THE opening of a new Federal Government detention centre in Tasmania next month will revert the Apple Isle back to its colonial origins as a penal colony, Broome Bishop Christopher Saunders said.
Earlier this month, the Federal Government announced plans to build a $15 million centre to house up to 400 asylum seekers next month on a former rifle range owned by the Defence Department in Pontville, near Hobart.
“I find this a retrograde step and an added cause of shame for us all as a nation of people who desire to give everyone a fair go,” said the Bishop, chair of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council (ACSJC).
“A caring and just response to refugees must look to see how quickly they might be processed and how humanely they might be treated,” Bishop Saunders said in a statement on the Sydney Archdiocesan website.
The ACSJC has long been opposed to mandatory detention, as is the Australian Bishops’ Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office. Bishop Saunders said the Government’s promise of three months’ incarceration has been too easily broken, and that detainees have been held behind electric fences and razor wire for more than a year.
“There are real alternatives to locking people up and resources must be committed to the processing of refugees that meets that initial target of three months behind bars and no longer,” he said.
There are up to 7,000 asylum seekers, at least 1,000 of whom are children, incarcerated in detention centres across Australia including at WA’s Curtin and Leonora centres.
Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Chris Bowen said it would operate for 26 weeks, after which time detainees will be transferred to Wickham Point north of Darwin where a new detention centre to house 1,500 male asylum seekers is currently under construction. The Tasmanian site was home to refugees from Kosovo in the late 1990s.
Marist Asylum Seeker and Refugee Service coordinator Fr Jim Carty proposed Australia’s policy for Vietnamese asylum seekers in the 1970s as a template for today’s boat people problem. “That government policy was regarded as a world class model of what to do with people who are displaced, whether they arrived by boat, plane or swam here,” he said.
“Back then, asylum seekers were processed quickly and provided with safe housing, freedom of movement once initial checks had been carried out, and given all the kinds of assistance such as English lessons and help with jobs to ensure they integrated into the community.”
Jesuit Refugee Services director Fr Aloysius Mowe said the government’s actions have not reflected its continued claim that detention is a measure of last resort and that asylum seekers are being held for the shortest possible time.
Fr Aloysius noted that the Gillard Government’s Universal Period Review to the United Nations on 27 January, under the heading Rights of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, outlined how it had closed asylum seeker processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island in 2007 and abolished Temporary Protection Visas.
The submission said that detention of asylum seekers was administrative in nature and not used for punitive or correctional purposes and that “detention in immigration detention centres is only to be used as a last resort and for the shortest practicable time.”
“There has to be a better way of doing this, and we believe that once these people have undergone health checks and some kind of security check, they be able to live within the community,” Fr Aloysius said.