Senator Andrew Bartlett
Friday, December 10, 2004
 
Christmas Island Detention Centre
During the break between sitting weeks a couple of weeks ago, I managed to visit the detention centre on Christmas Island, one of the few federal MPs who have visited that centre to meet with the detainees there. The situation facing the group on Christmas Island has not got very much public attention, and of course that is the reason the government, at great public cost, took those people to Christmas Island.

It is a fact that the detainees on Christmas Island did get to the migration zone. Their boat sailed through to just off the coast of Port Hedland, so there was absolutely no legal need to take them to Christmas Island. It did not affect in any way the progress of their refugee claims. It was absurd to take people from literally next door to a detention centre at Port Hedland, which was still operational at the time, and put them on a Navy vessel and ship them all the way out to Christmas Island.

It was a valuable experience for me, and I think for the detainees, to be able to visit them and to talk with them, because they have very few visitors from the mainland and certainly very few visitors from the federal parliament. There has been only one as far as I am aware.

There are currently 43 Vietnamese asylum seekers on Christmas Island. They fled Vietnam and ended up in Australia, as people may recall, in about the middle of last year. This group of people are all related in terms of broader extended families and in terms of the activity that they were all engaged in. They claim to have been distributing pamphlets, speaking out against the Vietnamese government and calling for political freedom and better treatment for the people.

They arrived in the boat the Hao Kiet off the coast of Port Hedland on 1 July last year after a month at sea and were then taken across to Christmas Island, arriving on 5 July.

As a total coincidence I was actually there at the time, in my capacity as a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, which was conducting a visit to look at the preparations for the revamping of the detention centre there - preparations that were being very hurriedly sped up to allow for the arrival of these people. However the government waited until the committee had left the island on the government plane and then it shipped in the Vietnamese asylum seekers literally on the same day, within a few hours of our departure. We were not able to meet with them at all.

We saw the centre literally the day before the Vietnamese moved in. So it was good to go back there nearly 18 months later to see the place after it had been lived in for so long. The situation does have some advantages over the situation in other detention centres I have been to in that the group is all of one nationality and all broadly known to one another beforehand. So you don’t get some of the problems of people from mixed ethnic backgrounds and nationalities being pushed in together. Having said that, there are still some issues there. They all live in one compound, all 43 of them, in very small rooms about two widths of a single bed for the room one beside the other, in a big elongated demountable.

One very obvious transition I noticed in being shown around the place was the vegetable garden that they have managed to create in the space of 18 months from when we were there. I have a photo taken at the time when the area was just bare dirt.




Now there are all sorts of vegetables grown there, which I have also received photos of.




Apparently it’s the best veggie garden on Christmas Island. Each group that I visited brought gifts of lettuces and other vegetables that they had grown in the camp. I hasten to add that I didn’t bring them back to Australia, because of the importance of maintaining quarantine, but they didn’t go to waste.

It was wonderful to see all of that having been grown in that space of time paw paw trees and other things as well. There were also beds that they had planted, grown and pruned in such a way as to have the name of the boat, the Hao Kiet, the name of Christmas Island and the date of their arrival in the camp as a permanent reminder of where they had come from and the date on which they had arrived.




Out of the group that arrived, nine people have already received protection visas from Australia, having been assessed as in need of genuine protection. Those two families are living in Perth and Melbourne. It highlights an anomaly and is part of the reason for the additional distress that the detainees still on Christmas Island are feeling, because some of them have been accepted and others have not, despite having been involved in the same activity and despite the fact that many of them are linked in a family sense. As I understand it, the rest of the family of one of the young women there had been granted a visa but she had not, for reasons that she could not understand. And from reading the decision, I couldn’t understand it either. She is 22.

Amongst the group currently in detention there are nine children. Whenever the minister talks about children not being in detention in Australia anymore we have the little asterisk saying that it does not count Christmas Island. People on Christmas Island get annoyed when they are not counted as part of Australia and they feel forgotten generally.

We had the opportunity to meet with a number of residents of Christmas Island as well and I would like to thank all of the people I met with. They were all extremely friendly and welcoming. Unless you are an asylum seeker and are going to get locked up, I would recommend going to Christmas Island.

It is a fascinating place with an amazing environment and a very interesting and unique culture and history. Unfortunately for the asylum seekers they do not see much of that because they are locked up in their detention centre. They do get out on escorted trips but their freedom is being denied them and they are in conditions that could hardly be called luxurious or even anything more than basic. But conditions are not the real problem, of course. It is the lack of freedom that is the real problem.

There is no doubt that there is still significant oppression and persecution in Vietnam. The US State Department has placed Vietnam on a persecution watch because of the continuing and increasing acts of oppression against political and religious freedom in that country. The Vietnamese communist government has specifically been cited by the US for failing to guarantee individual religious freedom for its citizens. Amnesty International has reported strong and ongoing concerns with the human rights situation in Vietnam. So there is no doubt that there are serious problems and serious human rights breaches in Vietnam.

Obviously, with refugee claims it has to be demonstrated that those breaches apply to each persons individual case to a certain level for a certain reason. That is part of the issue of assessing people’s claims. But the fact is that these people have been on Christmas Island now for nearly 18 months, and they look like being there for a long time yet.
We do not want more wasted lives, particularly of the children who are growing up in this environment. I met a nine-month-old baby who was born in a camp and a woman who is pregnant. That situation should not be continued. Just because the government has been re-elected does not mean this issue has gone away. It has not and the Democrats and I will continue to raise it.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Friday, December 10, 2004 Permalink
|


<< Home