The Residential Housing Project, Port Augusta
The Port Augusta detention centre is for detainee women, girls and boys up to 18 years of age. It is separate from the main detention centre, Baxter. Not all women and children live at Port Augusta, since they do not want to be separated from their husbands or fathers. Detainee males over 18 years of age are not permitted to stay there, but can visit.
The Minister calls is a "residential housing project". It is a detention centre, with a less hostile environment than Baxter, but still with guards, security cameras and fences. It opened in late November 2003.
Residential Housing Projects in the News
Home sweet home
Saeed's wife Leila admits that her husband has found it hard to cope since she moved out of Baxter three months ago to live in the Residential Housing Project (RHP) [...] "I hate the housing project, but I had to go there for my baby. She was very tiny, very small for her age and at Baxter every day the food was the same. Now I can give her the formula she needs and I can cook for her. But the housing project is worse than any detention centre I have been in, including Curtin. We cannot go out into the community, there are cameras everywhere. All the windows and doors have alarms. After 11o'clock at night we are locked in, you cannot open any window. If you do, the alarm goes off and they come running."
A rolled-gold alternative
The minister says the housing project has tight restrictions and security measures because it is "another form of detention" and was never intended to be an open facility where detainees could mix with the community. [...] As for the security restrictions placed on children, the minister says there is no preconceived notion that kids want to escape or that they are "bad people".
The Australian government is excising fathers as well as islands
�The Australian government is still excising islands and it is still excising fathers. The government is denying children the right to a family life. The splitting of families is imposed upon them by our government,� Ms Hiles said.
HREOC findings on residential housing projects
Excerpted from Chapter 6 of "A last resort?"
The Department [of Immigration] appears to be of the view that residential housing projects provide a good solution to the difficulties facing families in detention and has frequently declared the success of this initiative. For instance, in foreshadowing the closure of the Woomera detention centre, the Minister stated that:
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The very successful Woomera Residential Housing Project (RHP) will remain open and all residents will be offered the opportunity to stay in the Project or move to Baxter with their partners.
However, the evidence provided to the Inquiry does not support such a definitive conclusion about the success of the Woomera housing project. The Inquiry recognises that the housing project provides an improved physical environment and a closer approximation to family-style living than in detention centres. Children in the housing project are not exposed to riots and other disturbances taking place in the detention centre and have easier access to excursions into the community. However, closer examination reveals that the continuing restrictions on liberty have diminished the positive impact of the project on women and children. In the words of two children who were living in the housing project:
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CHILD 1: The [detention] centre has its own problems and the housing project has also its own problems. Like I think both are equal. Just here is like ... the shape is different -
CHILD 2: Yeah, there also just the shape and the look is like better there and maybe we cook but still we have some problems that is equal with the [detention] centre.
The most dramatic restriction regarding the lives of participants in the housing project is the condition that fathers stay in the detention centre. This condition exacerbates the already fragile mental state of families and has not been adequately justified by the Department. While there is no compulsion on two-parent families to volunteer for the project, the Inquiry is of the view that asking families to choose between a less harsh environment for their children and separation from their father is unfair. While this condition does not impact on single mother families, they have also found it difficult to conduct 'normal' parenting in the housing project.
The doctor providing care to detainees at Woomera wrote to the Department in October 2002 setting out his concern that:
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at the current rate of deterioration of the families housed [at the housing project] � it will not be long before the project must be considered a failure and alternatives found for the detention of those held there.
The housing project highlights one of the recurring themes of the Inquiry, namely that despite efforts by the Department to improve conditions of detention, it is the detention per se - the deprivation of liberty and autonomy - that is more often than not a primary cause of distress for children and their parents (see further Chapter 9 on Mental Health). This is not a new discovery and explains why the CRC imposes such strict limitations on the circumstances under which children may be detained - in particular that it be a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time (as required by article 37(b) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child).
Green's Senator, Kerry Nettle on the Residential Housing Project
17 June 2004 Read full story in Nettle's visit to Baxter and the RHP...
Last week I visited Baxter detention centre and the Port Augusta residential housing project to see whether things had changed in three years. I was particularly keen to visit the residential housing project because this is what both the government and the opposition point to when they are asked thorny questions about locking up children in our detention centres. I met a 20-year old Iranian girl Bahareh who has been held behind razor wire in Australia for the last four years. She described the residential housing project as a �golden cage�. She pointed to the furniture supplied by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs and said, �We don�t want this furniture; we want our freedom.�
The residential housing project is a gated cul-de-sac in a suburban street of Port Augusta. It is cordoned off from the community by two large fences. At regular intervals along the fence are security cameras and motion detectors. Security cameras also line the edge of the road through the middle of the area. Standing at any one point you can see the entire area, which is only about 100 metres by 40 metres. There are eight sterile demountable buildings, each with a two-metre backyard. Eight to nine guards are present daily, and several times throughout the day they walk into the homes to do a head count. Up to three families are housed in each home.
If it is hot at night, as I imagine it often is in Port Augusta, and someone opens the window after 11 o�clock at night, then guards descend on the home to check whether detainees are trying to escape out the window, past the two fences with motion detectors and security cameras and into Port Augusta. Mothers are escorted by three guards to the shops one morning a week. A detainee described to me how, if you are shopping and you see someone you know and say hello, you will be stopped from going on future shopping trips�so much for living in the community in these residential housing projects. There is no talking to neighbours through the two fences and cameras; there is no talking to friends whilst guards escort you on a weekly shopping trip. Children in these prisons who are able to go to school are body searched on the way to and from school each day.
[...] The residential housing projects and community or home detention of asylum seekers are not appropriate or humane systems for detaining asylum seekers. They are simply another form of detention; they are simply a different type of prison. The residential housing projects separates families and community detention extends the system of detention into our society in the same way that home detention of prisoners extends the criminal justice system into our communities.
Letter to Minister for Immigration re Housing Project Brochure
Senator Amanda Vanstone
Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs
12 July 2004
Dear Ms Vanstone,
I received in the mail today a letter from your department and a brochure promoting Port Augusta "Residential Housing Project".
I would like to take issue with a number of things in the letter and brochure.
* I object strongly to Port Augusta RHP being described as a "family friendly environment" and a "home like environment". Australian homes do not have security cameras, alarmed windows and guards. Australian children are not searched when they go to and from school. How can an environment where women and children are separated from their fathers and older brothers be called a "family friendly environment"??
* The literature repeatedly refers to the fact that the women and children go there "voluntarily" and that "they can choose whether or not to stay in an RHP". The alternative choice of life behind electric fences at Baxter Detention Centre is no choice at all. Their choice is to live freely within the wider Australian community in peace and dignity.
* Your letter also states that "as of 5 July 2004, there was only one child remaining in a mainland detention centre".Your figure does not include the 99 children detained in Nauru, Christmas Island, Port Augusta, Maribyrnong or Villawood detention centres. It does not include children who arrived by plane. It does not include children who have not sought political asylum. Today there are at least 100 children detained in secure facilities.
You have stated in the media that the mother who has chosen to remain at Baxter could choose to make that move any time she wished. This would mean that her husband would see his son for just four hours twice a week. Again, this is no choice at all! Late last week eight children and their mothers returned to Baxter from the Port Augusta residential community to show their support for the family as well as to protest against being detained.
* Your brochure states that the similar "alternative detention arrangements" in Woomera operated successfully and were "strongly supported by the local community". Why then did I see women and children from Woomera Housing belittled and ridiculed in Woomera township by some of the guards from Housing? Why was I forbidden, in my work at Woomera Hospital, from doing simple things like put flowers on the meal trays of women from the Housing Project who were patients there? Why was I warned by guards at the hospital that I was being "too friendly" to these women?
Thank you for sending me this literature, and I would like to commend you on your obvious talent for fiction.
yours sincerely,
(Ms) Mira Wroblewski
Their life behind the wire
Eight three-bedroom, cream-painted houses line the road on the outskirts of Port Augusta, 150km north of Adelaide. This, however, is Australia's only residential housing detention centre. When The Advertiser visited yesterday there were children playing, men chatting on the grassy street verge and women wandering between the houses. The visit was part of a media tour conducted by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs of the Baxter Detention Centre near Port Augusta. It was the first time members of the media were allowed into the detention centre - including its controversial management unit where detainees are held in individual cells under the watch of a security camera - as well as the residential project while detainees were there.