most other detainees. On one occasion a Somali woman wanted to get formula to settle her baby, who had woken up crying at midnight.The formula had been supplied by members of the Somali community outside the detention centre, but the guard on duty initially refused her access to the fridge. She made a fuss and he eventually relented, but only after checking for himself that the infant was actually crying.Two years after Fatima and her children had been released detention the same problems were identified at Woomera. Despite the clear statement in the Immigration Detention Standards that ‘the special needs of babies and young children are met’ (Paragraph 9.3.1), an investigation carried out for the State government of South Australia found that the provision of food was so regimented at Woomera that children under five could not be fed outside adult mealtimes. According to South Australia’s Social Justice minister, Stephanie Key, if children do not eat the adult food in the dining mess ‘then they just don’t eat’. The finding was disputed by the Immigration department and by John Hodges from the Immigration minister’s Independent Detention Advisory Group, who says that detainees at Woomera are able to keep food for children and babies in separate fridges near their sleeping quarters. Ahmed says that there was never enough food, that people in the detention centre were always hungry and that the quality of the food was poor.There is no objective evidence that immigration detainees in

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Australia are underfed, or that their diet is in any way nutritionally inadequate, yet Ahmed’s complaints are echoed by almost all former detainees that I have spoken to, regardless of whether they were held in Port Hedland, Curtin,Villawood or Maribyrnong. Meals are also one of the few ‘events’ that break up a detainee’s day, so it is hardly surprising that food becomes the focus of gripes and dissatisfaction. Fatima’s experience with rice indicates how difficult it is to cater to the tastes of the culturally diverse populations at the detention centres. Detainees from China prefer a short-grain rice that tends to clump together; they may object to the aroma and texture of Fatima’s preferred long-grain variety with its separate grains, even more so if the rice is flavoured with a spice like cardamom. A detainee from Angola or Croatia will have different tastes altogether. Giving detainees more control over their diets can ameliorate this problem. According to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the quality of food at Port Hedland improved dramatically in October 1998 when innovations by the catering manager allowed most detainees to eat meals cooked by a chosen member of their own cultural group.At the time there were just twenty-five people in a centre designed to hold more than 800. As detainee numbers began to climb again, variety was reduced, although in May 2000 detainees could still choose between four separate menus: halal, Asian, Indian or vegetarian. Mustafa, his wife and their three children were in detention at Port Hedland in 1999 as numbers began to swell with the arrival of new boats. ‘When we first arrived [in February], it looked OK,’ he recalls. ‘The detention centre was not too crowded. It looked new and we felt the staff were very kind.’ As the detention centre began to fill up, Mustafa says, pressure on the staff increased and their mood began to change. ‘It is very bad for them. Their temper is getting bad. They would say to us, “Why you run from your country? Why we are feeding you? Why don’t you speak English?”.’ Mustafa’s three boys were aged seven, five and four when they arrived in Port Hedland. By that stage the family had already spent more than eighteen months in international limbo, as ‘refugees in orbit’ looking for a safe place to land. Mustafa is from Algeria, but he had been working and studying in Saudi Arabia since 1993. He had remained there three years longer than his permit allowed because he was afraid to go back to his homeland. Government forces had killed his brother, and two other members of his politically active family had been imprisoned and tortured. In 1997, fearful of being forced back to Algeria by the Saudis under an accord agreed by the Arab League, and with no hope of obtaining a legitimate travel document, Mustafa bought false passports for his family and they tried to make their way to Canada. The ruse was detected in Singapore and he and the family

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were put in detention: Mustafa in one jail, his wife and the boys in another. They spent a year there while the Singapore authorities tried to work out what to do with them. Eventually, Mustafa came up with a solution, which they accepted. He organised, via a fellow detainee, to pay US$2000 to contacts in Bangkok to get another set of false passports sent to him in jail. Singaporean officials turned a blind eye, and, armed with fake Danish travel documents, Mustafa and his family were shoved across the border into Malaysia. They immediately took a train north to Thailand. The family then spent another six months holed up in a single room in Bangkok while Mustafa tried to organise tickets and visas to go somewhere else. He paid US$5200 to smugglers who arranged seats on a flight to Holland, but again the plan came to nothing. Check-in staff at the airport were suspicious and demanded that he produce further proof of his Danish identity, such as a driver’s licence or a credit card.When he failed to do so, they turned him away. Mustafa went back to the smugglers and asked for a refund.They refused and threatened to turn him over to the Thai police if he made trouble. Friends sent Mustafa the last of his savings from Saudi Arabia. He had just enough money to try again. This time the destination was Australia, but the smugglers told Mustafa he could not fly directly from Bangkok. ‘Everyone knows Bangkok is a transit point for Australia,’ he says. ‘The airport checks are very tough there.’ So Mustafa and his family flew back in the direction from which they had originally come a year-and-a-half earlier, west to Tanzania via the United Arab Emirates. Immigration officials in Tanzania immediately suspected that their passports were false and demanded US$1000 in bribes before they would let the family into the country. Mustafa bargained them down to $200. The family then got visas for Zambia and travelled on by train. From Zambia they went overland by bus to Zimbabwe, where Mustafa paid $90 for visas at the border. He chuckles in recounting this part of his ordeal because the inexperienced young border official was apparently convinced that Mustafa really was a rich Danish tourist, with plans to visit Victoria Falls and play golf. Harare is one of the few African cities with direct flights to Australia. Mustafa bought tickets on a Saturday morning so that the travel agent could not insist on checking his documents with the Australian High Commission or the Danish Embassy. The flight left on the following Monday. ‘When we landed in Australia it was really amazing,’ he says. ‘I had tried too many times. I did not believe that I could succeed. I thought the bad luck is following me everywhere. I thought when I try to land in Australia, the land will move beneath me so that the plane cannot touch down.’

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After arriving in Sydney, Mustafa and his family presented themselves at the border as refugees. They were initially detained at Villawood detention centre, where they met other Algerians, including other children.‘We felt happy, for one-and-a-half years my boys had not met any other children who spoke their own language. They had had no one to play with,’ says Mustafa.Two days later, his family was transferred to Port Hedland.‘I expected to be locked up for six months,’ he tells me.‘I thought in myself, better to expect the worst thing’. Even so, he underestimated. Detention in Port Hedland was ‘paradise’ compared to Singapore, according to Mustafa. Even so, it was very hard for the children:‘When they see some of the other families going out, like some Iraqi families who left after just twenty days in detention, it was very hard for them. In the end we tried to stop the children from seeing when other people left.The kids ask every day “when is our visa coming? when is our visa coming?” “Very soon”, I would say, “very soon.” One of my kids got hold a piece of paper with some writing on it and showed to other kids in the detention centre and said “See, this is my visa! I got my visa!”.’ Mustafa worked long hours cooking rice in the detention centre kitchen. ‘I started at 6 am and worked until 12 noon,’ he says. ‘Lifting heavy bags of rice, 25 kg each, carrying two at time, working in the hot steam. Always sweeping the floor. After lunch I would start again at 2 pm and work until 6 pm or 7 pm. I would finish at dinner time.’ Initially, Mustafa says, he was paid $10 per shift, or about $1 per hour. After a newspaper story drew attention to the low wages, the pay was increased to $15. Mustafa says the heavy lifting has left him with a bad back. Despite the conditions, however, the competition for the kitchen jobs was intense. ‘With 700 people in the detention centre, it was very tough to get a job,’ he explains.‘If you know the kitchen manager, they let you work and sometimes they give you respect because they know you have a family. I needed the money for the kids.They grow out of their clothes and need new ones. I also bought them sweets as a treat.’ If there was no work in the kitchen, Mustafa would try for other jobs, such as cutting the grass or weeding. Sometimes he would help his wife when she managed to get rostered for a week of toilet-cleaning duties, for which she would earn $5 per day. Mustafa says that musters were carried out at Port Hedland every few hours.The different sections of the camp would be closed off from one another and detainees would have to wait while the guards walked around to count the number of people in each area to make sure that no one was missing. At night the security checks were more intrusive. As a family, Mustafa and his wife and children were entitled to their own room, but this was no guarantee of privacy. ‘It was a very

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punishing time,’ Mustafa recalls. ‘Sometimes, when the guards come to check, they wake you up and you cannot control yourself. Some officers talk loudly on the two-way radio and wake the children.’ In Port Hedland checks are only carried out three times per night, unless there have been escapes or disturbances. In some detention centres, such as Villawood in Sydney and Maribyrnong in Melbourne, where Fatima was held, the Australasian Correctional Management (ACM) officers check the dormitories every hour. ‘The guards throw the door open and then slam it shut again with a bang,’ says Fatima. ‘They would have their two-way radios turned up loud and would shine a big flashlight into the room to count us. Sometimes they would shine it direct into your eyes. Every night they woke up the children.’ ‘Yes,’ says Richard, ‘many of my fellow officers are bastards to the detainees and treat them like dogs.’ He is an ACM officer who has worked for the company for more than two years. At the risk of losing his job, Richard agreed to answer my questions about life in the detention centres. Contact with the media is a clear breach of his contract. ‘Some officers are just extremely inconsiderate,’ he says. ‘Even if I turn my radio down, sometimes the officer I am with does not and they open doors loudly and shake their keys and so on.’ Richard explains it is sometimes necessary to shine a torch onto a detainee’s face if they are ‘under obs’ (that is, under observation) as a potential suicide risk or escapee. When someone is considered to be at risk of suicide, an officer needs to be completely sure that the detainee is all right. In the case of potential escapees the officer needs to confirm the exact identity of the person in the bed. ‘It’s rude but if anything was to happen and we mark the obs sheet as “OK”, then the consequences are high.’ Richard is mindful of the detainees’ welfare and the stress of their situation: ‘I really feel sorry for the long-term detainees who have to live in the appalling conditions day-in day-out, never knowing how long they will have to endure it.’ Other officers may disparagingly label Richard a ‘carebear’ but medical professionals who have worked in detention centres confirm Richard’s account of the attitudes of officers. Psychologist Lyn Bender says some officers ‘really tried’ to help detainees while others ‘operated out of a very strict military model, though not perhaps in an abusive way’.A few she describes as ‘sadistic’. Lyn Bender says ACM boasts that it provides detention-centre officers (they do not like to be called guards) with six weeks’ training, but she says people are being transferred from providing security in industries like mining, where people skills are a low priority, to a situation where people skills are paramount. The result was that some officers were ‘flailing around’ because they had ‘no idea of people’s distress or how to manage trauma’. The Australian Workers’ Union, which represents detention-centre officers, has also complained about inadequate

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training. After touring the Port Hedland detention centre and interviewing staff, the union’s director of Occupational Health and Safety, Yossi Berger, accused ACM of seeking to save money by skimping on training. ‘Fatigued, poorly trained, at times distressed and sometimes abused officers … are exploited by ACM and opportunistically managed,’ he wrote.‘It is a calculated, delinquent and offensive failure under the simple requirements of duty of care.’ < > Australia is not alone in detaining asylum seekers. Many countries routinely take people into custody for brief periods when they are first apprehended in order to carry out identity and health checks. Custody is also common for failed asylum-seekers who refuse to leave a country voluntarily. Nevertheless, the Australian policy of mandatory and indefinite detention for asylum seekers who cross the border without authorisation is a far more severe and inflexible regime than that imposed in countries with comparable political and legal systems. In Canada, for example, officers of the Immigration and Refugee Board have considerable discretion as to whether or not to resort to detention. An official guide to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act 2001 says that detention may be imposed where officers have ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that a person is likely to pose ‘a danger to the public’, that his or her entry to Canada is inadmissible ‘on grounds of security or of violating human or international rights’, that a person’s identity has not been established, or that a person will not turn up to interviews and hearings to determine their status. In the latter situation the Board’s Immigration Division can impose a bond or other reporting requirements as an alternative to detention. When detention is imposed, it must be reviewed by the Immigration Division within forty-eight hours, then again at least once during the next seven days, and again at least once during each subsequent thirty-day period. The guidelines affirm the principle that ‘a minor child shall be detained only as a measure of last resort’.The United States initially detains asylum seekers who arrive at airports or other immigration checkpoints without valid visas. People who lodge a claim for refugee status after being detected living illegally in the United States are also detained. However, around 40 per cent of asylum applicants are subsequently released to stay with friends or relatives while their claims are assessed. Asylum seekers in Britain also have a chance of being detained although, once again, it is not routine procedure. Detention can be used when authorities believe there is evidence that an asylum seeker will abscond, or when an asylum seeker has been refused refugee status and faces imminent removal from the country. There were 71,700

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applicants lodged for refugee status in the United Kingdom in 2001, but as of December that year only 1410 asylum seekers were in detention. The Blair government is committed to expanding detention capacity to 4000 places, and is keen to use detention to achieve its stepped-up target of removing ‘failed’ asylum seekers from the country at a rate of 30,000 per year. Human-rights groups are alarmed by the broad discretion granted to immigration officials to detain asylum seekers and the fact that their decisions are not subject to judicial scrutiny, given that, as in Australia, detention can continue indefinitely. Nevertheless, a system of mandatory detention comparable to Australia’s is unlikely. Humanitarian concerns aside, the major disincentive to mandatory detention is the prohibitive cost of keeping so many people locked up. According to DIMIA’s website (Fact Sheet 73 ‘People Smuggling’), the average cost of keeping a person in immigration detention in 2000–2001 was $120 per day and the overall cost of detention to the taxpayer, excluding the cost of capital works, was $104 million. Detention accounted for more than one-third of the $299 million that the department spent on ‘the enforcement of immigration law’ in 2000–2001. < > Australia’s detention policy is not only expensive, it is also illogical. In fact, it is quite perverse and can serve to reward honesty with punishment.Asylum seekers are only detained if they enter the country without valid documents. So, people who approach the immigration desk at the airport and admit to travelling on a fraudulent passport in order to seek refuge from persecution will almost certainly be locked up. If their application for refugee status is successful, they will be granted a temporary protection visa valid for three years, which restricts their access to most resettlement services. By contrast, a person who clears immigration first and then turns around five seconds later and says ‘I am a refugee’ will usually not be put in detention. Instead, that person will be eligible for a work permit and allowed to live freely in the community while his or her asylum application is assessed. Success leads to permanent residence. So, overseas students or tourists or business people or visitors on transit visas who lie about their original intention in coming to Australia, or who subsequently seek to stay in Australia as refugees after their arrival, are treated far more generously than people who have been compelled, through whatever circumstance, to engage the services of a people-smuggler or to travel on false documents. Yet, it could be argued that it is people in the latter category that are more deserving of our sympathy and generosity. Their circumstances

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are often, though not always, more desperate than those of the former group; the recent record certainly shows that they are far more likely to qualify as refugees. Since 1999, the majority of asylum seekers who arrived in Australia unlawfully have been granted protection under the 1951 Convention. By contrast, the acceptance rate for asylum seekers in the community is closer to 10 per cent.‘Unlawful’ asylum seekers are also much more likely to have their claims recognised on appeal. In 2000–2001 the Refugee Review Tribunal overturned the Immigration department’s primary decision in 36 per cent of the cases submitted by asylum seekers in detention, whereas only 6 per cent of community applicants succeeded at the tribunal. However, to pre-judge the relative worthiness of different categories of refugees like this is a morally dubious exercise. It only serves to illustrate that any distinction between ‘lawful’ and ‘unlawful’ asylum-seekers is arbitrary and meaningless. There is no basis to suppose that unauthorised arrivals pose a greater risk to Australia than people who arrive on valid visas; nor that their claims for refugee status are more likely to be bogus; nor that they are more likely to opt out of the refugee-determination process and abscond without trace into the community. Regardless of how people get to Australia, they must meet exactly the same strict criteria if they are to ‘qualify’ as refugees. Australia’s illogical distinction between ‘lawful’ and ‘unlawful’ asylum-seekers leads to the even more ludicrous distinction, gaining hold in the media, between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ refugees. It also appears to violate the 1951 Convention on Refugees, to which Australia is a signatory. Article 31(1) of the Convention states: 7KH &RQWUDFWLQJ 6WDWHV VKDOO QRW LPSRVH SHQDOWLHV RQ DFFRXQW RI WKHLU LOOHJDO HQWU\RUSUHVHQFHRQUHIXJHHVZKRFRPLQJGLUHFWO\IURPDWHUULWRU\ZKHUHWKHLU OLIHRUIUHHGRPZRXOGEHWKUHDWHQHGLQWKHVHQVHRI$UWLFOHHQWHURUDUHSUHV HQWLQWKHLUWHUULWRU\ZLWKRXWDXWKRULVDWLRQSURYLGHGWKH\SUHVHQWWKHPVHOYHVZLWK RXW GHOD\ WR WKH DXWKRULWLHV DQG VKRZ JRRG FDXVH IRU WKHLU LOOHJDO HQWU\ RU SUHVHQFH

The Refugee Convention does not prohibit detention, but Article 31(2) does restrict its use: 7KH &RQWUDFWLQJ 6WDWHV VKDOO QRW DSSO\ WR WKH PRYHPHQWV RI VXFK UHIXJHHV UHVWULFWLRQVRWKHUWKDQWKRVHZKLFKDUHQHFHVVDU\DQGVXFKUHVWULFWLRQVVKDOORQO\ EHDSSOLHGXQWLOWKHLUVWDWXVLQWKHFRXQWU\LVUHJXODUL]HGRUWKH\REWDLQDGPLVVLRQ WRDQRWKHUFRXQWU\7KH&RQWUDFWLQJ6WDWHVVKDOODOORZVXFKUHIXJHHVDUHDVRQ DEOHSHULRGDQGDOOQHFHVVDU\IDFLOLWLHVWRREWDLQDGPLVVLRQLQWRDQRWKHUFRXQWU\

Conclusions of the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme (the UNHCR’s governing body, of which Australia is a member) and Guidelines prepared by UNHCR at the request of the

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Executive Committee both support the view that Australia’s mandatory detention regime is, at least in part, in violation of Convention obligations. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has found that Australia’s mandatory detention policy can breach Article 9.1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which says, in part, that ‘no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention’. In 1993 the Human Rights Committee was asked to look into Australia’s treatment of an asylum seeker subjected to prolonged detention. The federal government argued that detention was justified because the asylum seeker had arrived unlawfully and might abscond if not detained.The Committee was not convinced. In its decision, handed down in 1997, the Committee agreed that illegal entry ‘may indicate a need for investigation’ and that the likelihood of absconding ‘may justify detention for a period’. It found, however, that Australia had offered no evidence as to why the particular asylum seeker in question should still be locked up.The Committee found that this detention was ‘arbitrary’ under Article 9.1 of the ICCPR. In response to the United Nations Committee’s criticism, the federal government did tinker with detention policy, introducing a category of ‘eligible non-citizens’, who can be released from detention on bridging visas.To be released, a person must be at least seventy-five years of age, or the spouse of an Australian, a former victim of trauma or torture, or a child for whom release is ‘in their best interests’. In practice, these exemptions are rarely invoked. For example, so far as children are concerned, it is invariably felt to be in their best interests that they remain with their parents, who are usually in detention themselves. Australia has always imposed strict visa requirements on foreign visitors and detention provisions have been enshrined in law for more than four decades under the Migration Act of 1958, but the legislative cornerstone of the hard-line policy of mandatory detention for boat people was more recently laid. The history of that legislation suggests that mandatory detention is government’s knee-jerk response to the widely held, deeply rooted but totally irrational public phobia about the risk of invasion. It is a ‘solution’ out of all proportion to the size of the ‘problem’; a policy formulated, not in sober debate, but in flustered panic at the unauthorised landing of a relatively small number of boats on Australia’s shores. < > On 26 April 1976 twenty-five-year-old Lam Binh steered a decrepit wooden boat into Darwin harbour. On board were his seventeen-yearold brother and three friends. Six other members of Binh’s family had also been among the passengers when fishing boat KG4435 snuck out

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of Rach Gia port in southwest Vietnam in February that year, but they had succumbed to violent attacks of seasickness and left the vessel to stay at a refugee camp in Thailand. Binh did not like the look of the camp, so he and his four remaining passengers continued their journey. For two months they were shunted from one Southeast Asian port to another, being supplied with fuel, food and water on condition that they kept moving on.As Bruce Grant recounts the story, Binh navigated the final sixteen-day crossing from Timor with the guidance of a page torn from a school atlas. He arrived in Darwin with US$100 in cash and with fuel, food and water to last just four more days. +HURXQGHGWKHSRLQWDQGVDZ6WRNHV+LOOZKDUIWKHEXV\FHQWUHRIWKHSRUWRI 'DUZLQ+HEURXJKW.*DORQJVLGHDERXWPLGGD\/DP%LQKWKHQFDXJKWWKH DWWHQWLRQRIDILVKHUPDQZRUNLQJRQDERDWQHDUE\¶:KHUHLPPLJUDWLRQSHRSOH"· /DP%LQKDVNHG¶:HIURPVRXWK9LHWQDP· 7KHILVKHUPDQWROGWKHPWRVWD\ZKHUH WKH\ZHUHDQGGURYHRII$VWKHZKDUIZDVFURZGHG/DP%LQKDQFKRUHG.* DERXWPHWUHVDZD\,PPLJUDWLRQRIILFLDOVDUULYHGLQDSLORWERDWDQGVWHSSHGRQ ERDUG/DP%LQKWDNLQJDGHHSEUHDWKPDGHDVSHHFKKHKDGUHKHDUVHGPDQ\ WLPHV¶:HOFRPHP\ERDW0\QDPHLV/DP%LQKDQGWKHVHDUHP\IULHQGVIURP VRXWK9LHWQDPDQGZHZRXOGOLNHSHUPLVVLRQWRVWD\LQ$XVWUDOLD·

Lam Binh, his brother and their friends became Australia’s first boatpeople and were accepted as refugees. In the next six years around 2000 Vietnamese boat-people followed in Lam Binh’s wake. This was a time of great instability in Indochina. Vietnam invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge. In response, China invaded Vietnam to teach it a lesson. Hanoi’s communist regime pursued Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority in a relentless campaign of persecution, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee the country altogether. In all, about 1 million people fled Vietnam and Cambodia during that period, but most ended up in camps elsewhere in Southeast Asia or in Hong Kong. Only a tiny proportion made it all the way to Australia. As Nancy Viviani has commented, it is surprising how sensitive Australian politicians and bureaucrats are to fears of a mass influx of boat arrivals, given that ‘the experience of the greatest exodus in the history of Southeast Asia simply did not result in such an influx in Australia’. The Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, and his minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Michael MacKellar, displayed considerable generosity and good sense in responding to the first boatarrivals. They successfully undercut the attraction of sailing south in a leaky boat by holding out the prospect of organised resettlement to Indochinese refugees holed up in camps in Southeast Asia. Less than a decade after the scrapping of the White Australia policy, Australia was offering a permanent home to around 15,000 Vietnamese refugees

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every year. By comparison, the Labor Party’s response was alarmist and opportunistic. Shortly before the 1977 election, Bob Hawke (then ALP president) called for Australia to stop accepting refugees who simply landed on its doorstep. He received backing for the comments from the opposition leader, Gough Whitlam.Whitlam may have swept away the last remnants of the White Australia policy while in office, but he had little sympathy for refugees from Indochina. Clyde Cameron, a former minister for Immigration in Whitlam’s government, recollects that Whitlam exploded when the issue was discussed in a cabinet meeting in 1975, declaring that he was ‘not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into the country’. Whitlam clearly believed that the Vietnamese would be antithetical to the Labor Party, like earlier refugees who fled Soviet communism in the Baltic states. The arrival of Lam Binh and those who followed him alerted government to the fact that Australia had no formal mechanism for dealing with onshore asylum seekers. The few people who applied were dealt with on a case-by-case basis by the minister for Immigration, who had the discretionary power to grant an entry permit. In response, the government set up the DORS (Determination of Refugee Status) Committee in 1977 to assist the minister in making determinations, although those Vietnamese who failed to meet the definition were allowed to stay anyway, under an amnesty offered to illegal immigrants in 1980.There was little need to invoke the DORS committee to assess asylum seekers landing in Australia by boat in the 1980s. Arrivals petered out in 1981 and the boat people did not reappear on Australia’s horizon until the end of the decade. In November 1989 a vessel codenamed ‘Pender Bay’ arrived in Broome with twenty-six people on board.There were two further boats in 1990 and eight more in 1991. By the end of 1992, fifteen boats had arrived, carrying a total of 654 people. Like those who preceded them in the late 1970s, many of these new arrivals were from Vietnam, although they had come to Australia indirectly, via camps in Indonesia, or from resettlement sites for SinoVietnamese refugees in southern China. Others were Chinese nationals or Cambodians. The boat people once again became the focus of public anxiety; after 1989 almost all of them were detained. Initially, they were held in semi-secure facilities in the Westbridge migrant hostel in Sydney (now Villawood detention centre). It was a low-security operation and when asylum seekers began to abscond, the government toughened its approach. In 1991 the first remote detention centre was established — at Port Hedland,Western Australia. The detention policy had firm political foundations and enjoyed bipartisan support in parliament, but some of its legal underpinnings were decidedly weak. Section 89 of the Migration Act of 1958 required that

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people be held in custody if they arrived at an airport without valid documentation. This section appeared immune to legal challenge. Under Section 88 of the Act, unauthorised entrants were also taken into custody if they arrived by boat and disembarked without permission. In this situation, however, custody was to last only until the boat once again departed Australia. In the case of asylum seekers, it was obvious immediately that the vessels on which they arrived were never going to leave. Refugees’ lawyers soon began to pick away at the gaps in the legal mortar of the detention policy as it applied to boat people. In 1992 they used flaws in the Act to press for the release of fifteen Cambodian asylum-seekers who had been in custody for more than two years.The government recognised that its house was in danger of tumbling down and rushed into action. Less than forty-eight hours before a Federal Court judge was to hear the application on behalf of the Cambodians, the Migration Amendment Act 1992 was pushed through parliament. The Act required that a ‘designated person’ who was a non-citizen ‘should be kept in custody until he or she leaves Australia or is given an entry permit’. The term ‘designated persons’ was applied to boat people who had arrived in Australia after 19 November 1989.The Act also stated that no court was ‘to order the release from custody of a designated person’. The lawyers for the Cambodians did not give up so easily.They challenged the amendment in the High Court, arguing that it breached the Constitution by usurping judicial power. That action failed. However, all but one of the judges commented that the detention of the boat people may have been unlawful prior to the passing of the Amendment Act in May.This unlocked the possibility of further legal action to seek compensation for wrongful imprisonment. The government also slammed that door shut before it could be opened further. A new section was added to the Migration Act; it stated that, where wrongful detention was proved, any damages payable would be fixed at the amount of one dollar per day. Further amendments have entrenched the detention policy to the point where it is unassailable in the courts. Bi-partisan political support for detention has also been shored up, even though the policy remains hotly contested by professionals who work in the field. Every time immigration detention has been subjected to scrutiny through parliamentary inquiries an overwhelming majority of submissions has called for the policy to be scrapped or drastically modified in relation to asylum seekers; on all but one occasion, however, the final report has ignored those calls and endorsed the status quo. The exception was a June 2001 report by the Human Rights Sub-committee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.The report

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forged rare agreement between political rivals from all parties on twenty separate recommendations to improve the operation of Australia’s immigration detention centres, including such straightforward proposals as expanding the range of newspapers available to detainees; broadening educational, sporting and exercise facilities; granting greater access to detention centres for community organisations, including religious and welfare groups; providing asylum seekers with regular updates on the status of their applications for refugee status and offering detainees classes about life in Australia.The most controversial recommendation was for the introduction of a fourteen-week time limit on detention for asylum seekers who had received security clearances. The minister for Immigration dismissed the recommendation out of hand, describing it tersely as ‘extraordinarily naive’. < > The most dramatic shift in policy after the 1992 amendments was the decision to contract out detention to the private sector. In April 1997 the government released a ‘Request for Proposal for Provision of Detention and Transfer of Persons Detained under the Migration Act’ to seventeen selected organisations, including the Australian Protective Service (APS), the government agency then in charge of running the detention centres. Five organisations submitted detailed proposals and the tender was won by Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), the wholly owned subsidiary of the United States-based Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, which is itself majority-owned by the parent company,Wackenhut. Wackenhut is an intriguing corporation, with 68,000 employees and an annual turnover in 2001 of US$2.8 billion. The official company website hosts an online shop, at which customers can order a pair of cuddly, plush velvet Wackenhut Bears (US$21.95) with ‘a round adorable face’ and ‘a royal blue T-shirt printed with the Wackenhut logo’. For the more serious shopper there is the formidable B.O.S.S., the Body Orifice Security Scanner, which at US$4500 provides ‘A Safe, Non-Intrusive Method of Detecting Objects Concealed in Body Cavities’. The B.O.S.S. ‘is commonly used in corrections facilities to scan inmates for weapons and contraband objects’ such as razor blades, paper-clips and knives that may be ‘hidden in anal, vaginal, oral and nasal cavities’. Security is Wackenhut’s business and the United States government is its major customer.Wackenhut guards top-secret nuclear facilities for the Department of Energy, including the Savannah River Site (where weapons-grade plutonium is produced) and the Nevada Test Site. The company has been continuously involved in providing security to

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United States satellite and missile programs since 1957 and guards some twenty United States embassies and diplomatic missions worldwide. Among the enormous array of other products on offer at Wackenhut are airport and airline security services, protection against kidnapping and extortion for senior executives and VIPs, alarm systems, highway toll-collection, fire prevention, emergency medical aid, investigative services and armoured transport. The company is named after its founder, George R. Wackenhut, who is now in his eighties. Before starting up a private security firm in 1954, George Wackenhut spent three years working as a special agent for the FBI.Today he lives in Florida in a mock castle ‘with an atmosphere of England in the late Middle Ages’. In the words of Britain’s Observer ‘Life’ magazine, he is ‘a more than usually right-wing businessman … who once took it upon himself to keep files on three million Americans he suspected of crypto-communism’. When Observer journalist Andrew Billen asked George R. Wackenhut about persistent claims that his company has done undercover work for the CIA or other secret service agencies, the corporate patriarch emphatically denied the suggestion and pondered where such claims could spring from.‘I had a man on the board who was a CIA director and had been a three-star admiral in the navy’, he said. ‘Another three-star general who had been head of defence intelligence [General Joseph Carroll]. We had [former deputy director of the CIA] Frank Carlucci who left us and became Secretary of Defence.We had all these military types and intelligence types on the board and people started to put two and two together and concluding we were in intelligence work.’ There are no obvious spooks on the current board of the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC), the Wackenhut company that owns ACM, but there are strong links to government. The board includes a former attorney-general, a former education adviser to President Reagan and a former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. WCC was founded as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation in 1984 and was separately listed as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994 (though a majority of its shares remain in the hands of the parent company). The first facility operated by the company was an immigration detention-centre in Denver, though its main income comes from the explosive growth in private prisons and juvenile detention centres. In the ten years from 1986 the number of beds in private prisons in the United States grew at a compound rate of 44 per cent per year, and WCC company literature happily informs shareholders that the capacity of federal prisons in the United States is expected to grow 50 per cent between 2001 and 2006, thanks to ‘[e]nhanced sentencing laws, and the growth of the overall population between the ages of 15 to 24 — statistically the age group that

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commits the most crime’. In its annual report for 2001,WCC claimed ‘a 22 per cent share of the United States private correctional market’ and ‘a 56 per cent share of the international private correctional market’. (The company does not seem nearly so concerned as Australian government ministers are to distinguish between the niceties of the ‘correctional’ detention of convicted criminals in prisons and the ‘administrative’ detention of unauthorised migrants and asylum seekers in detention centres.) The report describes the firm as ‘a world leader in government-outsourced correctional management, medical and mental health rehabilitation services’ and ‘the largest private detention and immigration services provider in the world’. However, the company’s record is not without blemish. In February 2000 the United States Justice department accused Wackenhut guards at a juvenile detention centre in Louisiana of violating inmates’ rights by ‘habitually using excessive force and allowing fights over basic items like and food and clothing’. According to the New York Times, the report found that the facility ‘fails to provide reasonable safety, improperly uses chemical restraints, and provides inadequate mental health, medical and dental care’.The company expressed disappointment with the report and said the issues had been ‘overstated or simply sensationalised’. Nevertheless, Wackenhut reluctantly concluded that ‘it would be in everyone’s best interest for Wackenhut to seek an alternative use for the facility’ and juvenile detainees have since been relocated. In December 1999 the Houston Chronicle reported that twelve former employees of Wackenhut Corrections Corp. were charged with raping or sexually harassing sixteen women inmates in a Texas state jail between 6 May 1997 and 6 August 1999. The company has since implemented a policy under which ‘only female employees will be allowed to work in the living quarters of female correctional institutions’. On 31 August 1999 Wackenhut correctional officer Ralph Garcia was killed during a four-hour riot by prisoners at the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility in New Mexico. A riot in April 1999 at another Wackenhut facility at Hobbs in New Mexico left thirteen guards and one prisoner injured.The incidents prompted an independent inquiry into the state’s prison system. Wackenhut Corrections Corp. defends its record and argues that the people involved in such incidents ‘represent only a fraction of our inmate population’. The corporation has contracts to manage 43,000 ‘offender beds’ in fifty-nine correctional institutions and detention facilities in North America, Europe and Australasia. Annual reports show strong growth in annual turnover, although profit results are more volatile. In 2001 Wackenhut Corrections Corp. reported a net profit of US$19.4 million on revenue of US$562.1 million.Without the contribution of its Australian subsidiary ACM, the bottom line would have

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been much less satisfactory for shareholders. ACM contributed about one-fifth of the company’s global revenue and accounted for a similar proportion of overall profit. Wackenhut came to Australia in the early 1990s and teamed up with the construction giant Thiess and the local security firm ADT to create Australasian Correctional Services. This new joint-venture company promised to provide ‘single point accountability in the financing, design, construction, management and operation of correctional facilities’. Australasian Correctional Services won the contract for a new 600-bed Correctional Centre at Junee, New South Wales, which became Australia’s largest prison when it opened in April 1993. After this facility was completed, ACM became responsible for its ongoing operational management. Now, ACM also runs the Arthur Gorrie Remand and Reception Centre in Brisbane (since July 1992), the Fulham prison in Victoria (since 1997) and the Melbourne Custody Centre, which it took over in March 1999. Its work in immigration detention dates from November 1997. ACM showed no interest in discussing its commercial activities with me. My phone calls and emails to company headquarters in Sydney went unanswered. However, financial statements lodged with the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) revealed a post-tax profit of $11.9 million on a turnover of $208 million in the year ended 31 December 2001.This was slightly down on the previous year. Before that, however, profit had almost doubled on an annual basis, from $4.1 million in 1998, to $7.5 million in 1999 and $14.75 million in 2000. Operating revenue had also jumped sharply year-byyear, up from $76 million in 1998, to $102 million in 1999 and $191 million in 2000. On the information lodged with ASIC, it is impossible to determine what share of that income comes from the immigration detention centres, and what share comes from the private prisons that ACM manages for various State governments. ACM also has a contract, via its subsidiary, Pacific Shores Healthcare, to provide medical services to correctional facilities in Victoria, and some of the money paid to it by the Immigration department is for transport services rather than detention, including at times, the removal of failed asylum seekers from Australia to their country of origin. However, it is safe to attribute ACM’s 250 per cent growth in revenues and 350 per cent increase in profit between 1998 and 2000 to the increase in unauthorised boat-arrivals and the consequent increase in the number of people in immigration detention. The 2000 annual report of the parent company, Wackenhut Corrections Corp. states that ‘compensated resident days’ (that is, the days for which ACM was paid to keep people in detention in Australia and New Zealand) increased from 1.1 million in 1999 to 1.8 million

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in 2000 and this increase was ‘primarily due to higher compensated resident days at the immigration detention facilities’. The explanatory notes to the financial statements in the annual report reveal that Australia’s Immigration department was the United States corporation’s third-largest customer, after correctional authorities in Florida and Texas, and accounted for 11 per cent of WCC’s consolidated revenue. At the exchange rate used in the accounts of US$0.56 to the Australian dollar, this equates to payments from the Commonwealth government to ACM of around $105 million in 2000. In 2000 the Australian subsidiary was responsible for almost half of the corporation’s US$19 million in global profit. The explosive growth in ACM’s income from immigration detention slowed in 2001, but the 2001 annual report for Wackenhut Corrections Corp. shows that DIMIA payments once again accounted for 11 per cent of its global revenue of US$562.1 million. At an exchange rate of US$0.51 to the Australian dollar, this is equivalent to payments of around $121 million dollars. The cash-flow from Australian taxpayers to ACM may soon be shut off. ACM’s initial three-year deal to provide detention services to the federal government should have expired on 22 December 2000. It was extended by mutual consent for a further twelve months on the same terms and conditions to give the Commonwealth additional time to negotiate with ACM (or, more exactly, with its affiliate company, ACS, Australasian Correctional Services Pty Ltd) on its offer to extend the contract for a further three-year term. Under a general ten-year agreement signed between the two parties, the Commonwealth was required to enter into these exclusive negotiations in good faith, before it could make ‘an approach to the market’. In the end the Immigration department was not satisfied that the ACM/ACS offer ‘represented the best value for money’ and on 25 May 2001 the government announced that the provision of immigration detention services would be put out to tender.The minister for Immigration said he expected a decision to be made by December of that year, but the tender process appeared to move exceedingly slowly.The contract with ACM was extended once more, until the tender process could be completed and ‘new service delivery arrangements’ put in place. In March 2002 the minister announced yet again that the contract would go to tender. He said that tenders would be let in May, a full year after the original announcement of the tender process. In fact, this did not happen until July 2002.A new contract was expected to be in operation by the end of the year. According to the Immigration department, the process is slow because it is ‘very complex’ and requires ‘detailed articulation’ of the department’s requirements. An ‘exposure draft’ of the tender document had also been released ‘to obtain industry comment’ and ensure that the tender process is ‘as robust as possible’.According to John Hodges from

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Philip Ruddock’s Independent Detention Advisory Group, the contract ‘will be tightened a lot in lots of areas’ resulting in ‘a better detention standard’. In the meantime, ACM itself had come under new ownership. In March 2002 Wackenhut Corp. and the Danish firm Group 4 Falck signed ‘a definitive merger agreement’. Wackenhut shareholders were paid US$33 per share, a 14 per cent premium on the current shareprice and double the price, of US$16.70, at which Wackenhut shares were trading just six months earlier. (The September 11 terror attacks had given a huge boost to the stocks of security firms, with Wackenhut’s share-price jumping 44 per cent on the day trading resumed.) The merger valued Wackenhut at US$570 million and created the largest security company in the world. As a result Group 4 gained majority control of Wackenhut Corrections Corp. and its Australian subsidiary, ACM. This reduced the level of competition in the bidding to run Australia’s immigration detention-centres, since Group 4 and ACM accounted for two of the four organisations short-listed to participate in the tender process. One of those bidders — the public-sector agency Australian Protective Service (APS) — has since dropped out.The APS was placed under the control of the Australian Federal Police, after which its bid was withdrawn because of concerns about the potential for a conflict of interest if the same agency were responsible for running immigration detention centres and for investigating complaints inside them.After the withdrawal of the APS, the only other bidder left in the running was Management & Training Corporation Pty Ltd. If Group 4 does win the contract, either in its own right, or via its new ownership of ACM, then the appointment will be controversial. Group 4 has 140,000 employees in fifty countries and an annual turnover of US$2.5 billion. It is already active in the private prison industry in Australia and has hit the headlines because of the high suicide rate at Melbourne’s brand new Port Phillip Prison. A coronial inquiry found that Group 4 had contributed to the suicide of four prisoners during the prison’s first six months of operation, by failing to remove hanging points or to provide adequate staff training. More recently Group 4 has been embroiled in controversy surrounding a fire at the Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre in Britain. On 14 February a fire destroyed around 40 per cent of the £100 million purpose-built complex, which had opened only two months earlier. According to the Guardian, the blaze began during a disturbance that followed an incident in which a woman was being restrained by Group 4 staff. It later emerged that no sprinkler system had been installed at Yarl’s Wood, which had the capacity to hold 900 people, making it the largest immigration detention facility in Europe. The fire-fighters’ union later

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claimed that for an hour its members were prevented from tackling the blaze by Group 4 guards, who were seeking to prevent the escape of any detainees. Group 4’s insurance company are now demanding £97 million in damages from the local police under an obscure 1886 law called the Riot Damages Act, which allows private firms and individuals to sue police over riot damage. Many of us find the very idea of private prisons and detention centres repugnant, but that does not mean conditions will necessarily be worse in a privately run facility than in one under public-sector management. How such facilities are run will depend on a range of factors such as the degree of transparency and accountability, the incentives on offer to ensure that detainees are treated with decency and compassion, and the penalties imposed for failing in that duty of care. Not long after the detention centres were privatised, the Immigration department stated that its contractual agreements with ACM were intended to deliver ‘a high level of quality in the services provided, a high level of accountability for the delivery of those services and provide cost and efficiency savings to the Commonwealth in the long term’. Clearly, there is the potential for these aims to be in conflict with one another. In particular, the pursuit of cost-savings has the potential to compromise the delivery of high-quality services. Under its detention contract, ACM has agreed to share with the Commonwealth any savings achieved in carrying out its operations (clause 3.2). This raises another conflict because the Immigration department, which is supposed to regulate ACM’s operations, becomes its partner in the pursuit of increased profits and reduced costs. Certainly, the company does appear to have cut the cost of detention. According to the Immigration department’s annual reports, the cost of detention per detainee per day went from $120 in 1995–96, to $130 in 1996–97 and to $145 in 1997–98. In 1998–99, the first full year of ACM control, the cost per detainee fell back to $112 per day. But just how were these savings achieved? It seems that, in some cases at least, charities inadvertently assisted ACM’s cost-cutting efforts. Under Clause 8.2.2 of the Detention Agreements between the Commonwealth government and ACM, the company is required to provide detainees with adequate clothing suitable for the climate.When the Woomera detention centre first opened in late 1999, ACM was keen to source this clothing, and other material goods, from charitable organisations. Ray Hartigan is the South Australian logistics administrator for the Society of St Vincent de Paul. He was approached, he told me, in December 1999 by the then manager of the Woomera detention centre to provide clothing for 500–600 asylum seekers. Mr Hartigan agreed to provide the clothing for $5 per kilo — a significant discount,

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he says, on the usual rate of $8 per kilo.This apparently straightforward commercial agreement went awry when ACM managed to source about 1.5 tonnes of goods for free from another section of the St Vincent de Paul Society. Mr Hartigan says ACM then offered to pay $1 per kilo for the clothes he had supplied, instead of the $5 he thought they had already agreed to. ‘We to-ed and fro-ed in the normal commercial way about how unfair and unreasonable that was,’ says Mr Hartigan. ‘I then received a payment for 300 kilos at $2 a kilo, which was $600, and … that went nowhere near the covering of the transport, the bales, the cost of putting the stuff up there.’ In the end, Mr Hartigan says, he received $2100 from ACM, for 2 tonnes of clothing: at $5 per kilo, the originally agreed price, this should have sold for $10,000. When commercial relations broke down with St Vincent de Paul in February 2000, ACM management at Woomera looked for an alternative supplier and turned to the Uniting Church in Adelaide. Church worker Scott Litchfield received the request.‘It was a series of faxes that came through which had … extensive lists of what was required in the centre in the way of clothing for men, women and children. It listed itemised stuff. It went right through basic personal clothing, but also a whole lot of stuff to do with setting up the centre — including curtains and other things to be used in facilities to house people.’ Woomera management was not offering payment for the goods, Scott Litchfield says.‘It was expected that they would be given free.We were not offered any money and it was expected that we would offer these as donations as we’d give to other people who are in need.’ After making some inquiries about the nature of ACM’s contract with the federal government, the Uniting Church in South Australia decided not to meet the request to supply goods to Woomera. However, the obvious need of people in detention leaves charitable organisations facing an ethical dilemma, and some assistance is provided. For example, the St Vincent de Paul Society in New South Wales continued to provide clothing for detainees in the Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney, even though the nominal fee paid by ACM for the goods was not enough to cover the Society’s costs. The pressure to reduce costs also raises important questions about the use of detainee labour in the detention centres. It is obviously in ACM’s interest to employ detainees at prison labour rates to provide services within the detention centre, rather than pay award wages to workers brought in from outside. Most former detainees I have spoken to say they were keen to work — despite earning a pittance — because it helped to break the monotony of incarceration. But the government’s Immigration Detention Standards, to which ACM must adhere, make no reference to the use of detainee labour.There are no prescribed pay

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rates, conditions or hours to be worked, for example.The only relevant standard is 5.1, which says that the Commonwealth Occupational Health and Safety Act is to apply in all detention centres. But even this requirement comes under the general heading of safety; it does not relate specifically to detainee labour. How then are detainees’ rights to be protected from the pressure to cut costs and boost profits? Certainly, there was little protection offered to Port Hedland detainees in the ‘Resident Miscellaneous Workers Contract’ that they were expected to sign each Monday before commencing work for the week. The contract directs detainees to report to an officer when they believe they have finished their job. If the officer agrees that the job is completed to his or her satisfaction, then the detainee can be ‘paid’ their points. However, detainees are warned that ‘Officers have the final say in weather [sic] your job has been completed or weather [sic] you have to return and complete your job to a satisfactory level’. If any of the rules in the contract are broken then ‘the Residents job will be Terminated’ (capitalisation and underlining in the original) and ‘the resident will not be re-employed for a period of eight weeks’. The potential for abuse and victimisation is obvious, yet the contract contains no mechanisms for dealing with disputes or providing mediation. In fact, it explicitly states that the detainees’ representatives, the Resident Committee, ‘will have NO say in where a resident works’ and ‘will have NO say in the outcome of termination of employment’. Some medical professionals who have worked in ACM detention centres are concerned that the drive to minimise costs can compromise patient care. In May 2002 the Age revealed that ACM had refused to vaccinate adult detainees at Woomera for such diseases as polio, hepatitis B, tetanus and diphtheria, despite recommendations from the Communicable Diseases Network to do so. The Immigration department defended ACM’s decision to restrict vaccinations to children on the basis it was not policy to inoculate adults and that the expense would be too great. The president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Dr Paul Hemming, described this as ‘outrageous’. He suggested that any saving was a false economy because the cost of vaccination was ‘minuscule’ compared to the cost of treating people should they become ill. Dr Annie Sparrow, who did two brief stints at Woomera in 2001 and 2002, cites the example of a lack of interpreters as another example of cost-cutting compromising patient care. There were more than 1000 people detained at Woomera when she worked there. Most were from the Middle East. Dr Sparrow says often there were only three interpreters; one female Arabic interpreter, one male Arabic interpreter and one male Farsi (Persian) interpreter.There were no female Farsi interpreters on site during the time that she worked there (although one was

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appointed after she left).‘It is incredibly degrading and demoralising to be discussing women’s gynaecological problems with a male interpreter and even worse to be doing it via a telephone interpreter service,’ she says. She says it was particularly difficult to communicate effectively with children via a telephone interpreter service. ‘I could not see that provision of a health service was a fundamental priority,’ she says. Psychologist Lyn Bender describes the case of a young man whose glasses were broken. He claimed that they were broken by an ACM officer; the officer maintained that it was the young man’s fault. Either way, ACM refused to replace the glasses unless he paid for them himself. The man had no money and so had to live without his glasses, which he usually wore all the time. He was severely restricted in his activities and began suffering headaches. Eventually, after two months without glasses, he resorted to slashing himself in protest.The response of the guards was to taunt him for being so silly as to cut himself on a Sunday when nothing could be done about the glasses anyway. ‘Didn’t he know that in Australia Sunday was a holiday?’ they asked him. The ‘solution’ was to offer the man a pair of glasses from the lost property box. At this point Lyn Bender intervened, warning that the use of the wrong prescription could further damage his eyesight. When Lyn Bender left Woomera, the man was still without glasses and had been told to put his complaint in writing. She was given to understand that no arrangements were going to be made to have his eyesight assessed since he could not afford to pay for new glasses. Educational staff have also voiced concerns about the underresourcing of teaching in detention centres. Inese Petersons is a registered primary school-teacher in South Australia who was contracted to work as an ‘Education Officer’ in Woomera between May and August 2001. She says she was offered an attractive salary package — much higher than a teacher’s pay — and before starting she had paid little attention to what was happening in the detention centres. She says she expected to ‘be teaching children, and possibly adults in an educational setting … that there would be a school and there would be adequate resources and that there would be adequate teachers and the usual things’.The reality was rather different. When she began working at Woomera, Inese Petersons was one of three teachers catering to 1500 detainees, including around 300 children. Over the next two-and-a-half months staff numbers fluctuated from a low of two teachers to a high of five. She says a ratio of 300 detainees to one teacher was supposed to be a minimum requirement under policy guidelines but she says this target was achieved in only five of the ten weeks that she worked there. Class sizes fluctuated from two to fifty-two people and varied with the mood in the detention centre.

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‘Learning was a high priority for most detainees but coming to classes often depended on their daily dispositions,’ she says. ‘Given their psychological states, often it appeared to be a diversion at best, and I found that they only kept coming to classes regularly, if it was relevant to their needs.’ The trauma of the adult asylum-seekers’ experiences in getting to Australia, and of their treatment in detention, left them with very little mental energy to devote to learning. ‘I found that their main focus and preoccupation was with getting a visa and its attendant problems.’ Children were generally eager to attend classes. ‘As students I found them to be extremely willing, extremely polite — attentive.They were very keen to learn; they certainly tried very hard. I would provide most of them with hard copies of lessons and they would all do homework, bring it in for me to look at the next day.’ Each teacher was rostered to teach six one-hour classes per day and it was ‘a monumental task’ to try to get around to teaching everyone. The teachers were assisted by some fifty detainee aides, who spoke good English and had other skills to offer. Included among these aides were information technology specialists, musicians, librarians, artists, teachers and athletes. They were ‘paid’ in points by ACM at a rate equivalent to $1 per hour. Inese Petersons says that without their ‘generous and concerned efforts’ there would not have been an education program in Woomera at all. ‘Given the shortage of staff and continual staff turnover and the lack of resources, teaching was often a haphazard affair,’ she says. Each teacher spent only one hour per day with each group of students so it was extremely difficult ‘to deliver an appropriately comprehensive educational program with any continuity of learning’. The teachers and their aides tried to provide five to six hours of teaching per week to primary school-students and four to five hours per week for secondary school-age children and adults.When there was a shortage of teachers, adult classes were rearranged or cancelled to give priority to teaching children. Inese Petersons concludes that ‘a positive and meaningful education program’ was not possible under the circumstances. She cites the treatment of detainees, the detainees’ physical, mental and emotional states, environmental conditions, and the extreme lack of resources, both material and human as working against the best efforts of teachers to deliver a good program. There is an obvious potential for conflict between achieving ‘cost and efficiency savings’ and delivering ‘a high level of quality’, but there did seem to be some improvement in conditions at the outset after ACM took over the running of the detention centres from the Australian Protective Service (its government predecessor). In the first two years critical independent observers credited ACM with marked improvements in the conditions in detention centres. In 1998 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission

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(HREOC) released a report ironically called ‘Those who’ve come across the seas’ (a title taken from the national anthem, which continues ‘we’ve boundless plains to share …’). HREOC’s investigations were mostly carried out while the Australian Protective Service was running the detention centres, and its conclusions were damning. In a followup report published in early 2000, HREOC stated that it was ‘impressed with the efforts of both DIMA and ACM to enhance the physical conditions, the opportunities for activities and the support services in detention.Very substantial improvements have been made in a wide range of areas. The criticisms made by detainees and recorded here were generally made in an overall context of satisfaction with their treatment and the conditions.’ HREOC praised improvements such as the introduction of excursions for children at Villawood, for most detainees at Port Hedland and those detainees playing soccer at the Perth detention centre. It noted the expansion of English classes in some centres, and the introduction of High Risk Assessment Teams to reduce the risk of self-harm by detainees.The Commission concluded that the changes were ‘attributable in large part to the transfer of detention service provision to ACM and the opportunity that transfer created for DIMA to design and impose immigration detention standards’. The initial impression of the Commonwealth Ombudsman was also one of considerable improvements in the operation of detention centres under ACM’s management. The Ombudsman’s 1998–99 annual report comments that the transfer of management brought improvements in the standard of care, including increased recreational activities and equipment, increased opportunities for religious observance and a better understanding of detainees’ needs. Both bodies continue to monitor conditions in detention, however, and to investigate a range of complaints.Along with its praise for ACM, HREOC found plenty of things to criticise; the Ombudsman’s office immediately followed up its report with another inquiry. Senior Assistant Ombudsman John Taylor says his organisation decided to initiate a new investigation following ‘a number of complaints about standards within detention centres, treatment by ACM staff and other issues’. He notes that new centres had opened at Curtin and Woomera since the Ombudsman’s previous investigation in 1996, raising ‘issues of accountability in remote areas’. He is also aware of media reports on the suturing of lips and the provision of medical treatment to female detainees. In its follow-up report released in early 2000 HREOC identified continuing problems for detainees in getting legal advice, and reported overcrowding, inadequate recreational facilities and inadequate phonelines at some centres. It noted that there were ‘possibly inappropriate

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limits on expenditure on health care, especially dental and psychiatric care and the possibility that some medical staff and contractors are constrained by budget or contract pressures at the expense of their patients’ well-being’. At a policy level, this HREOC report also voiced concern that the structure of the contracts between DIMA and ACM led to a focus on security, rather than on detainee welfare.While the company is expected to adhere to the department’s Immigration Detention Standards as an overall requirement of its contract (known as the Detention Agreements), it is security breaches, such as escapes, that attract immediate monetary penalties. According to HREOC: ‘Achievement of the balance between security and care is undermined by the contractual arrangements between DIMA and ACM. The balance is upset when a monetary penalty is imposed for every escape but implementation of the Immigration Detention Standards is a matter of contract compliance only. The increasing emphasis on security … can be traced to the imbalance in these contractual arrangements.’ If the Immigration department is dissatisfied with ACM’s management of the detention centre, it can issue a ‘default notice’ instructing the problem to be rectified. Default notices may be related to security breaches, or to the welfare of detainees in such areas as health care, the handling of psychiatrically disturbed detainees or the use of force and physical restraints. If ACM fails to rectify the fault within a specified period, the Immigration department can then take other measures.The ultimate sanction is to terminate the contract. However, as legal academic Dr Savitri Taylor comments,‘the contractor would be well aware of the practical constraints on the Commonwealth using the ultimate remedy of termination’. In an evaluation for the Sydney Law Review of the accountability mechanisms of the ACM contract, Dr Taylor noted that achieving the Immigration department’s standards would require money and effort. ‘It is to be expected, therefore, that a rational contractor will strive harder to achieve standards for which it is held accountable in practice, than to achieve standards for which it is held accountable only in theory.’ It is impossible to find out to what extent ACM is actually held accountable in practice for breaches of the Commonwealth’s detention standards in relation to detainee welfare. The performance measures linked to standards such as ‘dignity’ or ‘privacy’ have been deleted from the publicly available version of the Detention Agreements between ACM and the Commonwealth ‘for commercial reasons’, as have details of the ‘performance-linked fee’ that ACM can expect to earn if it achieves those performance measures. As part of my research for this book, I lodged a Freedom of Information request, asking DIMA for details of default notices, remedy notices or other documents issued to ACM for breaches of the Detention Agreements. The aim was to

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discover how actively the department oversees ACM’s management of detention centres. The request was turned down — again, on commercial grounds. Research for the second HREOC report (published in 2000) was carried out when the numbers of people in detention were low. Port Hedland was then the only remote detention facility in operation. Woomera and Curtin were not open.There is no doubt that conditions are better when there are fewer detainees to look after. It was easier, for example, to provide occasional trips outside the camp for detainees in Port Hedland and there was more variety in the food available. Excursions, more diverse menus and other improvements to conditions are much harder to achieve in detention centres that are full. HREOC noted, for instance, that overcrowding remained a problem in Stage One of the Villawood detention centre in Sydney, with the result that there were inadequate recreational facilities, and ‘no opportunity for privacy … including during ablutions’. HREOC and the Commonwealth Ombudsman must also contend with the fact that ACM is notified in advance of their visits.A detainee at Maribyrnong told HREOC: ‘You guys are coming today so they cleaned the bathrooms three times and sprayed with perfume. This should be done all the time.’Another claimed:‘Lunch today is only the third barbecue. It’s because you guys are here. Why can’t they have it more often? Organising the barbecue today is deceptive, as if it’s something they do all the time.’ Psychologist Lyn Bender, who worked at Woomera in March and April 2002, describes how guards organised games of cricket and soccer during visits to the centre by a team of auditors and a delegation from the State government of South Australia to investigate the welfare of child detainees. She says the officers ‘were suddenly playing conspicuous cricket and soccer in front of the compound with much loud cheering and noises and fuss made’, although she had never witnessed such games previously. She says the children understood exactly why the guards were doing this, but their faces nevertheless lit up with excitement.‘It is what happens in an abusive environment,’ she says. ‘The tiniest of gestures is just fallen upon like starving ravenous people fall upon food.’ Lyn Bender says the games petered out again after about a week. Richard, the ACM officer who confided in me, confirms that there is always a clean-up before independent observers come in to inspect conditions. For example, he says, if extra mattresses are being used by detainees to sleep on the floor owing to overcrowding, those mattresses will be placed out of sight before the official visitors arrive. The Ombudsman has the powers of a Royal Commissioner, which means that it could demand entry to the detention centres for its officers at any time without notice. It chooses not to do so. ‘They control

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the facilities. It is simpler to organise it with their concurrence,’ explains John Taylor.‘The Ombudsman only has recommendatory powers. Most of our formal powers are rarely used because we find that departments are generally and genuinely interested in improving their performance, so we tend to negotiate, if you like, outcomes and opportunities, to do our business. It is simpler in the long run.’ < > Gerry Hand, a former minister for Immigration in a Labor government, promoted detention as a means to deter other asylum seekers from coming to Australia. ‘The Government is determined that a clear signal be sent that migration to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country and expecting to be allowed into the community,’ he declared, when presenting the 1992 Migration Amendment Bill on detention to parliament.The same justification has been used by subsequent ministers. In 1993 Nick Bolkus told the ABC’s ‘Lateline’ that detention was ‘an important part of our armoury in terms of ensuring that those who want to come to Australia think very seriously about whether they are refugees before they come here’. The present minister, Philip Ruddock, is more circumspect in reaching for this defence. Perhaps the minister does not want to expose himself to attack by human rights groups, because he knows that the use of detention for deterrence contravenes the 1985 UNHCR Guidelines on the Detention of Asylum Seekers. Instead, Mr Ruddock and DIMIA officials now tend to adopt the circular argument that detention is required under the Migration Act. In other words, it is policy because it is the law. It is also claimed that detention helps ‘maintain the integrity of Australia’s migration and humanitarian programs’, though what this means is never spelt out. Does it mean that we must lock up asylum seekers who arrive without a visa because they have broken our immigration rules? Is it meant to ensure the compliance of others? If so, then detention is really a form of punishment, an arbitrary term of imprisonment that is subject to no formal charge, no court of law and no set time-limits. Detention is also justified on the basis that detainees are ‘immediately available for health checks’.This may justify a brief period of initial detention on arrival, but it is no defence for keeping people locked up once any urgent public-health issues have been addressed.The same applies to identity checks. Detention may be warranted if serious doubts exist about a person’s true identity, or if a person refuses to cooperate in establishing their identity, but these cases will be the exception rather than the rule. Finally, it is argued that detention ensures that people are ‘readily available during processing of

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any visa applications’ and, if their applications fail, detention ensures that ‘they are readily available for removal from Australia’. This is selfevident but the benefit is hardly worth the extravagant cost. If this is the main motivation, Australia could move to a British-style detention regime, in which asylum seekers are only locked up at the end of the process, when their applications for refugee status have failed, rather than at the beginning. Other motivations for detention remain unspoken. One is to keep the anti-immigration lobby quiet by taking a tough line on ‘illegal immigrants’. As a former departmental officer puts it, ‘with the political culture we’ve got, you cannot let people wander around freely’. More insidious is the desire to limit the number of claims for asylum by locking people up and keeping them ignorant of their rights under Australian law. Achieving these dubious aims exacts a high toll. Regardless of how compassionately and professionally the detention centres are run, regardless of what level of external scrutiny is allowed to monitor conditions in detention, the policy of locking up asylum seekers is in itself an abusive policy. < > In the leafy surrounds of Royal Park, within a lion’s roar of the Melbourne Zoo, nestles a collection of low-slung, cream brick bungalows with gardens gone to seed. These are the offices of the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture, which has provided support and trauma counselling to asylum seekers and refugees since 1988. Psychiatrist Dr Patrick McGorry was a founding member of Foundation House and continues to work there as a clinical consultant, alongside his other work at the University of Melbourne. He has seen a great many asylum seekers in detention. ‘It is almost like a horrible sort of psychological experiment,’ he says. ‘It is a very demoralising experience being detained indefinitely and often for very long periods, without any sort of sense of when you are going to get out or what is going to happen with your case.There are examples of this in psychological textbooks where laboratory animals or even human subjects have been placed in these sorts of conditions and it has been shown that it is a tremendously demoralising and stressful experience for them. Depression is almost inevitable, severe stress and the effects of all that occur, and we are talking about people who have already been traumatised and who are already probably suffering from psychiatric problems of various kinds. So it is a system devised to maximise morbidity and suffering.’ Dr McGorry says prolonged detention ‘just erodes people’s sense of the future, their sense of themselves’ and you

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see people ‘dissolving away before your eyes’. He cites the case of a man from Sri Lanka, who was in detention for more than two years.‘If you saw pictures of him when he went into detention, then he was a very youthful-looking person, a very creative artist. He painted lots of great pictures. After two or three years of detention he was grossly overweight, dishevelled, looked like almost an elderly demented person. He was severely depressed, actively suicidal and in a terrible state when I first saw him.’ Detention, as Mr Ruddock is fond of saying, is no ‘holiday camp’; yet it could still be regarded as something of a haven compared to the conditions many refugees have previously endured. For many asylum seekers, though, being locked up in Australia compounds the injuries that they have already suffered.‘It’s like rubbing salt in the wounds,’ says Professor McGorry. ‘They come here expecting a better form of response, almost like a rescue, and what they get instead is further abuse, even though you could say it is trivial compared to what they have been through. But when it is poured into an open wound, it’s almost experienced as being worse than the original thing.’ On the basis of his sixteen months’ work at Woomera detention centre, psychologist Harold Bilboe agrees. ‘When you meet the detainees when they first arrive there is a sense of euphoria,’ he says. ‘They are just happy to arrive and happy to be safe. They have this belief that Australia is the land of the free.’ Harold Bilboe says these positive impressions are gleaned from advertisements marketing Australia as a tourist destination, especially those produced during and after the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He says asylum seekers expect to find a country that supports multiculturalism, freedom of religion, freedom of association and freedom of expression. ‘Initially, 90 per cent of asylum seekers do not have a problem with detention on arrival,’ he says.They understand that health and security checks need to be made. Serious problems begin to emerge after people have been locked up for six months or more, with no understanding of what is happening to them or why the process is taking so long. He thinks that traumatisation of detainees is so serious that Australia could be guilty of psychological torture. Harold Bilboe says that medical professionals who do want to refer a detainee for psychiatric assessment find it almost impossible to do so. ‘In Canberra if someone was to self-mutilate or self-harm, then they would be put in hospital for six weeks with ongoing therapy under the supervision of a psychiatrist and no one would bat an eyelid.’ Usually the only psychiatric support that Harold Bilboe could get in his work with disturbed detainees was a tele-conference in which the psychiatrist would prescribe medication over the phone. ‘In one case I actually got the psychiatric support I needed,’ he says. ‘It worked out very well for that detainee because they were admitted to hospital and

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provided appropriate medication under the direction of a psychiatrist.’ The effect of detention on children and families is especially traumatic. My sister Sarah is a psychiatrist who specialises in child and family health. In early 2002 she and three colleagues were invited to accompany lawyers representing detainees on visits to detention centres. The lawyers asked them to conduct assessments and provide medico-legal reports for some of the children and families they were most concerned about. Sarah, two other child psychiatrists and a social scientist made these visits, and were shocked by what they observed. They wrote up their findings for a professional journal, warning that detention not only had an impact on individual adults and children, but ‘on the family process itself ’. In an article for the June 2002 edition of Australasian Psychiatry, they note that at the time of their visits to people in immigration detention centres (between December 2001 and March 2002) ‘there was no information about the extent of mental health problems in this population, no access to undertake such screening and no confirmed arrangements between State Departments of Health and Family and Community Services for provision of adequate mental health assessment and treatment for those families in need’. The Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry had repeatedly offered to undertake screening for mental health problems in detention centres, an offer subsequently echoed by the Committee of Presidents of the Combined Medical Colleges.The response from the Immigration department had been ‘inconclusive’. In their article my sister and her colleagues leave no doubt about their view of the detention of children, remarking that ‘psychiatrists have a moral obligation to oppose inhumane policies and practices’. They conclude that immigration detention ‘profoundly undermines the parental role, renders the parent impotent and leaves the child without protection or comfort in already unpredictable surroundings where basic needs for safe play and education are unmet’. The parents’ capacity to meet the emotional and physical needs of their children ‘is severely compromised by their own untreated depression and despair in the context of ongoing detention’. Parents have difficulty providing ‘comfort, care and protection, and transmitting hope about the future’. Lyn Bender witnessed this process of family breakdown when she provided counselling to an Iranian family detained for more than a year at Woomera. ‘The whole family was disintegrating,’ she says. She saw them after the thirteen-year-old son had tried to hang himself. As a result, the boy was placed with his father in an ‘observation room’. There are six observation rooms at Woomera, located on either side of a corridor behind the medical centre. The concrete block rooms are each about the size of a prison cell, with a toilet and a window so that

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they can be viewed from outside.An officer sitting at a desk outside can also monitor the rooms via closed-circuit video system. Lyn Bender says the rooms offer ‘the crudest form of safety’ for detainees, who are extremely distressed and threatening suicide. She says the rooms were also used like a lock-up, for the ‘management’ of detainees who became angry and who ACM guards felt needed to be restrained. Detainees have their meals in the room and are only taken out to be escorted by guards to go to a more private toilet or to shower. There is no television and nothing to do. For the thirteen-year-old Iranian boy and his father, she says, being in the room was torturous. She got them released after twenty-four hours, but the boy again threatened self-harm and they were readmitted. Lyn Bender says the boy needed to be taken out of the detention environment. ‘He was saying “If I could just be out, away from these fences, I wouldn’t want to kill myself ”’, she says. ‘You don’t see that as blackmail. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me. He’d just got to the end of his tolerance.’ Lyn Bender tried to get him admitted to Woomera hospital, but there was no space. The doctor at the hospital was concerned about the number of detainees already admitted for similar reasons. The boy’s mother was one of those detainees occupying a hospital bed. She had been suffering from depression, and her condition worsened after her son’s suicide attempt and she was hospitalised. ‘She was immobilised,’ says Lyn Bender. ‘She would not get out of bed, she would not talk, she was not eating.’ Lyn Bender also did a consultation with the boy’s ten-year-old sister but the girl refused to talk to her.‘She sat in my office … and tore up the paper towelling. Just sat there and tore it up and strewed it around the room. I think that was about how she was torn up inside.’ Lyn Bender believed the whole family needed to be removed from detention. ‘They were crumbling,’ she says.When she raised their case with ACM health-workers, it was as if she had not spoken. Lyn Bender came to see working at Woomera as like being a doctor in a war zone, where you patch people up so that they can go out and be injured again.‘In the end you feel complicit in a system that is abusive and destructive,’ she says. By attempting to make detention more bearable, she felt as if she was shoring up the system because, when public concern grew about acts of self-harm, government ministers could say, ‘we have a psychologist dealing with the problem’. Even in less extreme cases, or in cases where detention is not so prolonged, the situation for children is bleak. Lyn Bender says that in March and April 2002 the only facilities for children were play gyms designed for children under ten years of age.The children had already ‘wrung everything they could’ out of the equipment and she rarely saw it used. ‘I saw one lonely father with his ten-year-old daughter sitting

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there,’ she says. ‘He was sitting beside it and she sat on the slide. It was ghostly.’ Lyn Bender says she hardly ever saw children playing. ‘They were playing with rocks.They had pen and paper.That was about it.’ One physical manifestation of the psychological distress of child detainees is bed-wetting. In the article written by my sister and her colleagues, they describe seeing mattresses lying outside in the sun to dry. They were told that ‘many children, even up to the age of twelve, are incontinent day and night’. Paediatrician Dr Annie Sparrow confirms this. In her two short stints at Woomera she encountered a high incidence of incontinence ‘which is a physical manifestation of undue stress in children of all ages’. She says the best way to treat the children would have been to remove the source of their distress, in other words to take them out of detention. As this was impossible Dr Sparrow decided to prescribe medication. The alternative was to have children of up to twelve years of age wearing nappies at night, or continue wetting their beds, ‘which means they feel depressed and embarrassed, demoralised,’ she says.‘And, of course, parents are not in a position to easily wash and change the bed clothes.’The problem was so prevalent that Dr Sparrow ordered a dozen bottles of desmopressin or DDAVP. Each bottle cost about $70 and would last one or two months per child. Concerned about the cost, the manager of the medical clinic intervened and cut her order back to just two bottles. New reports of the destructive impact of detention come as no surprise to psychologist Maritza Thompson. She has been researching and documenting the phenomenon in Australia for the best part of a decade. Now a student counsellor at Southern Cross University and TAFE in northern New South Wales, she has a wealth of experience in working with refugees and asylum seekers both in detention and in the community. Maritza Thompson’s experience dates back to 1987, when she began providing settlement services to newly arrived refugees who had been released from prisons in Chile and other Latin-American countries. As a result of this work she began researching the psychological impact of torture and other forms of organised violence on refugees. As a native Spanish-speaker, Maritza Thompson focussed initially on refugees from Latin America who had been granted permanent residence in Australia. Over time she came into contact with other refugees, from countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and with asylum seekers who were living in the community but whose future residency status remained uncertain. Then she met a refugee from Somalia who, along with her four children, had spent eighteen months in detention. Maritza Thompson began to ask herself what was happening to those asylum seekers who were still locked up in centres such as Port Hedland or Maribyrnong. She started to work closely with refugee lawyers, providing psychological reports to support clients’

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applications for protection visas, and giving briefing and debriefing sessions to assist clients in coping with appearances before the Refugee Review Tribunal. She began meeting asylum seekers in detention and before long was receiving calls from the manager at Maribyrnong detention centre — an Immigration department official — asking her to come in and assess people. ‘I was invited in by the detention-centre manager to assist with particular cases and to provide guidance to staff,’ she says. The relationship was cooperative. Maritza Thompson felt the detention-centre manager was genuinely interested in her professional advice, that he wanted to improve conditions and enhance the mental wellbeing of detainees. ‘I was able to work with the manager to get people out of detention if that was best treatment option,’ she says.The level of trust with both management and detainees built up to such an extent that Maritza Thompson was called in to help end a hunger strike by a group of forty-five Tamil asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka. As her practical experience and body of research grew, Maritza Thompson began developing a model for working with asylum seekers both inside and outside of detention. In 1994, in order to take her research a significant step further, she put a submission to the then Labor federal government, requesting permission to go to all detention centres in Australia to assess detainees.‘One of the aims was to demonstrate that we had an assessment package that would give a clear indication as to the psychological wellbeing and history of a person,’ she says.‘I believed it to be a successful tool to give an indication of where a person is at, and the history of that person.’ In Maritza Thompson’s view, an adequate assessment of asylum seekers on arrival is crucial to providing for the wellbeing of the individual or the family. While she was on a trip overseas, Maritza Thompson was informed that her submission had been approved.‘I thought that it was an amazing opportunity to go in and assess people in the most objective way possible,’ she says. ‘My intention was not to prove the government had it all wrong, but to look at how we could make it better. This would also facilitate the work of the people in detention centres.’ Maritza Thompson felt that she had some support from Immigration department officials for her work; but, when she returned from overseas, she was told that permission to undertake the assessments had been withdrawn. ‘I never understood why,’ she says. Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry, who supported Maritza Thompson’s submission, says he was not surprised that her work was blocked at the official level. ‘It is a sort of a repressive process. Governments always want to hide these things.’ He believes that the prospect of accurately documenting the level of morbidity in detention centres made the Immigration department nervous. ‘We didn’t have any trouble at all in going into Victorian prisons in the late 1980s and doing surveys of

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psychiatric morbidity.That wasn’t a problem because it was not a politically charged sort of issue and they were genuinely interested in finding out what levels of psychiatric problems there were, whereas in this situation it is very threatening to them.’ When Australia’s immigration detention centres were privatised in late 1997, Maritza Thompson found that her access to Maribyrnong came to an end. Only service-providers who had signed formal contracts with ACM were permitted to provide counselling and assessment services to asylum seekers in detention. She managed to continue her work by interviewing refugees who had been recently released from detention. With the assistance of Patrick McGorry, she compared the experiences of detainees to three other groups: to normal migrants, to offshore refugees who had been resettled in Australia with the status of permanent residents, and to asylum seekers living in the community. There were survivors of torture and other forms of organised violence included in all groups. ‘I wanted to better understand survivor strategies in the face of extreme suffering,’ she says. ‘To explore whether there are differences in the psychological impact of torture and other forms or organised violence on refugees with permanent residence, asylum seekers in the community and asylum seekers in a detention centre.’ What she found was an ascending scale of mental illness, from migrants at the low end to asylum seekers in detention at the top, with resettled refugees and asylum seekers living in the community at points on the scale in-between. Not surprisingly, survivors of torture and other forms of organised violence exhibited higher levels of depression, anxiety and phobias than those who had not experienced such traumatic events and Maritza Thompson found that the symptoms varied according to a person’s status in Australia.Those with permanent residence were likely to exhibit fewer signs of ill-health, whereas the uncertainty of being an asylum seeker in the community was a stress factor that could re-ignite the trauma that a person had already been through. The worst mental-health problems, however, were found amongst asylum seekers in detention. Maritza Thompson says that the experience of detention broke down the coping mechanisms that had enabled refugees to deal with their trauma before they came to Australia. The sense of helplessness and the hopelessness they experience can trigger off all the trauma that a person has been through, so that they are condemned to re-live their worst experiences. Maritza Thompson says that ‘any sense of personal control’ is lost because asylum seekers who come to Australia with a sense of hope have no understanding of why they are then locked up. ‘In their own country, they know they are in prison for a political purpose or because of their religion,’ she says. ‘Here they do not understand why they have been

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imprisoned. “What have I done wrong? Is it my skin colour? Is it my political views? Is it my religion?” Numbness overtakes their minds.’ She says that detainees, because they are often separated by language barriers and ethnic differences, are effectively silenced, which ‘colludes with the practice of torture and trauma’. The findings of Maritza Thompson and Patrick McGorry lend scientific weight to the view that detention is a direct contributor to the severity of psychological distress in asylum seekers. In 1998 the minister’s Refugee Resettlement Advisory Council reached a similar conclusion. After examining the settlement needs of refugees who had been held in detention, it concluded that former detainees were an especially vulnerable group.The committee recommended that they be given special assistance with the process of resettlement in Australia. Instead, the reverse has happened.With the introduction of temporary protection visas in October 1999, former detainees are now denied access to most refugee and migrant support services, including Englishlanguage classes funded by the Commonwealth. Many asylum seekers eventually become members of the Australian community. As migrants, they confront the challenges of adjusting to life in an adoptive country. They must deal with an unfamiliar social system, a foreign culture, a new language. As refugees, they may carry the scars of trauma experienced in their homeland or in flight. Detention adds to this burden and can only be regarded as a peculiarly short-sighted and punitive policy. It requires refugees to show enormous resilience. < > ‘When we first got out,’ says Fatima, ‘the kids and I went to bed at 7 pm and slept until 10 am the next day.’ In detention, she says, her second child was ‘jumpy and scared of everybody’. She was not eating or sleeping and was too scared to go to the toilet at night, even though it was in the same room. ‘Now she goes on her own,’ says Fatima ‘even though it is down the hallway. She is laughing and playing. There is a huge difference in the kids.’ Mustafa, too, says his children are getting better now. The family was finally released from Port Hedland after seven-and-a-half months.‘I cried,’ he says.‘I could not believe it.’ Mustafa now lives in Brisbane and is doing a computer course. His oldest boy is at primary school.‘I am trying to help him with his English,’ says Mustafa. ‘He has trouble concentrating. He thinks school is for playing only. He has trouble waking up in the morning and doing homework at night. It’s hard to get him on track.’ Mustafa’s biggest concern is for his youngest son, now four-anda-half, but barely talking. He puts it down to the experience of

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detention, especially in Singapore, where they spent the most time. ‘The children could not speak there.When they speak the guards shout at them, always shout at them to keep quiet.’ He hopes to find a kindergarten place for his son; he hopes interaction with other kids may speed his healing. And Mustafa himself? ‘I feel bad,’ he says ‘I don’t trust the days. I don’t feel that I’m getting very well. I feel that, anytime, maybe things could change. Even when I see the police now in the road, I fear them. I check everything. Do I have my driving licence? Is the car registration OK? I don’t feel stable yet.’

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The helpful man outside the Knox Community Arts Centre directed me to park on the grass.Tonight’s star performer had drawn a big crowd and the car-park was already full. It was a hot night in early March 2000 and from my inner-city home I had ventured into the foreign territory of Melbourne’s outer east to witness the minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, conduct a community consultation on Australia’s 2000–2001 Migration and Humanitarian Program. It was the penultimate meeting in a nationwide series of consultations ‘intended to be meaningful’, the minister said, because the government ‘should take into account the views of the Australian community as a whole’. Having first mistakenly stumbled into a Weight Watchers’ session, I then found my way into the main auditorium. I knew I was in the right place when I saw burly men in suits with wires behind their ears.They were keeping a wary eye on the scruffy young guy hawking copies of the Green Left Weekly. Just inside the door was a table cluttered with pamphlets promoting local events: the Stringybark Bush Festival, the Knox Garden Competition and screenings of the Ferntree Gully Film Society. Also on offer there was tea or coffee and biscuits, and there were glossy Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) booklets with titles like ‘Population Flows’ and ‘Protecting the Border’. Philip Ruddock had come to middle Australia to sniff the wind and to spread his wisdom. The local member for the constituency of Aston (the highly regarded Peter Nugent, who has since passed away) introduced the minister. ‘Phil,’ he said ‘is well-known as a man of ability and compassion,’ with ‘a long record in the human rights field’. He pointed out that Mr Ruddock is also ‘the father of the house’, having served as a member of parliament continuously since 1973, longer than any other sitting member — longer even, by one year, than his veteran leader John Howard. Philip Ruddock’s parliamentary career began when he won

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