Mandatory detention: expensive and ineffective

Sarah* arrived at Tullamarine with her 10-month-old baby late on a Sunday night. She had a valid passport and a valid visa.

She came from one of the North African countries where people are protesting for western style democracy against a dictatorship. A house raid and threats to her safety forced the decision to leave her home.

Perhaps this was the reason that officers from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) decided to check her over. In so doing they discovered that her husband, who had arrived seven months earlier, also with a valid passport and visa, had since applied for a protection visa.

DIAC immediately cancelled her visa and attempted to put her on a flight. There were no flights available that night so she was taken to a place of detention, pending removal the next day.  Meanwhile her husband was in a panic. He knew that she was coming.

DIAC would not confirm her arrival or say where she was. The husband contacted a legal service who then sought the information from DIAC and permission for him to see his wife and baby son. A protection visa claim was lodged.

It was then that DIAC decided to send Sarah and her baby to detention in Darwin. Her husband had his interview in Melbourne that same week. DIAC eventually were prevailed upon not to separate the family, so Sarah was moved to a single room at an airport motel with two guards; a male and female.

The room was so small that she had to sit on the bed, with the guards only a metre away. Her husband was not told where she was and no phone call was allowed. The young veiled woman was terrified. She had no privacy to breastfeed her child and sat up all night in terror.  In her country women in custody are routinely raped.

The next morning Sarah was allowed a brief call to her husband. She rang in distress. “If only they let me talk to her – I could have told her – these people are rude but they will not harm you as Australia is a democracy,” her husband said.

This is mandatory detention. It is a blanket policy which has no get-out clauses. Under the Migration Act, DIAC were within their rights to cancel Sarah’s visa and, having done so, the officers had no alternative under this same law than to place her in detention.

Unlike other countries it is not possible to seek asylum at the airport in Australia. Signs direct asylum seekers to immigration desks in UK and European airports but not here.

A Russian family who arrived with valid visas and passports made the mistake of asking policemen for directions to the immigration department as they stood in the taxi rank at Tullamarine. They were marched back inside and transported to Baxter Detention Centre.

A young African girl who came for a religious festival, with valid documents, had her luggage searched at the exit counter and her diary read. She had written a passage about her fears of returning home. She never made it to the religious festival but spent months in detention before being granted a visa.

There are people coming off boats on Christmas Island with bodies scarred and marked from torture. There are many women who have been raped in their countries of origin. Research shows that at least one third of people seeking asylum have suffered torture. The “health checks” carried out by International Health Medical Services (IHMS), which all asylum seekers receive on arrival, rarely document these abuses.

If they did they would trigger a policy which states that persons who have been subject to torture and trauma must be detained for as short a time as possible. This like the Minister’s Detention Values regarding the detention of children is policy only – not law, so not enforceable.

In answer to queries as to how it is possible to overlook the bullet wounds, shrapnel scars and sores, knife scars, acid burns, cigarette and iron burns, dislocated shoulders from being hung backwards and knee and leg injuries from being hung upside down, a senior IHMS official responded that this “health check is not your routine strip down medical check” but rather a faster tick-a-box check which depends on the traumatised new arrival disclosing torture and trauma at the entry table on arrival. Even when known, the medical and psychological condition of a person cannot break the mandatory detention sentence.

The only way out is if the Minister himself considers a person’s case and signs to release them. This did not happen for the man in detention who had his leg amputated this year and who was then sent back to the detention centre “because it is the best place for him”. It did not happen for the woman whose baby died in utero at seven months and who then had to carry her dead baby full term until delivery. She stayed in detention all through the pregnancy and for months after she returned from hospital with no baby.

Certainly the brutality and cruelty of detention has little effect but the cost of this failed policy might cause concern. It has now been revealed that the cost of detaining 6,500 people in 2010 was $2 billion. This is well over $300,000 for each man, woman and child.

Australia is alone in this mandatory detention policy. We have been able to do it because our numbers have been so low. It is impossible for the UK, USA, Europe or Canada because they have too many asylum seekers arriving to even consider mandatory detention. A Dutch immigration officer laughed at me when I asked about their detention policy. He said “with 80,000 undocumented people in Amsterdam, where would we lock them up?”

Interestingly the basis for our detention regime since 1992 has been to deter arrivals when there is no evidence showing that our detention policy influences boat arrivals. Two billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on a policy which has so clearly failed to achieve its stated objective – financially and morally.

Mandatory detention is a big, expensive business, making huge profits for global corporations on the backs of Australian tax payers. Serco, the private contractor, are now recruiting directly from UK and South African prison systems as Australian staff are burnt out. IHMS are a global health care provider to prisons and detention centres.

There are no published minimum standards – as these are now all contained in the commercial-in-confidence contract. DIAC monitor and charge “abatements” for contract failures. There are monetary penalties for escapes, deaths, suicides, media entry to centres and a range of other transgressions. The effect of the “abatements” system is increasingly harsh conditions as Serco try to avoid financial penalties.

There is plenty of money in these contracts. The lowest grunt guard earns $2,100 per week. Interpreters earn $4,000 per week. Nurses earn $45,000 per three-month contract. These are remote area rates where half the detention centres are located. Contractors work very long hours and are mostly fly-in fly-out. Staff turnover is high because they can’t bear the conditions and some can’t stand seeing people treated so badly. Even in urban centres, rates of pay are generous to keep staff. No-one enjoys working in these places.

The big question is when will Australian taxpayers grasp the absolute waste of money in this business of damaging people? People are at their most compliant when they arrive seeking protection.  Research has found that asylum seekers and irregular migrants rarely abscond while awaiting the outcome of a status determination or other lawful process.

Why would they run away and where to, when they have a chance of applying for a visa and having a legal right to live in a peaceful country? They were forced to flee from their home country as no-one chooses to be an asylum seeker. They do not want to spend their lives on the run.

People could be housed in the community while having their claims assessed at a fraction of the cost. Research has shown that there would be a cost saving of 69 per cent in Australia on alternatives to detention.

When the Vietnamese people stepped off the boat in Darwin in 1976, they had no passports or visas; we did not lock them up. They lived in hostels until they were settled, moved out, got jobs, bought houses, started families and today are our fellow Australian citizens.

We could do it again if we had the political leadership to help us open our hearts and minds.

^{*Her name has been changed to protect her identity}

By Pamela Curr: the campaign coordinator at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

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