From Dave McKay
The following comes from Business Review Weekly via Pam Curr and
Grace Gorman. (I have trimmed it down a bit, as it was a rather
lengthy article to begin with.) Please forgive any cross-postings.
As Grace has pointed out, it is significant that a publication like
Business Review Weekly (BRW) is doing more to make the Government
accountable with regard to mandatory detention than is the rest of
the media these days.
Grace continues, "The reason is clear to me. Business investment, in
particular overseas investment in Australia, is being seriously
disadvantaged by Australia's reputation abroad.
"Shareholders are getting more and more ethical, and will not put
their money where bad things are being done, to workers, indigenous
people, the environment, or people in general, and Australia is now
on the nose overseas for all of those reasons.
"One day Little Johnny will be out on one of his power walks, and
he'll get a poke in the ribs, and the angry voice behind him will be
saying, "Hoy, I wanna word wi' you." And Little Johnny will turn
around, and it won't be Julian Burnside, or Ian Rintoul, or Jerome
Small. It will be Kerry Packer, or somebody [similar]. And the game
will be up."
Detention Centre Cover-up
By Stuart Washington, Business Review Weekly, 25 September, 2003
The Government has been hiding the real reasons why a private company
lost the contract to run six immigration detention centres.
The Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, is covering up the poor
performance of Australasian Correctional Management (ACM) when it
managed six of Australia's immigration detention centres from February
1998 to December 2002. Also covering up the poor performance is the
Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (Dimia),
which is acting in the commercial interests of ACM, despite continuing
revelations about the poor performance of the company.
BRW has discovered a serious contractual breach relating to ACM and its
handling of an escape, that the department is keeping secret. Despite
the seriousness of the breach - and the amount of about $90 million in
taxpayers' money paid to the company for each year of the contract - the
Federal Government refuses to disclose details about why a default
notice was served on ACM.
After a lengthy freedom-of-information request that began in May 2002,
BRW has established that the department secretary, Bill Farmer, or his
agent, issued a default notice to ACM under the contract. The default
notice, which warns that a contact may be cancelled, was issued between
March 1, 2001 and September 5, 2002. Dimia and Ruddock's office refused
BRW's requests for further information about the default notice.
As a sign of the seriousness of the breach, Dimia is not letting BRW see
the document because of the harm it would do to ACM. The assistant
secretary of unauthorised arrivals and detention services, Jim Williams,
wrote to BRW on September 5: "I believe that there is a real risk that
disclosure of the document would cause unreasonable harm to ACM's
business reputation and potentially prejudice its ability to perform
competitively in its industry."
Despite a long history of violent incidents at detention centres,
including a mass breakout from Woomera detention centre, South
Australia, in June 2000 and a riot in August 2000, it is the only
default notice issued by Dimia to ACM under its "general agreement"
contract. A default notice is one of the most serious penalties
available under a contract between the public sector and a private
service provider.
Dimia's low-key approach to holding ACM publicly accountable for
problems at the detention centres raises questions about how effectively
it supervised the company. The secrecy surrounding the default notice
also raises the question of how transparently public-sector bureaucrats
manage private-sector operators, and whether they become complicit in
hiding unpleasant truths under the guise of commercial-in-confidence.
Dimia's sensitivity to ACM's business reputation is characteristic of
its defence of ACM in numerous public inquiries. In 2001, despite direct
questions about ACM's performance under the contract, Dimia staff,
including Farmer and the then deputy secretary Andrew Metcalfe (now
promoted to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet) said the
removal of the contract from ACM was based on value-for-money reasons.
It was a line parroted by Ruddock in June 2001, when in response to a
question on notice in Parliament, he said: "ACM has submitted an offer
to provide detention services for a further three years. This offer has
not been accepted by Dimia because Dimia could not be satisfied that the
offer represented best value for money".
This line was always questionable, given th e riots, mass breakouts and
alleged mistreatment of refugees in 2000 and 2001 in the six detention
centres run by ACM. Since some of Dimia's stonewalling defences of ACM
in 2001, the poor performance of ACM in managing detention centres has
been revealed even more starkly. In July 2002, the former operations
officer at the Woomera detention centre, Allan Clifton, told the Human
Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry into children in
immigration detention that it was regular ACM practice to inflate
figures on services provided. He also said that staff at Woomera were
under-resourced in training, numbers and medical supplies, and that
children had been endangered in riots. In May this year, Four Corners
broadcast disturbing video footage in which ACM staff at Woomera were
attending to people on hunger strikes that were never reported to the
media, an August 2000 riot of detainees in which a water cannon was
used, and ACM staff handcuffing a detainee because there were not enough
staff to mount an effective suicide watch.
BRW argued unsuccessfully that it should be allowed to see the default
notice because it was in the public interest, partly because of the huge
sums paid by Dimia to ACM. In 2002, Dimia paid $US57 million, down from
$US62 million in 2001. BRW intends to appeal against Dimia's decision to
the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
The suppressed information includes a three-page letter from Dimia, on
Dimia letterhead, to the managing director of ACM.
It also includes a 14-page response from ACM to Dimia. No dates are
available for this correspondence. BRW was denied access to the letter
from ACM to Dimia because it would "reveal ways in which escapes could
be carried out".
Dimia said it would not release more information about the default
notice than had been obtained under the FoI request. A spokesman for
Ruddock said he did not have the power to release the document because a
release would be in breach of the FoI Act.
The Federal Parliament's human rights sub-committee issued a report on
detention centres in May 2001. The then chairman of the committee, Alan
Ferguson, and a committee member, Bruce Baird, both say they are not
aware of the default notice. BRW understands that the continuing Human
Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry has not been informed
about the default notice.
------------------------------
Publication: Business Review Weekly
Publication date: 25-9-2003
Pamela Curr
Greens National Refugee Spokesperson
--
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever does."
Margaret Mead
The best part of being a pacifist is that success does not depend on
'winning'; it depends only on our willingness to take a stand for
what is right. --Dave McKay
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