When she became Australia's first national Children's Commissioner recently, Megan Mitchell promised to make the situation of asylum seeker children one of her top priorities.
As part of what she's describing as a national listening tour, she's just been to the Pontville immigration detention centre in Tasmania.
The visit has resulted in new concerns being raised about the effects of the indefinite detention of asylum seeker children - especially those who have no parents with them.
Calliste Weitenberg reports.
In the small rural community of Pontville, north of Hobart, the young voices of those kept inside double fences have been ringing out.
There, about 250 boys aged between 13 and 18 are currently being held in what the government calls an alternative place of detention set up to cater for young asylum seekers.
"Even if you make this place heaven it is not enough for us," says one boy, "because we feel like we are in a cage. We feel people see us like animals in a cage."
It's a voice echoed by the many others around him.
"We are getting crazy pressure from our families," says another, "At 3am if you come here you will see people walking around like crazy because they can't sleep. They are going crazy so people cut themselves."
They're hard words for the National Children's Commissioner, Megan Mitchell, who heard the comments during a visit to Pontville.
She spoke to boys from six different language backgrounds.
She says she finds it misleading to call Pontville an alternative place of detention.
"It's surrounded by high wire fences and these, they are internal to the centre as well, and it is situated about 30km away from Hobart so the boys are not free to come and go and they feel trapped there."
Megan Mitchell says the experiences of those at Pontville raise serious questions about the nature of alternative facilities being used to house child asylum seekers.
"Many of the boys were quite depressed, they are very anxious, some feel they'll never get out of there. So many of them had been there for more than three months and a number for more than 6 months. Some see some other boys being moved out into the community or into community settings and they don't know why they are not being moved out. Some had relatives in the community and they couldn't understand why they couldn't go and live with them while their claims were processed. And the kinds of things that that this was resulting in was, you know, serious mental health issues: depression anxiety, self harm, sleeping disorders."
Most concering, the Commissioner says, were accounts of self harm in the wake of prolongued periods of detention inside Pontville.
"Some did show, show us evidence of them having self, um, harmed themselves, yes some did.... [Journalist: And what kinds of self harm are we talking about here?] Well in that case it was cutting... in that case."
Megan Mitchell has written to Immigration Minister Tony Burke, outlining her concerns.
She says she is worried mental health aid provided to those at Pontville is inadequate.
"There are mental health facilities available at the centre. However many of the boys reported that they didn't really benefit from it. So one of the things I asked the centre management to do was have a look at the adequacy of the mental health programs that were available and I'm hoping that they will will have taken up that suggestion."
But the Commissioner is also calling for the Pontville detention centre to be closed down.
Instead, she wants the boys moved into community-based detention.
"All the boys in Pontville are unaccompanied minors, so they don't have their parents with them. They are out here on their own and obviously that's very hard for a young person not to have their family around them. What the Human Rights Commission has been advocating for and governments successively have been trying to do this to their credit, is to move children into community-based detention while their claims are processed. Now that could be with a relative in the community or with host families or residential units, all of those are options and there are a number of young people living in those options in the community. But at the moment there is nearly 1800 young people in closed detention and we really want to make sure that those young people are moved out of those situations as soon as possible."
In 2008 the Labor government, under the leadership of Kevin Rudd, proclaimed that detention would be a last resort and that children would not be detained in immigration detention centres.
But the most recently published Immigration Department figures show that more than 16-hundred children were in some sort of immigration detention facility in April, with a further 1200 in community detention.
Madeleine Ogilvy is a Hobart barrister who has represented clients at Pontville over the past four years.
She questions a decision by Immigration Minister Burke, after a recent visit to the centre, to handpick 18 boys to be removed and placed into community-based care.
"You'd have to wonder what the other boys are thinking now. Why not me? Like you know, I just think we need to be very very careful to play a very straight bat and ensure that everybody there is treated equally because if you release one group of boys it may cause problems with others who haven't been so fortunate."
According the Tasmanian Migrant Resource Centre, there are currently no unaccompanied minors in community-based detention in Tasmania.
The organisation's CEO Cedric Manen, says before considering community-based care, guardianship laws would need to change.
"There are some particular aspects we need to look at in terms of young people. Obviously the guardianship of the young person is of prime importance so who is going to be calling the shots on the type of support they receive and where can they receive the support from, but more importantly, if that support is not being received what is the mechanisms to indicate to government that they need further assistance."
Under federal law, unaccompanied minors fall under the guardianship of the Minister for Immigration.
The barrister Madeleine Ogilvy says this is a serious conflict of interest, especially in the wake of concerns around detention at Pontville.
"When you are dealing with children who do not have parents with them, there is a question around who is standing in loco parentus, so who is able to speak for them as their parent. And I am just not sure that the government in this situation, where we have them incarcerated, is fulfilling that function. My personal view is that each of those kids particularly in Pontville and wherever else they may be ought to be provided a separate legal representative as we would do in a family court case so that their interests are protected."
As Children's Commissioner, Megan Mitchell has the power to review federal laws, and to give her views whether they are meeting the rights of the child.
After visiting Pontville, she is now pushing to see the guardianship laws changed.
"We should continue to look at the laws and how they are either supporting or failing children and the law in terms of detention is one of those and I think in particular one of the issues that we'll continue to highlight is the conflict of interest that is presented when the immigration minister is both, is also the guardian of these young people, which is a situation that I would really like to see change."
But for Madeleine Olgilvy, in the interim there are glaring opportunities for immediate improvements to the health of those inside the Pontville centre.
"The mistake we are making is assuming the site itself couldn't be made better. It was originally rebuilt at the time we had male asylum seekers in Curtin and various other places who were in need of a more stringently controlled environment. So we've got this area that now looks more like a prison but what we've got there are a lot of kids and the first thing that i think we ought to do is take the fences down. That it should be more of a dormitory style environment. I don't think we have got dangerous kids in there.... A cricket pitch wouldn't go astray for example. What do you do with teenage boys? And you have got a lot of them out there at Pontville and we need to be looking after them better"
Share
