The federal Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Migration has released the first report of its inquiry into immigration detention.
It is a sign of how far the debate has shifted back into rational and humane territory that many of the Committee’s recommendations – which a few years ago would have been seen as ground breaking – are now seen as not going far enough. Two Liberal MPs – Petro Georgiou and Senator Alan Eggleston joined with Green Senator Sarah Hanson-Young to provide a dissenting report stressing the need for independent review of a person’s detention and for oversight mechanisms to click in much earlier in the process than recommended by the Committee.
The dissenting report reinforces the key point around immigration detention which has been absent from so much of the public debate over the last two decades; namely that it is a serious issue to deprive a person of their liberty and lock them up, and it should not be solely a matter of administrative decision to keep a person locked up. If there are serious enough public interest reasons to keep someone locked up or under some form of supervision, these reasons should be tested by an independent authority as occurs any other time a person’s freedom is being curtailed.
One particularly welcome recommendation from the entire Committee concerns the issue of charging people for the time they have been kept in detention. This issue was the subject of a major piece in Crikey a couple of months ago. I hope this recommendation is acted on by the federal government as soon as possible.
Recommendation 18
The Committee recommends that, as a priority, the Australian Government introduce legislation to repeal the liability of immigration detention costs.
The Committee further recommends that the Minister for Finance and Deregulation make the determination to waive existing detention debts for all current and former detainees, effective immediately, and that all reasonable efforts be made to advise existing debtors of this decision.
The issue of monitoring what happens to failed asylum seekers who are removed from Australia was also addressed by a Committee recommendation, which proposes that “the Australian Government instigate mechanisms for monitoring and follow-up of persons who have claimed asylum and subsequently been removed from Australia.” This same sort of recommendation was made by a Senate Committee I was part of in 2000. I accept it is hard to formally monitor people in another country, but that’s no reason to make no effort at all to track what happens to people deported to dangerous situations.
2 Comments
The more I see and read of this detention issue the more aggravated I become. I followed the link back to the story about charges and was appalled. It would be cheaper to accomodate detainees on Hamilton Island or on the Gold Coast etc. I am not joking! At least that would help the tourist industry too! What a ridiculous situation.
As for the deterrent aspect for illegal people smuggling, it seems to be targeting the cargo rather than the carriers. It may make logical sense to some but these are people we are talking about, not fake Rolex watches! An investigation into the illegal traders and policing of international waters needs to be carried out.
A little compassion is required when most asylum seekers (granted, perhaps not all) have suffered more than we can ever imagine. I am sure they are aware of the risks but this just highlights how desperate they must be.
Just to clarify my previous post… my reaction to the back-charge issue was not directed towards the asylum seekers/immigrants! I was really surprised that the government seeks to recover this at all and not surprised that they do not get much of it in te end.