Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration I take this opportunity to speak on the presentation of this report on immigration detention centres in Australia. It is appropriately titled Immigration detention in Australia: a new beginning, because I see both the work of the committee and the policy announced earlier this year by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, as a new beginning in policy with respect to detention centres in Australia and as a new beginning for those people who come to this country and are for one reason or another detained in those centres.

At the outset I thank the secretariat, who assisted the committee with the work that was carried out for the last 12 months. I was elected in 2007 and this is the first report that I have been associated with, albeit that I do sit on two other standing committees of parliament. I commend all of the members of the secretariat. I thank Dr Anna Dacre, Ms Anna Engwerda-Smith, Mr Steffan Tissa and Ms Melita Caulfield for the assistance they gave to the committee. I have worked with public servants over the years on many occasions and I have to say the work of all these people was absolutely professional in arranging the visits, researching information, organising public hearings and managing the workload, which they did above and beyond what I would have generally called the call of duty. Their absolute professionalism in everything they did is commendable. I believe that the final report is in no small part a measure of their contribution to the whole process.

I also take the opportunity to thank the chair of the committee, Mr Michael Danby, the member for Melbourne Ports, and you, Madam Deputy Speaker Vale, for your tolerance, your compromise, your experience and your wisdom as senior members of the committee. I valued very much the fact that along the way you were able to manage the process. And it was not an easy process; it was very difficult because of the types of issues we had to deal with, the places we visited, the people we were talking to and the processes that we needed to go through. As I say, the experience and wisdom of both the chair and the deputy chair of the committee were gratefully received by me and I am sure by other members of the committee.

The committee visited detention centres in Sydney, Darwin, Christmas Island, Melbourne and Perth. There was one visit I was not able to attend. We also received 139 different submissions. We held public hearings, which were attended by many people, including some of those people who had made public submissions but also, and very importantly, former detainees of the detention centres that we had visited. I put those detainees broadly into four different categories. There are people who have arrived on our shores as what we generally refer to as illegal boat arrivals, although I question the term ‘illegal’. Others would say there is no such thing. There are illegal fishers, people who had breached section 501 visas and people who had for other reasons breached different visa categories and ultimately ended up in detention centres. In the course of our inquiry we also spoke to many of the people who worked with and visited these people and assisted them while they were in detention centres right around the country. I stress that it was right around the country because I found from my experience that at each detention centre we went to it was a different experience, and therefore it was important to hear from those people individually.

You made the point in your own comments on this report, Madam Deputy Speaker, that as at 7 November there were some 279 people held in detention. The breakdown of those was 189 in immigration detention centres, 44 in community detention, 25 in alternative temporary detention in the community, 16 in immigration residential housing, three in immigration transit accommodation and two restricted on board vessels in port. I cite those statistics simply to highlight the different forms under which people may be held in detention. It is not simply one particular type of place. So, when people try to envisage how people might be held, they can see there is a range of options available to governments and they have been used by governments over the years.

In quoting the recommendations from the report I note that there were some 18 recommendations that the committee ultimately adopted. I know that, in respect of some those recommendations, some members of the committee prepared a dissenting report, but I should note that there were certainly consistency and agreement on the majority of the others. So it was clearly a case of one aspect, which I will come back to, where we might have had some disagreement but, overwhelmingly, the recommendations were agreed to unanimously by all members.

On page 9 of the introduction of the report the recommendations are summarised, and I will quickly go through them:

• 5 day time frames for health checks
• up to 90 days for the completion of security and identity checks, after which consideration must be given to release onto a bridging visa,
• a maximum time limit of 12 months’ detention for all except those who are demonstrated to be a significant and ongoing risk to the community, and
• the publication of clear guidelines regarding how the criteria of unacceptable risk and visa non-compliance are to be applied.

The report goes on to recommend:

• greater detail and scope of the three month review conducted by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship
• ensuring detainees and their legal representatives receive a copy of the review
• ensuring the six month Ombudsman’s review is tabled in parliament and that the ministerial response to recommendations is comprehensive
• providing increased oversight of national security assessments that may affect individuals
• enshrining the new values in legislation—

that refers to the new values of the minister’s policy, announced on 29 July—

• establishing a maximum of 12 months in detention unless a person is determined to be a significant and ongoing risk to the Australian community, and
• opening the door to merits and judicial review of the grounds for detention after that person has been detained for more than 12 months.

I believe that those recommendations essentially summarise the general direction that the committee would like the government to go in when it comes to policy on detention centres.

Those members of the committee who dissented did so on the question of judicial review, and I simply want to make this point: it is my clear impression that their judgements were based on events, practices and processes which took place in the period prior to the Rudd government coming into office. Therefore, they made judgements about what should be done based on the experiences that were brought to them from the submissions made about how people were treated prior to the Rudd government coming to office and certainly prior to Minister Chris Evans’s announcement of the new policy.

Whilst I can understand the dissenting report, at this point in time it is not one that I would support. Nor do I believe it should be supported by the government. We have a new policy in place and it is only once that policy has been applied that we can make judgements about whether we ought to make further recommendations to the minister. I believe that the member for Kooyong said that there was no process after the Ombudsman’s report at the six-month period for any further action to take place. My recollection of the recommendations is that in addition to the six-month report by the Ombudsman we are requesting the minister to respond within 15 days to the Ombudsman’s report. So there is an opportunity for matters to be taken up by the minister.

I will just make some personal observations about the work that the committee did. Firstly, setting aside the submissions from the government departments that we received, which one would expect to be impartial and non-political, my recollection of all representations that were made to the committee were either critical or highly critical of the past policies in respect of detention centres. Secondly, all of the representations that I can recall that made comment about the new Rudd government policy commended that policy. That policy was well received by all of the people who made submissions to the committee, albeit that some might have wanted the government to have gone further.

Thirdly, in all the evidence that I can recall being put to the committee, there was none which supported any suggestion that terrorists were entering Australia as refugees or boat people. I saw no evidence at all to support that notion. Fourthly, there was substantial evidence that people held in detention centres for any period of time, and certainly those held in detention centres for lengthy periods of time, ended up with mental health issues. And, fifthly, the majority of the people who were held in detention centres were ultimately released into the community.

It seems to me, given those observations, that what we need is a change in policy—and we have seen that in the welcome policy response by the Rudd government. We need a fundamental change in mindset, and I have to say that the introductory comments in the report talk about the need for a paradigm shift in the way we address the issue of people being held in detention centres in future. Again, I welcome that. I believe that we need to adopt what I would refer to as principles of natural justice when we deal with people who come into this country for whatever purpose. Those principles of natural justice would rely on us giving them the same provisions in law that we apply to anyone who, for one reason or another, comes before the law in this country, and that is that they are presumed to be innocent until they are found to be guilty. I am pleased to say the Rudd Labor government is going in that general direction with its policy.

That policy announced on 29 July by Minister Chris Evans has seven key values. The first is that mandatory detention is an essential component of strong border control. None of us dispute that. Second, to support the integrity of Australia’s immigration program three groups will be subject to mandatory detention: (a) all unauthorised arrivals, for management of health, identity and security risk to the community, (b) unlawful noncitizens who present unacceptable risks to the community and (c) unlawful noncitizens who have repeatedly refused to comply with their visa conditions. Third, children, including juvenile foreign fishers and, where possible, their families, will not be detained in an immigration detention centre. Fourth, detention that is indefinite or otherwise arbitrary is not acceptable and the length and conditions of detention, including the appropriateness of both the accommodation and the services provided, would be subject to regular review. Fifth, detention in immigration detention centres is only to be used as a last resort and for the shortest practicable time. Sixth, people in detention will be treated fairly and reasonably within the law. Seventh, conditions of detention will ensure the inherent dignity of the human person.

I finish with this comment. I share the comments made by the member for Isaacs and I too was concerned by the question raised by the member for Murray in the House yesterday. I say this to the member for Murray: whilst there was a dissenting report in respect of this matter, those of us who had the firsthand experience of visiting detention centres, speaking to people within them and speaking to people who assisted them all came away with a very strong view that our policy ought to be more humane—and even the dissenting report goes further than our committee did in terms of wanting to make it more humane. I therefore find it objectionable that that question was raised in the House. I say to anyone: before you make a judgement about detention centres and the people who come here, take the time to visit those detention centres, as the committee did.

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