The events over the past few days at both the Curtin and Woomera detention centres reveal several quite sickening aspects of the policy which should – but, alas, do not – cause such widespread protest that the Government would be forced to change direction. The first is the fact that so many children are in detention. Children are vulnerable, as events of the past few have shown. At the Curtin centre in Western Australia police are investigating allegations that three Sri Lankan men sexually assaulted a five year old boy and attempted to sexually assault another five-year-old boy. One of the boys has been in detention since last March with his mother, two brothers and a sister.
That a five-year-old boy, who has committed no crime, can be put into detention in Australia for nearly a year should be offensive to the vast majority of Australians. Alas, apparently it is not. The Government feels it can continue with this abhorrent policy because it is popular. It may be popular but it is not right.
The vulnerability of children in these centres is now more apparent.
Further, in the Woomera centre in South Australia there are reports that a number of children have sewn their lips together – or had them sewn together by adults — as part of a hunger strike. Once again the policy of detention of children is exposed for its inhumanity because it puts the innocent in an unnecessarily vulnerable position.
The response of the Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, is that if parents have done this to their children, then they should be separated. Having created the victims, he now wants to punish them further.
Mr Ruddock justifies the detention of children – even unaccompanied children – because, he says, sending children without parents is used as a ploy but people to get a foothold in Australia.
Even if that were true, there is still no ground for detaining children, and certainly no ground for detaining children for periods approaching a year.
The second element of the detention policy which should concern Australians is that people are being detained in remote places – out of sight, out of mind. In more recent months so have been taken but Australia to even more remote places in the Pacific islands. If the detention policy had so much merit and if the detainees were being treated humanely, why the need to shut them away so far away? We get some knowledge of the centres. What knowledge we get is quite disturbing.
What desperation drives a parent to sew the lips of a child up, or what desperation drives a child to sew his or her own lips up?
There are better ways to deal with the influx of a few thousand boat people each year. Speedier assessment and repatriation of those who are not refugees and releasing of families with children into the community pending assessment can be achieved with political will. Technology can be used — with things like electronic bracelets and DNA testing to ensure overstayers are eventually caught — which would be cheaper and more humane than detention. Other countries with bigger refugee problems do not detain children.
The sad thing is that most of these people will have to settle in Australia anyway. And they will settle here alienated and distrusting of authority and government – for good reason. The immense warmth, affection, appreciation and loyalty that past waves of migrants have for Australia will be dead. Australia will be the poorer for it.
And those Australians who have been suborned by this Government’s detention policy should look at their own children and the events of the past few days and consider changing their minds.