Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (Senator Vanstone) to a question without notice asked by Senator Nettle today relating to the detention of and compensation for Ms Cornelia Rau.

Cornelia Rau was found over a year ago suffering from untreated schizophrenia in Baxter detention centre. In the time leading up to the report by the Palmer inquiry, which looked at Cornelia Rau’s case, the government continued to say that they would not deal with any issues relating to compensation or other issues until they had received the Palmer report. The Prime Minister said that there was an inquiry process under way and that until the Palmer inquiry reported it was not the government’s intention to contemplate or discuss other issues. He said that when the findings of the Palmer inquiry were in then all the circumstances could be assessed and further attention could be given to what should be done. He acknowledged in parliament the difficult experience that Cornelia Rau had gone through—which I think is an understatement.

The Palmer inquiry reported on 14 July of last year, yet we still have not heard from the government what concrete steps they are taking to resolve this issue. I acknowledge that the process with her lawyers has taken some time. There is hope on the part of her lawyers and, as the minister indicated, on the part of the government that the issue can be resolved outside the courts through a negotiated agreement. But we are not getting any closer to any compensation being paid along the way. Unfortunately, the delays are similar to those that we saw in the case of Vivian Solon, where it took so long for the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and the lawyers involved to decide on a way in which this could be determined.

One would hope, looking at that situation from the outside, that it could be resolved and that a process could be set in place in the case of Vivian Solon so that when we got to Cornelia Rau—and, hopefully, there will be nobody else down the track—there would be a process in place to determine how these issues could be resolved. It is now over six months since Palmer reported and over a year since Cornelia Rau was found and released, and she still has not received one cent in compensation.

Part of the difficulty for people in the Australian community in understanding what has happened in detention centres and what kinds of circumstances people are being held in is the isolation that people experience because they are detainees in remote detention centres. The very remoteness of the detention centres themselves is an issue. Cornelia Rau, for example, was first taken into custody in Far North Queensland and then wound up behind razor wire in the remote detention centre of Baxter. Similarly, another group of detainees, the West Papuan asylum seekers, arrived in Far North Queensland. They have been taken even further away than Cornelia Rau was and are now over on the extremely remote external territory of Christmas Island.

From answers given by the department of immigration in Senate estimates the other week, it appears to be the government’s intention to send a large number of detainees over to Christmas Island. That is why, on Christmas Island at the moment, a massive new detention centre is being built. It is an enormous detention centre that is intended to hold 800 beds. When you go and look at the size of the construction that is going on, it is easy to believe that there is an intention to hold many more than 800 people there. It is an enormous facility. The department of immigration said in the last estimates that the latest figure for the spending on that was $210 million, but there is clearly an intention to build a lot more and spend a lot more.

This is not something that the people of Christmas Island are welcoming onto their island, either. One of them commented to me that they do not want to be an island of gulags—I think that was the language that was used. The shire president said that the only carrot that had been waved in front of him and others from Christmas Island was the possibility of 20 local jobs. Twenty local jobs at a facility that is designed to have 800 people is hardly a great offer to the people of Christmas Island. It is unsurprising that they are saying that they simply do not want this facility to be built.

It is partly the remoteness of Christmas Island and other detention centres that means that we do not hear about the circumstances of people like Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez. That is what leads the government to the point that they are at now, where they are having to deal with these compensation issues. Unfortunately, they continue to drag out the compensation issues so that they cannot be resolved. Worse than that, they build more detention centres. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.