Christine Rau
I wasn't involved in the asylum seeker debate in 2001 when the government's actions on Tampa were, in their opinion, decisive in getting them re-elected. It was an accident of circumstance that my family was given a voice this past year: we had an obligation to point out the hypocrisy of having one set of rights for citizens and another for suspected "illegals" who are left to rot for years in detention centres without the rule of law to protect them.
Even though it took months for all the nasty specifics of
Cornelia's treatment to emerge, the broader themes were clear from the outset: the lack of morality — not to mention the expense — of detaining innocent people and hiding them away in the desert; the overall levels of secrecy; the farming out of detention centres to for-profit corporations; the use of punitive isolation to control behaviour; the unchecked power of ill-qualified immigration bureaucrats and privately employed security guards; and the absence of judicial review.
The failures exposed by Cornelia's case have hardly been addressed.
The reforms emanating from Mick Palmer's inquiry into the wrongful imprisonment of Cornelia have given a greater review role to the federal ombudsman (but only after someone's been detained for two years) and many long-term detainees are being quietly released. A couple of sports fields have been added to Baxter and some of the razor wire in Villawood coming down with great fanfare — only to be replaced by electrified fence.
But the federal government's responses to Palmer's report on Cornelia and Neil Comrie's report into Vivian Alvarez were an expensive sop to the electorate. There is a $230 million restructuring and retraining package for the Department of Immigration, for example, but we're not told the detail about who is going to teach compassion to the callous part of the bureaucracy.
In detention centres, the lack of palatable food has been a deeply felt source of contention. The food issue, so seemingly trivial when compared with indefinite detention, can lead to avoidable tension and abuses. This has not changed.
What's needed is an overhaul of the migration act and its byzantine regulations, introduced by stealth largely under Philip Ruddock's reign. But that overhaul won't be coming any time soon. The Senate is now considering measures which will further limit migrants' legal rights with its Migration Litigation Reform Bill 2005.
Among other things, the bill will make it harder for legal aid and pro-bono lawyers to represent detainees, by imposing personal liability on legal costs on lawyers. George Newhouse, solicitor for Alvarez, and whose firm also represents Cornelia, wrote that the proposed bill flies in the face of Palmer's recommendations for increased scrutiny and openness. In the October 6 Sydney Morning Herald, he said the bill will put even more constraints on the already extremely limited judicial review of immigration cases.
The sheer blatancy of many government measures has attracted grassroots opposition from a hitherto non-"activist" group of Australians. Just look at the huge rise in Rural Australians for Refugees and Circles of Friends' groups. There's the growing network of doctors, for example, of all ages and political persuasions, who are quietly providing pro-bono medical networks to those thousands of
refugees who can't access Medicare under their bridging and temporary protection visas (BVEs and TPVs).
Cornelia's case
In early February, Cornelia was just another non-person in Baxter, receiving no treatment for a florid psychosis. The rest of our family was living in suburban obscurity. We were dragged into public life in early February 2005 when the media became interested.
Even before the government announced the Palmer inquiry — only five days after Cornelia was identified — we were getting calls from people with information about what had happened to her during her brush with DIMIA. I was determined to expose the more appalling misuses of power during Cornelia's time behind the wire, much of it in punitive isolation.
In the first few days, Senator Amanda Vanstone's office put out various bits of misinformation about how wonderful DIMIA had been to Cornelia and to us. No-one had contacted us.
Then, Professor Ray Watterson at the University of Newcastle Legal Centre (UNLC) got in touch. Coincidentally, I had rang Ray the morning before the Palmer inquiry was announced, and he offered pro-bono help. He, like many others, had assumed we were already getting legal help and was astonished to find out we were pretty much on our own.
The UNLC had specialised in public interest law and mental health advocacy, had experience in the coroner's court and the health system and had also played crucial roles in the Leigh Leigh and Ron Levi cases in NSW. (These cases involved a bungled police investigation into a young girl's murder and the unlawful police shooting of a mentally ill
man on Bondi beach.)
Thanks to the university, we were able to run a full-scale parallel investigation into Cornelia's case for a family submission to Mick Palmer. We ended up with a 108-page submission (not counting the lengthy appendices), which one of Palmer's team told me had forced them to address issues which would otherwise have been omitted.
We had essentially put a tripwire under the shield DIMIA so often erects in bungled immigration cases — privacy. Because we publicly released most of our submission, excluding Cornelia's detailed medical history, Palmer's team were forced to spell out some of her mistreatment.
Our team hit the phones, interviewing dozens of eyewitnesses to what had happened to Cornelia both in Queensland and Baxter, and experts in psychiatry, the operations of DIMIA and refugee issues. Interviewees included chaplains, bureaucrats, researchers, refugee advocates who specialised in collecting documents, lawyers, doctors, prison and detention centre visitors, current detainees, former detainees, several former DIMIA officials and even a Baxter guard. These insiders gave us invaluable material that the Palmer team had to consider.
Neglect
We learned of the phantom medical care being given to detainees. There were horrific cases of neglect: the young child with a broken thumb, which turned purple and swollen in the week it took for him to get medical attention; the man complaining of severe headaches who was fobbed off with Panadol for two years until he collapsed one night between compounds and started to turn blue after which he was finally
rushed to hospital where neurosurgeons operated for 12 hours to contain the burst aneurism.
There was the woman in Villawood in NSW who couldn't establish breastfeeding with her newborn because guards were in her hospital room 24 hours a day. During the delivery, a guard even gowned up to watch the caesarian, worried no doubt, she might jump up from the table and abscond during the procedure. There were stories of sexual assaults by guards, and in
one case, a hastily arranged abortion.
Many of our interviewees were worried about repercussions and asked for confidentiality. The former detainees and their families were able to tell us how places like Baxter really worked in practice, how the medical services that DIMIA described in such glowing terms, breached the duty of care requirements.
Interview transcripts and court affidavits, including from DIMIA staff that flagrantly contradicted the sort of eyewitness evidence we were getting, were passed onto the university. One such chilling document was the "Behaviour Management Plan" (BMP) from Global Solutions Limited (GSL, the company that runs Baxter among other corrections institutions), which set out rules for detainees in the punishment compound at Baxter, Red One. This is where Cornelia spent 94 days in a psychosis, which had been discerned by other detainees.
Evidence we were given showed GSL even flouted its own management plan for much of the time Cornelia was in Red One. For example, detainees have to sign a consent to the BMP before they enter the compound. Cornelia signed no such document.
Under the strictest stage of the plan, detainees are allowed four hours out of their cell. In Cornelia's case, we were told by eyewitnesses that on many days she was given only two hours' egress, or none at all. At least on one occasion, Cornelia was punched in the chest so hard she fell backwards into her cell so the guards could lock her inside.
Some people gave us material they shouldn't have, and others, like the publicly sympathetic Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, declined to give us the material he should have.
The deadline for Palmer kept extending — from March 24 to May and then indefinitely — when the news about additional unlawful detentions, including the Alvarez case, broke.
Our contention is that sometime during Cornelia's detention, DIMIA was no longer justified in their initial suspicion she was an "illegal". The task for Cornelia's lawyers in any future case will be to determine when that "reasonable suspicion" no longer applied. There are also constitutional implications in her case.
The federal government is cynically sacrificing human rights principles for short-term electoral gain. This is compounded by a disturbing tendency to obscure the truth about what really happens under the auspices of the migration act.
The states have covered up any deficiencies in their own systems and avoided addressing the deeper flaws that Cornelia's, Vivian's and other cases have exposed. They have to get their corrections, health and criminal justice systems in order to halt the blurring between mental ill-health and criminality.
You simply can't lock innocent people up in isolation for months at a time, jail them or deport them illegally, without there being some consequences. There are solutions to almost every dilemma; it just needs some ability to think through complexities, pay attention to detail and a willingness to take official responsibilities seriously. Politicians and public servants are paid to make decisions, presumably for the public good. It's time they did their jobs.
[Abridged from a speech by Christine Rau, Cornelia's sister, to the Queensland Public Interest Law Clearing House on October 18. For the full text see .]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, November 23, 2005.
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