Immigration detention - reading the tea leaves

This week, the Immigration Department’s weekly “situation report” identifies 671 people in immigration detention. These weekly reports have been a useful tool for tracking what’s been happening to asylum seekers and refugees over the last few years.

The department has never made a fine art of transparency or accountability, and the weekly statistical summary has to be read a bit like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup to get an interpretation on what’s going on. With a bit of practice though, you can get a good idea of the number of long-term detainees, movements between detention centres, and an insight into the human tragedy being played out.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the continued denial that the people still held on Nauru are part of Australia’s responsibility - these figures have always excluded the detainees there, and there’s still 30 blokes stuck on that desert island who have been there for nearly four years now. Out of sight, out of many minds.

But let’s look a bit more closely at what else this week’s figures do and don’t show, particularly compared to the same time three years ago.

Detainees are only at Nauru, Baxter, Villawood, Maribyrnong and Perth, with the majority being at these latter three metropolitan detention centres. Woomera, Port Hedland, Curtin, Christmas Island, Cocos Island and Manus Island are closed. If we could just get those last men off Nauru - women and children have long gone - and mothball Baxter, then we’ve won our call for immigration detention centres to be close to major population centres for accountability, speed and ease of processing. The worst of the camps - Woomera, Curtin and Port Hedland - are gone.

The children are out of detention. Three years ago, before we’d won the first of the series of backbencher-forced back-downs from the Government in December 2002, (one which proved so hard to get implemented): there were 89 children in the detention centres in Australia, including kids unaccompanied by their parents; plus another hundred or so on Nauru; with only a handful in “alternative accommodation pilot projects”. Today, there are still children deemed to be in detention - or in hospitals, foster care, private apartments and so on - but it’s a big breakthrough to get them finally out of the detention centres.

Fully a third of last week’s number are from China, and I’d guess that almost all would be in detention for relatively short periods for breaches of visa conditions, on the way to removal from Australia. The main point is that compared to three years ago, the detainees are not largely boat-arriving asylum seekers.

The enormous political and social mobilisation that has made immigration one of the key issues was about the treatment of those who fled Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, and arrived in Australia by boat. The vast majority of these people have now been given refugee status, and most are now on the path to permanent protection in Australia, and eventually citizenship. While a handful of refugees have left Australia, I am not aware of any cases where people got temporary refugee status (the three year temporary protection visa), and were removed after the end of this period of protection. There are of course still unresolved cases in the system.

Now as we have discovered, the mere presence of a single person in immigration detention must give rise to some concern, as the department has a dreadful track record for not handling people with dignity, sensitivity or respect for basic human rights. These are surely also a group of people who are so damaged by the processes they’ve been through since arriving by boat. These are people whose settlement into the community has been fraught with insecurity as they have waited for the promised removal that so far has not come.

There is a whole other group of asylum seekers - people who arrived here with visas, but whose circumstances changed while here and then seek refuge. If that change to circumstances happens more than an arbitrary 45 days after their arrival, they have to wait through the whole refugee determination process without income support or work rights, reliant on a stretched charity sector.

But while it’s not popular to admit it, those of us who’ve been working on these issues in recent years have a lot to be proud of - we’ve taken things a long way.

Starting from a time of bi-partisan support for mandatory detention, and the failure of both the Government and the Opposition to resist using human misery for political capital, scores of groups, and tens of thousands of Australians have organised into one of the biggest human rights mobilisations we’ve seen.

There were the local community actions from retired school teachers who met the refugees released from the WA detention camps, and organised housing and English lessons for them. There were the experienced national campaigners like myself who shaped disparate groups into coalitions with budgets, strategies and credible media profiles. There were prominent identities who loaned their names and their networks, some with enormous generosity. There were the traditional refugee sector groups who tried to rise to the new challenges, some who failed, others who’ve become better organisations as a result. There were the political activists who found a gritty human reality to otherwise abstract issues; and, of course, there remain those who continue to make political capital from tragic situations.

It is by no means sufficient for a campaign organisation to just write a strategic plan (as we did in 2002) saying:

• break bi-partisanship on the policies between Government and Labor;
• focus on the children in detention with the Backbench Government MPs;
• predict what will happen if TPVs are allowed to expire; and
• maintain pressure on long term detainees and on Nauru.

It then required the efforts and sustained energy of people to keep working together towards these goals. In the three years of the campaign, there were people who got better ideas and went off to make their own mark or to found their own better organisation, but the great thing is that thousands and thousands stuck with the task. While in the nature of things, community organisations spend a lot of time worrying about the importance of community organisations, the real strength of the campaign work was the thousands of people involved who were prepared to do precisely what was asked of them. Letters were written, money donated, politicians visited, petitions signed, public meetings attended, refugees and detainees visited or prayed for.

Of course, the structures of these movements were always flawed - and there was always an inherent conflict in a campaign organisation governed by a board of 20 representatives from other organisations, where all the energy and funds came from thousands of unrepresented individuals. The conflict was often unpleasant, but the prevailing view was to keep it all together because the net value of the organisation was so high.

Well now we’re in a situation where we’ve won a sort of victory. How much has been achieved can be the subject of dinner-table arguments, rather than long complaints about how powerless people are. What’s left to be done can be argued knowing that an agenda for change is worth discussing. Whether the campaign can or should take credit; which bit of the campaign worked; what was the most influential; did it really matter - there’ll be a host of views. But it’d be crazy to carry on without taking stock.

For me, the big thing in this week’s figures, and from pondering the campaign work of the last few years, is that it’s time to acknowledge that there’s been a big shift. We tried a form of campaign organisation and it worked. Now let’s make some new plans on the basis that campaigns can work.

Its successes aside, the asylum seeker campaign demonstrated clearly that, when it matters most, human rights protections fail in Australia. The Solon and Rau cases, and the other unnamed victims of arbitrary treatment by DIMIA remain testament to the simple reality that there are, in the end, no minimum rights of treatment for any of us.

This failure of protection of human rights has a big effect on so many other situations. For Australian children, for those who are ill, those who are feared, who are vulnerable, or for those who are different.

It’s great that so many people are keen to join a campaign to look at this fundamental problem in our social structures. There’s a lot of work ahead, but we can see that it’s worth it.