Nearly 25 years on from the Tampa crisis, Australia needs a parliamentary inquiry to lift the lid on offshore detention.

Next year will mark 25 years since the Tampa crisis transformed Australia. This transformation is akin to a virus that continues to weave its way through our current political, cultural life and moral life as a nation. Last weekend’s revelations that an outlaw motorcycle gang had won a contract to provide security on Nauru to former immigration detainees and that Australian taxpayers paid millions of dollars for non-existent offshore asylum seeker services as part of a system that “enabled” corruption by Nauruan politicians and Australian companies underscore the virulence of this virus.

Australia is going from bad to horrifying in its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees and the secrecy that surrounds both. But does that matter? And more to the point do Australians care?  In 2001, while working at the Australian Financial Review, I interviewed a former Labor Immigration minister who explained to me that, being cruel to refugees is “like shooting fish in a barrel, no one cares.”

It sounded cynical at the time, it sounds prescient now.

That’s why the week of the Tampa crisis demands a closer inspection, because going into this crisis on the 24 August, 2001, Australia was a nation that had managed – despite xenophobia and the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation – to stay on the right side of international law, in fact if not in spirit.

By 29 August the prime minister had called out the SAS to board a civilian ship and taken control of the lives of the crew and the 433 asylum seekers on board. We were then at the edge of our legal obligations and values and the map read, ‘beyond this point there be dragons.’

Kate Eastman’s 2024   Kaldor Centre Oration describes the exhaustion and disbelief of that week as a young lawyer trying to apply law to this emerging and fast-moving crisis. It is well worth listening to. At the same time in the parliamentary gallery journalists were also wondering what the hell was going with “that boat”.

Meanwhile Prime Minister John Howard saw both a political opportunity and a way to manage his own anxiety. Released cabinet papers from 2001 show confidential contingency plans had been drawn up to deal with intelligence reports suggesting an increasing pool of 6,500 asylum seekers in the “smuggling pipeline” was awaiting passage. Of course, when the Twin Towers came down on 9/11 the fusion between terrorists and asylum seekers was forged.

Since then, we have careered into unchartered waters in our ongoing abuse of people seeking asylum and continue to breach international conventions such as the Convention Against Torture, the Rights of Children, and undermine the Refugee Convention itself.

The abusive nature of Australia’s on and offshore detention regime has been exhaustively documented by health professionals, lawyers, journalists and activists. In 2016 myself, Carmen Lawrence, Wendy Bacon, Claire O’Connor and Pamela Curr wrote Protection denied abuse condoned to investigate the abuse of young women held in Australia’s detention regime in Nauru.

The evidence of a pattern of systemic assault and rape of refugee women in Nauru was clear. The stories of assaults inside the camp by both local men and Wilson Security staff, from women brought to Australia for medical and psychological care alerted us to the horrors of life in Nauru. From April 2015 the phone calls from distressed women living outside the camp detailed a pattern of rape and abuse in the Nauru community that could not be ignored.

In my book, _Australia’s schism in the soul_, I interviewed five psychiatrists, all of whom had worked for over two decades with people held in these camps. Among the questions I asked all of them was this: do these camps and the treatment people experience within them constitute torture? Five out five of these medical professionals said yes.

The Tampa affair and the events that followed changed Australian policy towards refugees forever. The iconic image of Australia’s most elite soldiers boarding a cargo ship to hold guns to the terrified people on board marks the inflection point in Australia’s immigration policy and indeed its soul.

We have never been the same nation since that week.

The journey from using the SAS to detain unarmed civilians to paying bikie gangs possibly billions of dollars to run Australia’s offshore detention camps is characterised by two elements. The first is a belief that the “ends justify the means”, no matter the financial costs to the taxpayers or the physical and mental costs to the men, women and children indefinitely detained. The second is the secrecy of the camps, the contracts, the abuse of both those detained and the young Australia workers recruited to work there.

I am not sure what changes a politician into someone willing to do whatever it takes to keep their power – even if that means turning a blind eye to the abuse of vulnerable people. But I do know what changes this culture of secrecy and that is a Royal Commission into Australia’s immigration detention regime. I know because I remember as a journalist for the Australian Financial Review I sat in the 2004 Inquiry for many days listening to the evidence. I remember the day one document was produced, written by ACM’s psychologist at Woomera and addressed to the South Australian Department of Family and Youth Services.

“I accuse DIMIA and the federal government of the emotional abuse of children at Woomera and the residential housing project,” the psychologist wrote. “They have continued to ignore all the reports from the experts that continual detention further harms children. These children are now completely dysfunctional and we cannot treat them in a detention environment. What is happening in Woomera is a medical and psychiatric emergency.”

It this kind of evidence that led a number of people to believe that ACM was addressing two audiences. One was the commission, the other a future coronial inquiry after a successful suicide attempt.

‘This is the anatomy of a death in custody except we’re still waiting for the death to take place," said Charandev Singh, human rights activist at the Brimbank Community Legal Centre at the time.

At Labor’s 2024 Conference there was a powerful push for a Royal Commission into immigration detention. It was seen off by then Immigration Minister, Andrew Giles, on the promise of a Parliamentary Inquiry.

That inquiry has never eventuated and last week’s scandals have already been pushed off to the highly secretive National Anti-Corruption Commission. Groups representing thousands of people have written to Minister Tony Burke asking he make good on that promise. The silence is deafening.

This is bad for those detained in this secretive and abusive regime, but it is also bad for a nation in dire need of reasons to trust our elected officials. If we ever want to become what we had once been, only the truth will work to free us. That demands at least a parliamentary inquiry as a first step.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.