The immigrant scandal that won't go away

On Wednesday night 12-year-old Ian Hwang and his 6-year-old sister Janie walked out of their own nightmare and into the much larger one consuming Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone.

Just a week after the damning report of the inquiry into the unlawful detention of Australian resident Cornelia Rau and the wrongful deportation of Vivian Alvarez, and another condemning immigration detention centre staff for failing to protect a woman who was sexually assaulted in front of her young daughter, the Hwang children emerged as yet more victims of Australia's unyielding and deeply flawed treatment of asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants.

The case of the Hwangs was especially poignant: two innocents, entitled to live in Australia under visas granted in 1998, taken from their classroom at Sydney's Stanmore Public School and locked away in Villawood detention centre for four months.

They were taken to Villawood to join their mother, Young Lee, a South Korean who had allegedly overstayed her visa but whose lawyer claims is legally in the country. Lee was released with her children into community detention under more lenient rules announced by Prime Minister John Howard last month.

At Villawood, where more than 40 children are still detained, life for the two children was traumatic. At one stage, Ian told ABC radio, he saw another detainee attempt suicide. "I couldn't wait until I got out."

Earlier in the week, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released its findings of an inquiry into the assault and attempted rape of an Iranian woman at Western Australia's remote Curtin detention centre.

The woman is a member of the Sabean Mandaean religion, a pre-Christian Gnostic sect who had fled persecution by Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. At Curtin, separated from her husband, she was the only woman among 50 Muslim men.

One man had tried to rape her in front of her 9-year-old daughter. Another punched her, broke a finger and tore her clothes. The department, the commission found, had breached her human rights by failing to ensure that she and her children were kept safe and free from harassment.

An oversupply of similar accounts has stained Australia's reputation abroad and fired angry opposition at home, infuriated most recently by the 10-month detention of long-term resident Rau, and the deportation of a severely injured and equally lawful resident, Philippines-born Alvarez.

What has emerged is a picture of a policy of ruthless detention, operated at too great a distance by Canberra bureaucrats who care too little about how it is put into practice.

It is enforced by officers with vast powers but little, if any, training, and buried deep in the outback where, even with the best of intentions, proper care could never be provided.

It is a system that presumes a level of mental illness - and therefore required levels of care - similar to those of the general Australian population.

But it overlooks repeated studies showing a significantly higher level of mental problems, accentuated both by the trauma that forced many to flee their homelands and by the months, even years, spent behind razor wire and electrified fencing waiting to learn their fate.

And it is a system prone to errors of judgment and omission that can imprison people who have every right to be in Australia, as the Rau case has painfully shown.

Another 200 similar complaints are at present being investigated.

The continuing stream of inquiries into mandatory detention of illegal immigrants has also raised a growing clamour against the policy itself. No other country, even those with much larger proportional flows of asylum-seekers, illegal immigrants and visa overstayers, is so uncompromising.

The Government argues this has choked off an armada of boats that peaked at the time of the 2001 Tampa crisis. Critics argue that other factors, including changed circumstances in such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan, and a far less sympathetic Indonesia, have been as great an influence - and that even if the Government's claims are correct, the price is too high.

Echoing earlier criticism by the United Nations, Amnesty International last month released a report on the impact of indefinite detention condemning the "appalling human cost" of the policy.

"People seeking asylum in Australia from human rights abuses in other countries are currently met with a system that further violates their human rights," Amnesty said. "These violations include administrative detention for a prolonged and potentially indefinite period of time."

Proof of this is Peter Qasim, an asylum-seeker claiming to have fled violence in the disputed Pakistan-India border region of Kashmir.

Last week Qasim was released from Adelaide's Glenside psychiatric hospital, where he was being treated under guard for depression, after seven years in detention.

The report by former Federal Police Commissioner Mick Palmer into Rau's unlawful detention and the deportation of Alvarez raises even more questions about a system that has been supported by both major parties since it was launched by Labor more than a decade ago.

The circumstances were different but both cases were the result of a compounding series of mistakes and failings produced by a flawed system.

Rau arrived in Australia in 1967 as a toddler. She eventually lived overseas for 15 years, then returned and worked for Qantas. She was ultimately diagnosed as a schizophrenic, largely removed herself from her family and in March last year went missing from Manly Hospital.

Within weeks she was detained as a suspected unlawful migrant in Queensland, imprisoned in Brisbane's jail for women, and finally sent to Baxter, the new detention centre in South Australia. Rau claimed another persona as a German overstayer, confusing efforts to identify her.

But although the Palmer report said Rau had not wanted to be found, she had slipped through a loose system of checks and balances, her mental illness had not been recognised and treated, and systemic flaws had kept her detained for 10 months.

Alvarez was a long-term resident and Australian citizen who was admitted, seriously injured and apparently destitute, to Lismore Hospital. She gave conflicting accounts of her situation and was deported to the Philippines, where she was confined to a nursing home.

The Government has offered her a package of financial, medical and other measures. Her case is still under investigation and she is likely to sue for hefty compensation.

Palmer found not only that similar problems and failings were evident in both cases. He also concluded that they are not alone. "The strong possibility the same factors may have contributed to the inappropriate detention of a number of other people over an extended period should give rise to serious concern."

His report pointed to an emphasis on finding reasons to deport suspected illegal migrants and overstayers, rather than a real effort to establish genuine identity and background, in part a product of an overload of complex and sensitive work on immigration staff.

Palmer also described serious cultural problems within the Immigration Department - "overly self-protective and defensive" and unwilling to face criticism or change - and manned by officers granted exceptional, even extraordinary, powers.

"That they should be permitted and expected to do so without adequate training, without proper management and oversight, with poor information systems, and with no genuine quality assurance and constraints on the exercise of these powers, is of concern," he said.

Palmer found that compliance officers also had a poor understanding of the laws they enforced, and those responsible for detaining and confirming the identity of suspected illegal migrants "often lack even basic investigative and management skills".

He also supported long-held concerns by refugee advocates and mental health groups that mental health care is inadequate.

Despite the much higher level of mental health care required by detainees, visits to Baxter by the consulting psychiatrist were infrequent, and there was no focused mechanism for outside accountability or professional review.

Baxter itself is flawed. Despite policy to the contrary, the high-security facility is operated largely along the lines of a prison, manned by staff largely drawn from correctional centres, and operated under a contract with private company Global Solutions that made it impossible to fulfil policy expectations.

The remote nature of Baxter itself contributes to its problems: 300km from Adelaide, on the fringe of the South Australian outback, where few qualified and capable people would choose to live. In turn, isolation and depression increase the need for such people.

And there remains the problem that put Rau into Baxter in the first place - a flawed network to track down missing persons.

Palmer said Australia needed a national missing persons database containing sophisticated biometric markers. "This is a national priority, and calls for a whole-of-government approach."

Some of the issues raised by Palmer have already brought changes. Howard has promised more. But the line he has drawn clear remains: mandatory detention will continue.