Senator BARTLETT (6:50 PM) —I move:

This is a report from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission of an inquiry into complaints by immigration detainees concerning their detention at the Curtin Immigration Reception and Processing Centre. This report is another example—one amongst the now countless number of examples—of what the minister herself and the department head of DIMIA have now acknowledged is a major problem with the culture of the immigration department.

This report shows that that problem goes back a long way, because it deals with complaints made by a range of detainees—all of them asylum seekers—back in 2000-01. It has taken that long for this report to even be tabled in the parliament. That is example No. 1 of why the current so-called checks and balances are inadequate. The department often says, ‘If people have problems, they can complain to the Human Rights Commissioner and the Ombudsman.’ These people complained about their treatment back in 2001, and here is the report four years later.

The finding of the Human Rights Commissioner was quite unequivocal. The finding was that the rights of most of the people who complained under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights had been breached. Another example of how far out of whack everything in this area has gone is the fact that reports like this, in which the Human Rights Commissioner can find that the immigration department and the then detention centre providers, ACM, have breached people’s human rights, are tabled here with no comment and with barely a yawn. If I had not stood up to speak to it, it would have passed without any notice at all.

Our government breaches the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as determined under our own law through the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, but nobody cares. It is par for the course for the government and the department to ignore these findings, as they have in the past. This is not the first time such a finding has occurred. The specific aspect of these complaints was that a range of people—26 complainants—were put in separation detention in Curtin detention centre for significant periods of time. According to DIMIA’s own figures, the greatest of those periods was 264 days. Separation detention is when people are put in a separate area when they first arrive in detention and can have no contact with anyone outside that area. They can have no contact with the outside world and no contact with anybody else even within the facility. They can have no contact with a lawyer or the Ombudsman unless specifically requested. Again, that is a clear example of the problem with the culture. They put people away from everything else. They do not even let them know their rights, and it is only if detainees know the magic words to specifically request a lawyer or specifically know to request to talk to the Ombudsman, for example, that they then can speak to them—and only about that specific issue.

The commissioner, in looking at the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, looked at the relevant law and what is called the body of principles that has been developed around that international law for the protection of all persons under any form of detention. One example of the sort of sophistry and distortion of culture that DIMIA had developed even four or five years ago is the fact that they said those laws did not apply because it is not penal or correctional detention; it is immigration detention. The department’s answer was, ‘We don’t even need to comply with those basic minimum principles because it’s not correctional detention; it is administrative detention, so we can operate on worse principles than the basic principles for correctional detention.’ That is bad enough, but the fact is that they were wrong anyway. It is quite clearly stated that the body of principles is meant to apply to all people under any form of detention. This report gives page after page of blatant breaches and blatant contempt for any due process and for the basic humanity of people. This was four or five years ago. The same is happening today. If anything, it is possibly worse because they have been allowed to get away with it for all that length of time and, not surprisingly, they have therefore become more and more blase about that sort of treatment of human beings. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted.