Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is a companion document to the previous report, so I will continue on in the same vein. This is the actual report from the Commonwealth Ombudsman. It details the detention history of 62 different people, the process of their visa applications, issues relating to health and welfare, consequences of their detention and any recommendations. As I said before, the vast majority of these people have now ended up with permanent protection visas or humanitarian visas of various sorts. A few have been given permanent spouse visas and one a temporary protection visa. Health consequences are very prominent in the majority of these 62 cases, with damage having been done to people as a consequence of detention. I repeat the simple fact: these are people who have had their freedom taken away. They have committed no crime and they have been charged with no offence. It is administrative detention. It takes years and years, and it causes immense harm to many people. The Ombudsman’s report details some of that.

I can well remember the irony of showing a group of refugees—who had finally got visas—around Parliament House one day. The group had arrived here after having spent years locked up on Nauru. As people would know, in the public area of Parliament House there is a very rare and very valuable copy of the Magna Carta, from 1215. It was an immense irony to hear the Parliament House tour guide point to the Magna Carta and tell all these people, ‘This is the Magna Carta, which guaranteed that people wouldn’t be locked up without trial.’ To say that to a group of refugees when Australia had done just that for years was a supreme and not very pleasant irony.

I also draw attention to one case in here in particular, a Hazara man of 22 years of age, according to this document. If that means his current age, and I assume it does, it means that when he arrived here in 1999 he was 14 or 15. He was detained for a year from when he first arrived, at that age. As this says, his temporary protection visa, which he was granted in 2000, was then cancelled at the end of 2002 because DIMIA determined that he was a Pakistani national.

People may recall the great scare campaign that was run around the country by the minister of the day, saying: ‘There’s evidence that so many of these people aren’t really Afghans; they’re all just pretending to be. They’re all Pakistanis.’ Immense amounts of money, millions of dollars, went into re-examining these cases. Special identity units were set up in Afghanistan, trying to demonstrate this so-called fact that so many of these people were just pretend refugees and they were actually Pakistanis. That myth permeated the Australian consciousness. I remember speaking to someone just a few weeks ago, whom I will not name, who had actually employed a number of refugees and who said, ‘You know, actually they were all Pakistanis.’ So many people just assumed that myth was true.

This was one person whose visa was cancelled because the department determined that he was a Pakistani national. The case was re-examined three years later. I presume that in that period he was put back in detention—it is not clear, but he would have to have been; otherwise he would not be in this report—until the case was re-examined three years later, when he was interviewed by Afghan and Pakistani authorities. Afghan authorities in July 2005 confirmed this person as a citizen of Afghanistan. So, for all of the intervening three years, purely because of an error—to put it politely—by the department, I would suggest driven very much by a strong political imperative to try and perpetrate this mythology that these were fake asylum seekers, this person, a genuine refugee, a young man, was locked up. There is no compensation for that—three years of unfair, unnecessary, wrongheaded imprisonment, when he should not have been imprisoned anyway. He was not charged with any offence. And yet, what does he get at the end of it? Nothing. Not even an apology for that sort of national mythology that was perpetrated.

There are many other cases in here that to me demonstrate grotesque inhumanity. Let’s remember that this is still continuing. This is still in the law. This is still allowed to happen. We must continue to campaign. Just because the number of boat arrivals has dropped does not mean that the capacity is not still there for people, including children, to be detained indefinitely without having committed a crime and without being charged with anything, unless the minister happens to decide otherwise. That is an inadequate circumstance to have under our laws, and it must be removed. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.