Compassion and $400 million thrown out to sea
BY MICHELLE DIMASI
Canberra Times, May 23, 2008
Within the next couple of weeks, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship will be handed the keys to Australia’s newest detention facility, the Christmas Island Immigration and Reception Centre.
The Howard government facility has not come cheap: a staggering $400 million of public money has been spent constructing this 800-person detention facility. Yet only 400 people are held in immigration detention centres across Australia and no one is currently being detained in Christmas Island’s existing facility.
Most Australians could be forgiven for knowing little about the new centre. Christmas Island is so far away that it may as well be part of Indonesia. It lies 320km south of Java and 2630km north-west of Perth. The island has about 1400 permanent residents. It is best known for the annual red crab migration, when millions of tiny crabs make the dangerous journey from the island’s jungle to the sea. But dangerous journeys and migratory movements are not confined to the crab world on Christmas Island. Since the early 1990s, Christmas Island has been the first port of call for many asylum seekers who escaped persecution in their homelands and made the perilous journey across the Indian Ocean in the hope of being allowed to settle in Australia.
In the wake of the Tampa crisis, the Howard government created the so-called Pacific Solution, whereby asylum seekers would be detained and processed off-shore, in Papua New Guinea or on Nauru. The aim was to deter and punish people who tried to exercise their right to claim asylum, a universal right bestowed on all human beings.
The government also introduced legislation to excise Christmas Island and other islands from the migration zone. In 2002, it announced that it would construct a 1200-person
detention centre, at an estimated cost of $197.7 million. By claiming that its construction was a matter of urgency, the government prevented the proposal from being scrutinised
by the Public Works Committee.
The Howard government was not afraid to spend millions of dollars to ensure that this would be a maximum-security detention centre. It contains lockdown zones, which
allow staff to separate detainees from one another, and has CCTV directly linked to Canberra. It is heavily guarded by two fences with high-tech detection systems. To prevent detainees from hanging themselves, shower fixtures are positioned on sharp angles and the hooks behind cell doors flick down when too much pressure is placed on them. The building is built low into the ground to prevent detainees from seeing beyond the tropical jungle walls of the detention centre. It is troubling to think about how this maximum-security island detention centre may affect the mental health of those detained there.
Since Labor has come into power Australia’s asylum policy has changed. The detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island have been shut down and the Pacific Solution has been scrapped. While the Rudd Government ought to be applauded for abolishing the Pacific Solution, it remains to be seen what it will do in relation to the new Christmas Island facility.
Immigration Minister Chris Evans has said that no children and families will be held in detention. Essentially, this means that the centre will be of little use if there were boat arrivals similar to that in 2000 and 2001 – inevitably including families including children. Where would families be accommodated?
While the Howard government had to turn to the Pacific to overcome the challenges created by its uncompromising stance, the Rudd government has a different problem to contend with: how to find a use for a $400 million island detention centre so that this project has not been a total waste of taxpayers’ money.
No Guarantees 
SOunds like a great retirement home for former Prime Ministers and Immigration Ministers
Children haven’t been detained for a few years. families who are detained are usually held in what’s called “residential accommodation”. That often means they have a house set up for them and people with them 24-7 or they are housed together in units rather than cell blocks.
that may well be true now, Gareth, but let’s not forget that the changes to the way children were treated were brought about reluctantly by the previous government and only after concerted and costly campaigns by many thousands of concerned Australians who could not stomach the cruelty (I use the word deliberately) of the whole approach taken towards asylum seekers at that time.
I well remember standing on busy street corners trying to discuss the matter with people who openly displayed contempt for the plight of these innocent ones (“the least of these”) angrily shouting that they should be drowned at best, and locked up at the very least.
I still have my ‘Children Don’t Belong in Detention Centres’ T- shirt – lest we forget.
It is outrageous that anyone in this country should ever need to wear such a shirt.