A New Approach - Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees and Asylum Seekers report - why do we have to wait for these reports and why do we have to wait for 'celebrities' to lead the way? People have died, t's time to change our ways.

What is being called for in the latest report, A New Approach - Breaking The Stalemate on Refugees and Asylum Seekers and undersigned by various celebrities and identities has been long called for by various experts and other witnesses to the Australian Detention Centre experience.

I visit both Australian adult prisons and Australian Detention Centres, and it is still to my great surprise that the Detention Centre experience is worse for those detained than the prison experience. I have met Asylum Seekers, and perceived people smugglers (though I do not accept such a defintion) who have experienced both the Immigration Detention and Australian Prison experience and to my surprise ALL OF THEM have said to me, again and again, that the prison experience is '100 times better' than the Detention Centre experience - they describe a greater ethos of care among prison personnel, less restrictions in regard to movement within the sectors of the facility, more opportunities at doing more things such as various short courses and less intimidation, intolerances and other maltreatment.

The Australian Detention Centres are designed on prison design principles now outdated, more than six decades old. A significant number of the lower level personnel working in Detention Centres are highly unqualified and a significant number, because of labor resource demands, have been secured through Centrelinks Job Service Providers who can achieve this with the Employment Pathway Agreements Centrelink recipients need to be on in order for instance to secure NEWSTART allowances. We are doing nobody any favours by coalescing under trained or untrained personnel - we are harrassing our Asylum Seekers into various meltdowns and enshring the worst behaviours into the personnel who are inadequately trained and who are hence victims of the protocols imposed.

We only need to remind ourselves that at one time such a system and such processes did not exist and that we often accepted greater numbers of distressed folk seeking Asylum and that as a peoples we need to understand the peaks and troughs of our nearest neighbours various homeland crises.

The rest is discrimination and racism.

Gerry Georgatos
PhD Law Researcher, Australian Deaths in Custody
Convener, Human Rights Alliance

0430 657 309