Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier this year I asked the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs for an explanation about how 26 Australian citizens could be detained as illegal immigrants. I want to emphasise that Australian citizens were detained as illegal immigrants. How this came about we have no idea. The Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and the Attorney-General informed me in May that 26 of the 220 DIMA detention cases described as ‘released not unlawful’ concerned Australian citizens. There was no any indication as to where these citizens were detained or released, nor any explanation as to how they came to be detained. I added some follow-on questions to my original question to the ministers, and those related to the different circumstances of all those Australian citizens who were detained unlawfully. The only answer I got back was that it had been referred back to the Ombudsman and that a report would be coming soon.

Two days ago, a number of reports were tabled in the parliament by the minister for immigration regarding the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s reports on individual detainees’ cases. Yesterday there were three reports released: the report about Mr G, which concerns the detention of an Australian resident; the report on nine mental health and incapacitation cases; and, the most shocking report of all, the report of 10 children in detention, of whom eight were either Australian citizens or holders of visas entitling them to reside freely within the community. These were children. We are not talking about adults who were here so-called ‘illegally’. These children had every right to have the same freedoms that my children have been lucky to grow up with. It is abhorrent that, in this nation today, in 2006, we are detaining children that have no right to be in detention.

It is worth noting the circumstances under which the Ombudsman makes reports pertaining to a group or class of people or complaints. In the preface to the report about children in detention, it is observed:

A report can be prepared if the Ombudsman is of the opinion that the administrative action under investigation was unlawful, unreasonable, unjust, oppressive, improperly discriminatory, or otherwise wrong or unsupported by the facts …

Certainly the detention of those children was unlawful, unreasonable, unjust and oppressive. The children in detention report focuses on 10 children who were detained within the period of 2002 to 2005 for up to 282 days. Nine of the 10 children were imprisoned within an immigration detention facility. The Ombudsman writes that, since these events occurred, DIMA’s approach toward the incarceration of children has changed. Now we are led to believe that children will be detained only in an immigration detention facility like Baxter or Port Hedland as a last resort. It is a disgrace. (Time expired)