News & Events

Cornelia Rau on Christmas Island -

With the Australian Governments construction of the $360 million Christmas Island detention facility (1), it is highly unlikely that advocates could ever find Cornelia in the new 800-bed facility.

Cornelia Rau's time in detention at Baxter, may well have been extended if she had found herself subject of the Governments remote detention policy and had been shunted off and kept even further out of sight on Christmas Island.

The PM's claim to have stopped the boats leads to the question of who will inhabit the new expensive camp?

If it is the case that mainland detainees will be moved offshore to satisfy this Governments detention at any cost obsession, and fill an otherwise 'white elephant', Australia could lead the world in gross human rights abuses and never be held accountable.

The existing Christmas Island detention facility as it stands, holding mostly Vietnamese asylum seeker women and children, has little outside scrutiny. Visitors to the compound have voiced serious concerns at the wellbeing of those behind the wire there.

Leading WA Doctor, Professor David Fletcher, visited and treated detainees in November 2004. He has likened the trauma presented in the detainees as the worst he has seen in his 30-year medical career.

David Fletcher was stunned at the guarding of detainee children under his medical care while in hospital by 2 large GSL guards.

Professor Fletcher has challenged the PM in writing about the "cost to our community of current policy in both dollars and to our International Reputation as decent citizens of the world".

The small remote population of Australian citizens who live on Christmas Island exist with little or no adequate provision of mental health services. A Federal Government Health Service Survey (2) reveals that Christmas Island has a "lack of continuity of medical and other health care providers".

The Palmer Inquiry must investigate the potential for remote detention to further exasperate the future possibility of those wrongly held.

Australia must call for a moratorium on the extravagant construction of this remote mega prison subject to a cost benefit analysis of the social and financial cost.

1. Detention centre cost blows out. 08/01/2005. ABC News Online

2. Alberton Consulting (DOTORS)

For more information contact: Kaye Bernard (08) 9535 6660

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