Sarah Stephen
Immigration minister Amanda Vanstone is feeling the pressure of public opposition to children in detention. So the government is quietly releasing them, one by one.
Over the past 12 months, the number of asylum-seekers under 18 years of age in detention centres in Australia has dropped from 82 to just 30, with 15 of those on Christmas Island.
These statistics tell only a small part of the story, however, as the vast majority of children in detention languish out of sight on the Pacific island state of Nauru. Eighty-two children remain there.
On February 15, the immigration department began to reassess the claims of Afghan asylum seekers, as it promised to do at the height of the asylum seekers' hunger strike last December. If their claims are reassessed fairly, perhaps some of the children on Nauru will also be able to see the outside world again.
Rural Australians for Refugees activist Emma Corcoran, who spent the past six months in Port Hedland working with asylum seekers in the detention centre, told the RAR national conference on February 7 that the example of Port Hedland indicates that the government is making moves to get all children out of detention.
There were eight families in detention when Corcoran arrived, and currently there are only two, plus one in a community housing project. All but one of the families were released on bridging visas. This means their cases have not been resolved — they are simply outside the detention centre and hence no longer one of the shameful statistics.
Dianne Hiles from ChilOut, which has been campaigning for the past 2.5 years to free children from detention, told the February 14 Melbourne Age that children under virtual house arrest in residential housing projects could not be counted as having been freed.
From Green Left Weekly, February 25, 2004.
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