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download a 2-page document which explodes the myths about refugees: click here

The facts

§ Every detainee gets a bill for the cost of their detention. The daily rate varies: at Maribyrnong it is $147-50 per day; in Perth it is $191 per day. These bills is used to harass people – “Go home now, before your bill gets too great” etc. Some have bills in excess of $300,000 and the Department knows well they can’t pay but still the demands keep coming, along with threats of more detention. The bill will be used to repel people, even refugees who have lived here for years. If they ever leave Australia they will not be re-admitted as they have a Federal debt. Please tell your friends about this, it’s a scandal.

§ Australia comes in at 32nd out of the 71 countries resettling refugees. The “resettling” is mostly done by countries like Pakistan and Indonesia who have to deal with millions.

§ There are only eight countries, Australia is one of them, who insist on a quota for refugees. Most do not even count their refugees.

§ Woomera detention centre is, like all of our centres, worse than jail. Woomera is a concentration camp of cruelty and humiliation. It has two working toilets for 800 people, and four showers. No hot water until after midnight. Detainees are not allowed to cut their own toe nails, a nurse will do it. She cuts one person’s nails a day – no more. Women have to queue up to get a tampon. Until recently no air-conditioning; no fly screens. Woomera is 6 hours into the desert from Adelaide, it gets to 45 degrees during the day and is swarming with flies. No wonder the inmates are driven to protest.

§ All the centres have solitary confinement provisions; confining children for days is not uncommon, people are routinely handcuffed. So-called “toilet privileges” are denied in some cells (even in Melbourne).

§ Australia, along with Greece, Turkey, Albania and Poland, put asylum seekers into detention. In Britain and the US there are some restrictions, but asylum seekers work and move about in the community.

§ The Taliban is the product of camps. These “students” were brought up as orphans in camps in Pakistan. They had no mothers and no education, aside from what they got from a few koranic teachers.

§ The few thousand refugees we receive would barely be noticed within our general immigration programme. Last year we accepted 92,000 migrants (not refugees)! In the late 70’s we accepted as many as 20,000 per year. Australia has not and will not collapse under the weight of these people.

§ Detention centres are prisons run by Australasian Correctional Management, a subsidiary of Wackenhut Corporation.  They are surrounded by high chain-mesh fences topped by razor wire.  They hold up to 4,000 men, women and children who have not committed any crime against Australian law.  They are imprisoned  not by a Court but by the government.  80% of detainees are held in remote desert locations: Woomera, Port Hedland and Curtin.  These desert detention centres have unlisted phone numbers, increasing the difficulty of making contact with the wretched human beings inside.

§ The government initially refused to allow Mary Robinson permission to visit Woomera in order to see the conditions there.   In 2001 it refused a UN delegation permission to visit Woomera.  The Independent Detention Advisory Group has publicly stated that Woomera should be closed: they described it as "a cage in the desert".

§ The government has obscured the facts, and has gone to great lengths to mislead the public about asylum seekers.  Most people who support the government's policy simply do not know the facts.  Alexander Downer, for example, recently referred to refugee policy as if it were an element of immigration policy.  It is not.

§ Peter Reith told stories about refugees throwing children overboard: the supposedly convincing video evidence showed no such thing.

§ The government regularly refer to detainees as "illegals" and "queue-jumpers", yet it does not allege that any of them have broken the law by seeking asylum here.

Conditions in detention centres: click here.