Tracey Barnett: NZ blind to Aussie detention 'gulags'

AP photo / Brennan Linsley

Kathryn Ryan was getting hot under the collar. The RadioNZ host was grilling their Australian correspondent about Kiwis in immigration detention on Christmas Island - a nearly invisible story from their side of the pond, "Where is their access to lawyers? Where is their access to due process? Where is their access to decent treatment?"

We're ticked off and our best cousies have barely noticed. We don't like the sound of indefinite detention for someone who shouldn't be in jail. No access to legal counsel, or family, or even an end-date to their unknown sentence. Australia sure has a hell of a talent for trying to make people so unhappy they'll want to bugger off home. Where's the love, Bros?

But here's the dirtier irony we're completely missing; when it comes to indefinite detention of asylum arrivals in these same modern-day gulags - with no access to legal counsel, or family, or an end-date to their unknown sentence - what has New Zealand said about locking up some of the world's most desperate - folks guilty of trying to find safety from war?

Not. A. Word.

We'd better start talking loudly about Australia's Guantanamo, the festering open sore that our government doesn't want to mention much. Our blaring silence has been a particular shame, too, because Australia's offshore prisons have earned quite a notorious reputation internationally. Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island have been riddled with allegations of everything from waterboarding, 'zipping' (plastic-tying one's ankles and wrists to a bed frame and dropping with force), to sexual assault, child imprisonment and endemic self-harm rates.

From now on, you aren't likely to hear many first person stories behind the news either. Australia just passed legislation that effectively gags all staff, including medical personnel, from talking to the media about conditions inside. If a staff member does talk to the press, they may face up to two years in prison.

Reporters have been shut out too. A journalist will be charged $8,000 just to apply for a press pass from the Nauru government, whether access is granted or not.

So how do we untangle what's really happening there? Numbers may tell the story that those inside cannot:

* The number currently held indefinitely on Nauru, Manus Island and Christmas Island: 1810.

* The number of children included in that tally: 93 on Nauru, plus another 104 in Australia's mainland detention centres, making 197 children locked up in total.

* The number of reported child abuse incidents on Nauru only: 67 - 30 of which are against staff at the facility. No staff have been charged.

* The number of asylum seekers reported to have been raped or sexually assaulted: 33.

* The number of reported suicide attempts or 'self harm' events: 253 - on average, one person every four days. (Note, 'self harm' constitutes hangings, chewing glass, drinking chemicals, self-incineration, self-cutting and attempted self-suffocation.) One whistleblower told a Senate inquiry, "We were told if we saw people protesting or self-harming, not to look at them because it empowers them. We were told to walk away."

* The number of reported assaults on detainees: 211 - that constitutes one person every five days.

* The number of detainee deaths: 2.

* The number of guards now on trial for the alleged beating death of one detainee: 2.

* The percentage of adults who seek help from mental health nurses: 57 per cent. Figures may be low, as assessment is voluntary and acute cases are less likely to self-report.

* The percentage of children helped from mental health nurses: 44 per cent.

* Time it takes to queue for a toilet: 45 minutes+.

* Number of Manus Island asylum seekers whose cases have been processed for resettlement: 0.

* The cost to the Australian taxpayer for Transfield Services' recently renewed contract to run Nauru and Manus Island: $AU1.2 billion.

Australia is doing something sadly innovative; they are paying poor, developing countries to take Australia's human rights obligations off their hands. It's working too. Nauru and PNG get a big chunk of cash for hosting these Australian-run black holes.

Surely, New Zealand doesn't endorse this?

In February 2013, when then Prime Minister Julia Guillard came out of talks with John Key in Queenstown, she invited New Zealand to send any future boat arrivals to Nauru and Manus Island. We have never made it clear whether we will take up that offer.

That same year, New Zealand passed a law that would amount to mandatory detention for any future boat arrivals over 30 people, unusual for a country that has been respected internationally for its humane community-based approach.

How long will it take for our silence to condemn us too? Are ugly Australian immigration gulags just fine as long as Kiwis aren't thrown in them?

Funny, how we can suddenly see so acutely across the Tasman now - with the right blinders on.

Tracey Barnett is a columnist, author and founder of a refugee awareness initiative WagePeaceNZ,