On an oppressively hot Sunday afternoon on February 19, I visited the Villawood detention centre in Sydney’s west, a suburban prison for up to 400 refugees and asylum seekers.
At the centre, in the same compound as the maximum-security “Blaxland centre” that holds male refugees, is the Sydney Immigration Residential Housing facility. Six children live with their refugee families in a small row of simple single-storey homes, replete with CCTV, ever-present guards and a spiked fence.
Immigration officials and Serco guards can enter their home at any time to “check up” on them. The children can walk up and down their tiny street, where guards also constantly roam, or go to a “play area” nearby.
Some attend school — with an escort of up to 10 Serco cars. But they cannot walk freely past the boundary and mostly remain with their despairing parents in the Villawood compound.
Refugees detained there include a Tamil couple and their three children, aged seven, four and one. The youngest was born in detention, and his parents will never be released to live in Australia because of an adverse ASIO security check. The children are depressed, isolated and can be given no sense of hope for a safe, stable future.
So it was particularly galling to see the immigration department’s media and communications manager, Sandi Logan, try to once again defend the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s (DIAC) treatment of refugee children in response to the February 18 Green Left Weekly article “More than 500 refugee kids still in detention”.
Logan tweeted that he would correct the “many errors” in the article. In a comment on the GLW website, he said: “DIAC has never (repeat never) said children are not in immigration detention.”
Instead, he argued that children are not kept in “(adult) detention centres”.
But GLW’s entire premise was that “adult detention centres” and the immigration department’s “alternative places of detention” or “residential housing” are inherently the same. Children and adults alike are being mentally and physically damaged by the immigration department’s regime — no matter the name of their prison.
The danger of Logan’s persistent twisting of the truth is that, as immigration’s chief spin-doctor, he has control over almost all the facts, and decides who gets access to them. A “Power Index” profile by independent journalist Matthew Knott described Logan as “on a mission to shape what you read, see and hear” about immigration.
DIAC sometimes releases a summary of the numbers of refugees kept in detention. But it doesn’t specify which “alternative places of detention” are in use and how many children are in each.
There are extensive “non-disclosure” clauses in the government’s contract with private firm Serco. Any media visit that is not pre-authorised by DIAC is considered a “critical incident”.
Serco can also arbitrarily restrict access to refugees with impunity. Late last year, when one of the Tamil children detained at Villawood had a birthday, his English tutor — who visited them and taught them at home — was denied from taking part in the party because Serco said it was “inappropriate” for an employee to show the children friendship.
Logan is an unelected bureaucrat who selects the “facts” and writes the “story” to suit a political line, that of justifying and continuing the unjust policy of mandatory detention.
This is why GLW reports on this issue often, why it talks to refugee supporters, those who visit detention frequently, the activists, experts and witnesses. It is the only way to know what the conditions for refugee children are truly like, as well as thousands of adult asylum seekers locked up under Australia’s punitive mandatory detention policy.
Logan’s point that children are not held in “centres”, rather than “detention” is pedantic. But it’s a telling backflip. DIAC cannot say these refugee children are in the "community"; they are still locked up, which makes the campaign to free them as significant and necessary as ever.
