Sarah Stephen
After five months and numerous delays, the Palmer Report investigating the wrongful detention of mentally ill Australian resident Cornelia Rau finally became public on July 14. No doubt breathing a joint sigh of relief, immigration minister Amanda Vanstone and PM John Howard can rest easy knowing that the report contains no recommendation for a royal commission or judicial review, as some hoped it might.
Former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer accepted his limited powers and produced the report the government wanted — suitably scathing in its findings, yet appropriately superficial in its recommendations.
The government has enthusiastically set about implementing some of the cosmetic changes proposed in the report. Bill Farmer, the top immigration department bureaucrat duly fell on his sword, resigned and has been given a top diplomatic posting as ambassador to Indonesia as a reward. His deputies, Ed Killesteyn and Philippa Godwin, have been moved to senior management positions in other government departments.
Despite limited powers and narrow terms of reference, Palmer's findings are quite damning. He identified that there is within the immigration department (DIMIA) "a culture that is overly self-protective and defensive, a culture largely unwilling to challenge organisational norms or to engage in genuine self-criticism or analysis".
Palmer criticised what he called a "preoccupation with process and a culture of denial and defensiveness", which was identified at all levels of management, including "consistent evidence of reluctance to ... accept responsibility and acknowledge fault".
He gave one example of this: "In a recent formal interview a senior DIMIA executive asserted that the power to remove from Australia a person reasonably suspected of being an unlawful non-citizen 'does not require a decision' because it is required by the [Migration] Act."
Palmer also found that DIMIA's compliance officers had a poor understanding of the legislation they were responsible for enforcing. In addition, he found that "DIMIA officers are authorised to exercise exceptional, even extraordinary, powers". Furthermore, he found that were "no genuine checks and balances on the exercise of these powers".
The cases of Rau, illegally deported Australian citizen Vivian Solon and some 200 others wrongly detained by DIMIA occurred over a period of six years. Palmer pointed out that the same causal factors appeared to have given rise to the wrongful detentions, but "none of these factors seems to have been identified or responded to" by DIMIA.
Responding to the report, Rau's sister Christine told the July 14 Melbourne Age: "The lack of independent, outside scrutiny was a major contributing factor to Cornelia's and Vivian [Solon]'s ordeals." She argued that the power to detain should be placed in the hands of the courts rather than with DIMIA officers.
Solon findings
Palmer's preliminary findings on the deportation of Solon four years ago, which took up just 12 pages at the end of the 250-page report, are highly explosive. He revealed that on the day before Solon was deported on July 20, 2001, in response to a Queensland police request to search its files to help locate a missing person, a DIMIA officer had replied that Solon was an Australian citizen and gave her date of birth. On the same day, DIMIA's compliance officers called in a doctor to pronounce Solon fit to be deported.
Palmer described how a social worker had advised DIMIA that Solon said she came to Australia on a spouse visa and had been beaten by her husband. A DIMIA file note recorded three months later, close to the time of her deportation, reads "smuggled into Australia as sex slave wants to return to the Philippines".
The note contradicts information provided by Solon in a formal interview on July 13, 2001, at which she told DIMIA officers she had a visa, that she would like to stay in Australia and did not want to leave voluntarily.
Solon told reporters in Manila on May 13 that a DIMIA officer "asked me if I am a citizen and I told him I was a citizen, but my passport was not with me, there was no proof". The officer in charge of her case made no attempt to establish if she was telling the truth about being an Australian citizen, even though to do so would have been relatively easy.
While the preliminary findings raise many disturbing questions about Solon's treatment, her lawyer, George Newhouse, is critical of the way the inquiry dealt with her case, telling ABC Radio National's PM program on July 14 that Palmer had "not even interviewed Vivian".
"How can you produce a report on Vivian without hearing her version of events?", Newhouse asked. "Not only that, there are a number of other important witnesses that have not been quoted in the report. Now it's clear to me that this is DIMIA's version of events. Now that's just one side of the story, and the rest is yet to be revealed."
Solon's case will be dealt with in full, along with some 200 cases of wrongful detention, by former Victoria Police commissioner Neil Comrie, who joined the investigation when Palmer announced on May 25 that he would step down once the initial report was completed. Comrie has now taken over from Palmer as head of the inquiry.
ALP immigration spokesperson Tony Burke also criticised the way the Palmer Inquiry was conducted. He told ABC TV's Lateline program on July 14: "You need to have an inquiry that compels people to appear, that can subpoena documents and can provide whistle-blowers with immunity. A royal commission can provide that. The Palmer report couldn't."
Problem is policy
Labor is making many of the right criticisms of the inquiry, which is a welcome change, but blames the Rau and Solon scandals on the "culture" within DIMIA, when it's first and foremost a problem of policy. The culture is a product of the policy of mandatory detention of "illegal" immigrants, a policy that Labor supports.
The 7.30 Report described the scandal surrounding the wrongful detention of Rau as a "festering sore" for the government. Following its establishment on February 8, the Palmer Inquiry has been used by Vanstone to deflect questions and criticisms.
Now that Palmer's report is out, Vanstone no doubt hopes it will be the safety valve she needs. She has described it as a "full-on, full-frontal boots-and-all assessment of what the problems are" in DIMIA.
In reality, it falls far short of this. The report recommends better training for DIMIA officers, better information systems and better communication, rather than what' really needed — a radical change in government policy.
The recommendations that relate to Baxter detention centre are a patronising joke that makes a mockery of the suffering that detainees experience there. They include calls for the creation of vegetable gardens in open spaces, and the removal of some rooms so detainees can have a view of the outside world.
The report recommends better information provision so that "detainees understand why they are being kept in detention", explaining to them the rules and complaints process, allowing detainees to cook their own food, and opportunities to earn the "privilege" of monthly supervised visits to Port Augusta.
The report identifies as a shortcoming the fact that there is no automatic process of review to determine whether detention is being exercised lawfully, justifiably and with integrity. However it doesn't recommend any mechanism of independent review.
Newhouse told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly that "the culture is so endemic that only judicial review of their decisions will keep DIMIA on track". He offered this warning: "Unless the law is changed it could happen again, although I hope that exposing this case makes officers think twice before treating another Australian in the same way as Vivian."
The government has repeatedly argued that the treatment of Solon and Rau are totally unrelated to the way that asylum seekers and unauthorised arrivals are treated by DIMIA, and that no generalisations can be drawn from their cases.
Newhouse disagrees. "Vivian Solon and Cornelia Rau are proxies for all those asylum seekers who have suffered from the inappropriate culture that is rife within the department", he told GLW. "Their cases are a window onto the culture of the department and the way that the department treats individuals caught within it.
"The government's own conduct proves they are related ... If they were so different, the government would not have changed its policies on the treatment of asylum seekers following the outcry on their cases."
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, July 20, 2005.
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