‘Tough’ migrant stand ineffective, Humphries says

By KIMBERLEY GRANGER
THE suspension of processing visa applications from Afghans and Sri Lankans is an ineffective attempt by the Government to look tough, according to Liberal Senator Gary Humphries.

And a migration-law expert has described the move as inhumane.

The Government has also announced that the notorious West Australian Curtin detention facility will be reopened to house up to 300 asylum seekers.

The Government has stopped processing Afghan applications for at least three months and Sri Lankan applications for six while it determines if it is safe for these refugees to return home.

Senator Humphries said the Government was doing this to look tough when it was nothing of the sort.

“I cannot see where this policy will lead except most likely at the end of the period of three or six months to a resumption of much the same sort of program which has been in place before,” he said. “It would be an extraordinarily brave person to suggest that both Sri Lanka and Afghanistan have turned a corner and the countries are now sufficiently safe . . . to return to either of those places.”

There has been controversy at the reopening of the remote Curtin detention centre, which has previously been labelled a “living hell hole”.

Professor Andrew Bartlett, a research fellow from the migration law team at the ANU, believes that keeping these people in detention for an unclear amount of time is inhumane.

“They haven’t committed any crime,” he said. “They’re not charged with any crime, and they shouldn’t be jailed. The real problem is leaving people in detention for prolonged periods of time . . . and in the circumstances I think people are rightly suspicions that it’s driven as much by politics as by any genuine evidence of improvement in the situation.”

Curtin’s isolation also makes it difficult to scrutinise the treatment of those kept inside.

“Curtin always had the worst reputation of any, partly for the conditions and partly for the incredible remoteness of it,” Professor Bartlett said. “It put them more out of sight, out of mind, made it harder to monitor what was going on, what treatment was being meted out to people, made it harder for them to get proper assistance, and gave the impression of punishment.”

Senator Humphries agrees that problems have occurred in the past as a result of housing too many refugees in detention centres.

“We’ve seen riots and acts of self harm in the past when large numbers of people have been couped up in these centres… ,” he said. “We’ve got to engineer policies that don’t leave us in the position . . . where we’ve got places like Christmas Island bursting at the seams.”

Asylum seekers have continued to arrive despite the visa suspension, with 11 boats entering Australian waters in the past few weeks.