Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important report. It was undertaken by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, and it was to consider the facilities, services and transparency of immigration detention facilities in Australia.

Obviously our immigration detention facilities have a very important role to play in Australia in terms of making sure that people are secure while all sorts of inquiries are made; perhaps about their identity or where they are kept pending being sent out of the country. You have such a variety of detainees. At one end of the continuum you might have people, who may include women and children, who arrived unauthorised at Ashmore Reef for example, and then go to Christmas Island where they are kept in mandatory detention while their identity, security and health status is checked. At the other end of the continuum you of course have people who came out to Australia on visas and who, as non-Australian citizens, offended seriously in Australia and may have served prison terms. At the end of those prison terms these people are kept in detention until they are able to be put on a plane to return to their home countries. So this is an important inquiry.

Unfortunately, the inquiry itself did not receive the information, the full cooperation, the sorts of details and data that you would normally expect of such an important inquiry. So in my minority report I pointed out that, with that information often missing, it was very hard to justify or have a depth of data to support the recommendations made. Unfortunately, I joined the committee on 10 November 2008 after most of the evidence and inspections that form the basis of all three reports had been taken. I was not able to question those submissions or to visit most of the facilities that were the subject of the three reports. The committee visited the facilities on Christmas Island prior to the current surge of detainees, which commenced in September 2008, and so its observations on the functioning of the facility are based on its appearance while empty of any detainees and without community or DIAC feedback on the functioning of the facilities or adequacy of services following the arrival of over 1,000 detainees over the following 12 months.

Unfortunately, my several requests to officially visit and inspect Christmas Island facilities since the surge have not been made possible and have not been facilitated by this government. I cannot, then, support any recommendations in relation to the major offshore facility at Christmas Island given the absence of any relevant observation or commentary on the performance of the island detention facilities now in operation. The committee was also not able to obtain a detailed breakdown of the costs associated with the various detention options, except for those at the Christmas Island secure facility. Neither the costs of the transit accommodation available in the capital cities nor the community detention options were provided to the committee despite requests for that data—very earnest and serious requests. This makes a meaningful discussion of the viability, comparisons, efficiency or alternatives to various facilities very difficult. No data was supplied to the committee about any security breaches—for example, escapes from detention facilities—and yet the committee made recommendations about the appropriateness and adequacy of the security infrastructure itself. So, clearly, the data about security breaches was essential for a reasoned debate about the adequacy or performance of different physical infrastructure. We are aware of this anecdotally. I provided some data on people literally going over the wall at Maribyrnong and changes then being made to the infrastructure, but that information was not made available officially to the committee.

We also have recommendations 6 and 8, which refer to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s service delivery model and the Immigration Detention Standards or their current equivalent. The ANAO is called upon to thoroughly review detention facilities with these models in mind. I hope the ANAO has better luck than the committee, because we were not supplied with the Immigration Detention Standards and so were not able to compare the functioning of these facilities with the service delivery model, which apparently does exist. One excuse that was given was that there were tenders in process. Quite clearly, being aware of a detention standard model does not interfere with competitive neutrality or a process of tendering that in fact had been completed some time before. So that was a great disappointment. The data and inquiry methodology were missing, which led to problems associated with not being able to genuinely compare and contrast or account for costs and value for money. All of those pieces of data were essential for our report. They were missing, so I was not able to support the recommendations in this report.

On the other hand, let me say that, of course, the priorities, strategies and values underpinning Australian detention centres are of critical importance to our nation in terms of our humanitarian treatment of those who come to Australia unauthorised and whose identity, security and health status then must be quickly and efficiently checked. It is also important that those who have failed to abide by their visa conditions or who have broken the law in Australia are treated humanely but are kept very securely while they are prepared for exit out of our country. Therefore, I was disappointed with the report and with the cooperation that was extended to the committee as it tried to complete this report. I do hope we have more cooperation with our next report, which seeks to look at disability and immigration and visa applications in this country.

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