Sarah Stephen, Sydney
The Refugee Action Coalition held a protest outside the immigration department's offices on February 10 to call for an end to mandatory detention in light of the Cornelia Rau scandal.
RAC activist Ian Rintoul condemned the private inquiry planned by the government to investigate how an Australian resident could be mistakenly imprisoned for 10 months. "An inquiry held in secret is not an inquiry, it's a cover-up!", he told the gathering of 50 protesters.
Toby Raeburn from the Mental Health Workers Alliance and nursing unit manager at the Matthew Talbot Hostel for homeless men told the rally that the Rau case was "only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the treatment of people with mental illness in this country". He called for a full and open judicial inquiry.
Iranian refugee and former detainee Mohsen Soltany Zand spoke about the debilitating effects of depression and uncertainty on asylum seekers in detention. He referred to a man released from Baxter two days earlier, with whom he had shared a room in Port Hedland detention centre almost five years ago. "I couldn't believe it when I saw him; he looked just like he was dead."
Dr Michael Dudley, chair of Suicide Prevention Australia, asked people to consider why Rau's "clearly psychotic symptoms [were] not identified and treated". Dudley attacked mandatory detention as the problem, pointing out that there is "overwhelming evidence that indefinite detention maintains and increases mental illness. No appropriate treatment is possible, because the environment is the problem." He added: "There must be an end to treating psychological harm as 'acceptable collateral damage'."
According to Dudley, "The inquiry is going to be a whitewash". He argued for "an independent inquiry on mandatory detention and its effects". Dudley also demanded an amnesty for the "long-suffering inmates" of Baxter detention centre. "A lot of good could be done if money spent on razor wire and the "Pacific solution" was spent on mental health services."
NSW Greens parliamentarian Lee Rhiannon described what she knew of the Red 1 compound where Rau spent much of her four months in Baxter. "Red 1 is described as a place of sheer psychological torture. It verges on sensory deprivation. there's nothing to do — no radio, no TV, no books. People are under constant surveillance, sometimes even subject to internal searches."
"The government has so much to hide", Rhiannon said. "That's what we have to flush out."
From Green Left Weekly, February 16, 2005.
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