Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to speak tonight on the second report of the inquiry into immigration detention by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration. In May last year, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, requested that the committee inquire into and report on immigration detention in Australia. The committee’s first report was tabled last December and it addressed the duration of and means of release from immigration detention. That first report made a number of valuable suggestions and I, together with fellow committee members Senator Alan Eggleston and Senator Hanson-Young, approved of those recommendations but dissented from its proposal of a model that allowed people to be held in detention for 12 months without any independent judicial oversight. We proposed an alternative model which includes judicial review.

As yet, the government has not responded fully to the recommendations of the committee’s first report, but I do acknowledge and congratulate the government for taking steps to implement the committee’s recommendations calling for the abolition of detention debt. The imposition of a fee for incarceration has been one of the unacceptable features of Australia’s mandatory detention regime—a regime which was introduced by the Labor government in 1992.

The committee’s second report examines options for community based alternatives to detention. We believe that the development of viable alternatives to detention is a fundamental part of the reform process. In 2005 the former government initiated significant reform to law and policy to enable the release of children and their families from detention centres into the community. By July 2005 all children and their families were placed in the community. In July last year the Rudd government introduced a new policy which aims to limit mandatory detention to those individuals who pose a health, security or compliance risk. I welcomed this as a further step towards the establishment of a more humane approach to immigration detention, and the committee’s second report continues this move by focusing on alternatives to detention and the means of support for those released from detention and living in the community. I believe that the model of release via a reformed bridging visa system proposed in the report is another step in the right direction and that the report also makes some valuable suggestions about more humane bridging visa conditions which are intended to ensure that people are provided with the social and economic support they need to live adequately and decently in the community.

In my view, there are two areas of significant concern that the report has not addressed. The first is the detention of children in immigration residential housing and immigration transit accommodation. The second is the lack of transparency in the proposed model of release by bridging visa. The harmful effect of detention on the family lives and the development of children is well documented. It was reiterated to the committee in numerous submissions, notably by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Australian Psychological Society.

It is worth noting that, in response to a rising tide of opinion strongly opposed to the detention of children under the mandatory detention regime, the former government amended the Migration Act to include the statement:

The Parliament affirms as a principle that a minor shall only be detained as a measure of last resort.

That was in 2005. As a consequence, in July 2005 all children and their families were released into the community through a mechanism known as residence determination. Under the changes then made to the Migration Act, the minister is empowered to determine that a specified person may reside at a specified place such as a flat or a house in the community instead of being detained at a place of immigration detention. As the explanatory memorandum to the 2005 bill states:

Under these arrangements, detainees would be free to move about in the community without being accompanied or restrained by an officer under the Act.

The granting of residence determination has been the mechanism through which the former government’s commitment to release children and their families from detention into the community has been fulfilled. In the course of its inquiry, however, the migration committee received disturbing evidence of instances in which children had been held for extended periods of time in forms of immigration detention other than immigration detention centres. It is important that we are clear that the 2005 reforms and the legislative change that gave them statutory effect were intended not only to release children and families from immigration detention centres but to release them from, as I said, all forms of detention other than a residence determination, allowing them to live at liberty in the community with only minor restrictions such as their parents’ reporting requirements. I have, therefore, been concerned—I am aware that this concern is shared by others, and it was brought to the committee’s attention in submissions—that the government’s new detention values only explicitly prohibit detention of children in immigration detention centres.

According to the most recent departmental statistics, as at 15 May 2009 there were a total of 55 children in either immigration residential housing, transit accommodation or alternative detention in the community. ‘Alternative detention’ includes detention in the community with a designated person in private houses, correctional facilities, watch-houses, hotel apartments, foster care and hospitals. By contrast, according to the most recent count, there are only 27 children on residence determinations living freely and unsupervised with their families in the community.

I do not believe that the majority report gives adequate weight to the evidence received by the committee from the International Coalition on Detention of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Migrants, which said that long-term use of these detention alternatives for families and individuals with health issues is not something that should be accepted. Evidence was also submitted to the inquiry by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission that it has been aware of several cases where children and families have been detained in immigration residential housing facilities for a significant period of time. The submission tells of the stress suffered by a family with a small child and a pregnant mother held in immigration residential housing for two months. This evidence is further updated in the commission’s report on 2008 inspections, which revealed that a family with a baby and a five-year-old child were detained in immigration detention residential housing for three months. The committee also received verbal confirmation from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship that children would now be held in immigration residential housing beyond the period of initial assessment.

The report provides descriptions that closely mirror the promotion materials readily available on the department’s website that speak of landscaped areas at detention centres, quiet areas for reading and other activities, units with disability access and the provision of full catering, including all meals and snacks as required. The committee does acknowledge that facilities termed ‘immigration residential housing’ remain secure and closed environments with restricted access and a security presence at reception. These facilities have security measures in operation for monitoring—from cameras and alarm systems to guards at the doors. We have all seen them. The fact is that these are still closed detention facilities which, however sophisticated the security monitoring may be, have one ultimate aim and purpose: to prevent people from passing through the door. The object of the 2005 reforms regarding children was to allow families to live in the community, attending day school, day care and so on without supervision because the Australian community would no longer accept children being detained in secure detention. I am very concerned that we may be slipping away from our obligations.

The second issue that was inadequately addressed in the committee’s report in my view is transparency. In the majority report the committee recognised both the benefits of maintaining a high level of transparency in the migration system and the damage that has already been done by its absence. The report states:

Consistently the evidence reported a lack of transparency in DIAC decision-making which diminished the rigour of the immigration system.

It cautions:

Failure to provide this transparency will inevitably lead to inconsistency, poor outcomes for people, an increase in review applications, and an even greater loss of public confidence in our immigration system.

While the report correctly diagnosed the malaise, its recommendations fall far short of a remedy. Recommendation 4, for instance, proposes that there be provision in writing of reasons for a bridging visa refusal. Since the provision of written reasons for bridging visa refusals is already standard practice in the department, it really is difficult to see that this contributes a great deal more. Furthermore, simply providing reasons for decisions does not constitute a sufficient mechanism of accountability. The report mentions in the second part of recommendation 4 the introduction of external scrutiny of the decision to continue detention. I am not sure what this means, but if the committee intended that full merits review provisions should be provided to those for whom release from detention has not been granted, it should say so explicitly and unapologetically.

As in the first dissenting report, we strongly disagree that public servants should have unfettered power to detain, without independent external scrutiny. These concerns are not alleviated by the model of release by bridging visa proposed in the second report, particularly not by the paucity of transparency measures presented in recommendation 4.

I wish to add my voice to those of other committee members who have thanked the many contributors to this inquiry. I also wish to express my gratitude to the secretariat. I, along with other members of the committee I am sure, was particularly moved by the testimony provided by community groups such as the Hotham Mission and the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in my home state of Victoria. They have carried more than their share of the burden of providing economic, legal and emotional support to asylum seeks in the community. We should all recognise, and express our gratitude for, the extraordinarily commendable service over many years by these groups. I look forward to the third report.

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