The Australian government’s policy on the detention of refugees is a disgrace verging on the inhuman. This week an all-party parliamentary committee reported on the policy. They found some asylum seekers are cooped up in filthy cells with overflowing toilets. They found asylum-seekers spending months in detention centres with nothing to do. They were left wandering aimlessly through the camp. At night they were checked by torchlight. At Port Hedland the committee said conditions were, “horrendous” and “disgraceful”. Detention centre staff had even tried to prevent MPs from seeing one block – – clearly they had something to hide.
These are not the findings of some of politically motivated group. Nor are they the findings of some pro-migrant or pro-refugee organisation. Rather, they are the findings of a parliamentary committee containing both Government and Opposition MPs. The recommendations and findings they made were unanimous.
But the minister for immigration, Philip Ruddock, and Prime Minister John Howard could barely have had time to skim through the report before they came out rejecting its key findings and recommendations. Clearly, their minds had been made up that there were more votes in the detention of asylum-seekers than applying decency and humanity to fellow human beings.
The asylum-seekers are not criminals, but they are being treated worse than criminals. It is appalling that the government has set up detention centres in remote parts of Australia and repeatedly denied reasonable contact between the detainees and people in the community who could help them. And it is simply sickening that an Australian Government can tolerate a situation where innocent children are detained for months and in some cases years. The committee quite reasonably recommended that there be a limit of 14 weeks for the detention of asylum-seekers after which they would be released into the community. That would put the onus on government to make assessments of people quickly and either deport them or if their refugee status is accepted to grant them asylum. Provided there was no evidence of that the asylum seekers were causing the delay, the 14 week limit should apply.
Mr Ruddock has accused committee members – – including members of his own party – – of being a naïve. Faced with findings of the appalling conditions in the Australian camps, Mr Ruddock argues that refugee camps in other parts of the world are far more appalling. What a sorry state we have come to that an Australian minister uses as his benchmark squalid refugee camps elsewhere in the world as a benchmark to excuse poor detention standards in Australia.
Australia’s detention policy stands in stark contrast to policies of the European countries. During at the recent election campaign in Britain the treatment of legal immigrants became an issue. The Conservatives proposed more use of detention. Labour prevaricated after some initial suggestion that it would look at the Australian policy. The telling point for the British Government not taking on detention as a policy was the cost. Most Western European countries have a higher proportion of illegal immigrants than Australia yet they manage to deal with them without the inhuman detention policy that Australia applies.
In Australia, the Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley, was typically waffly in his response to the report. He refused to commit to any easing of the detention policy. Rather, he just said that present policy was not working. Wow. The Australian public is entitled to know in some detail what Labor proposes.
Surely it would be more humane and less costly to ease the detention policy. It should not be beyond the wit of government to devise reporting requirements or even electronic bracelets to insure that asylum-seekers released into the community do not simply disappear. That this Government does not do so shows that it is more interested in pandering to it xenophobic populism than leadership and proper standards of human-rights.