It’s late on a Friday evening in April, and the Morrison government is releasing the last of the refugees locked in hotel detention. These Alternative Places of Detention, or APODS, linger as a murky blotch on the former government’s reprehensible asylum seeker track record. It’s been two years and one global pandemic, but the election looms.
When Basim Alobeidi reflects on how he was thrust into the open, cold afternoon air for the first time in 20 months, he says August 27 was a date he will remember for the rest of his life.
As with most of the Department of Home Affairs’ (DHA) decision making on this issue, a lack of transparency muddied the waters of logical reasoning when the department’s then minister Alex Hawke began the haphazard release of innocent men who had been locked in hotel APODS like the Park Hotel in Melbourne for upwards of 600 days. The Park Hotel is a “crime scene” according to one academic source.
On August 27 last year, Iraqi born refugee Basim Alobeidi was brought down from his room and told he was free. Given 1 hour to pack his possessions, he returned to his room and cried. It had been 611 days since he arrived in Australia for emergency medical treatment and was swiftly locked into the Mantra Hotel APOD in Preston.
Alobeidi is one of over 1400 people the Australian Government held in immigration detention facilities until December last year. Unlike regular Australian prisoners who undergo parole hearings and months of psychological preparation for their release, he was given no notice and no reason for why he was suddenly freed into community detention. Both state and commonwealth justice systems appear meticulously well ordered in comparison to the chaos of on-shore refugee detention.
According to Corrections Victoria, prisoners are eligible for targeted support from pre-release, transitional and post-release programs. One program, ReConnect, provides targeted, intensive (up to 12 months) post-release reintegration outreach support for prisoners
The graduates of penal institutions are also, in most circumstances, able to connect their punishment to a crime they committed. They have the opportunity to repent and a tangible, discernible period of time to do such repenting – an endowment not awarded to the hotel’s prisoners.
The arbitrary and bewildering nature of these refugee releases stumps even the most well informed experts, advocates and lawyers. Over the Labor Day long weekend, 13 men were released from the Park Hotel, while the nation lamented the plight of Ukrainian refugees crossing the Polish border and watched as, closer to home, floods raged in northern NSW.
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre said the government had “provided no reason as to why” the releases were taking place.
Others speculate that the upcoming election may have played a role.
On Saturday April 2, when Prime Minister Morrison was seven weeks out from an election, he announced a “historic” trade deal with India, and then a series of unplanned, unannounced refugee releases began. Around 16 were released that afternoon and then in quick succession, more were cleared out on the 7th, 9th until the self proclaimed four-star hotel was gutted.
Julie Macken is a Doctoral Candidate at Western Sydney University and author of The melancholic torturer: How Australia became a nation that tortures refugees. She said the decisions made by the DHA and former Minister for Immigration Alex Hawke “suggests that the refugees are always treated as political collateral”.
An Australian Border Force (ABF) spokesperson said “the Australian government’s policies have not changed and illegal maritime arrivals will not be settled in Australia.” You’d be forgiven for suffocating if you held your breath waiting for the ABF to comment on an individual case.
It’s much cheaper for the government to detain Alobeidi in the community too. It costs the taxpayer $458,506 annually for each person that is held in hotel-type APODs. That’s nearly one million dollars for Alobeidi’s tenure alone.
Among others, he was driven by immigration officers to Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation (MITA). The Broadmeadows facility was originally army barracks used for the Australian Light Horse regiment during World War I.
This place is not unfamiliar to Alobeidi, he’d been there 618 days earlier when he was first flown here from Papua New Guinea. A hot day. The 18th of December 2019 saw the thermostat at Essendon Airport reach 41 degrees celsius.
MITA was ravaged by a succession of horrific incidents in mid 2019 before Alobeidi arrived. One man died after his medication allegedly ceased. A spokesperson for Victoria Police said 23-year-old Abdul Aziz died about 20 minutes after midnight. A fellow detainee told The Age that officers found the man lying down on the floor outside his room.
“Five months ago he signed a visa to go out, I think a bridging visa. He signed because we have to sign first and then wait one or two weeks, but after five months he still didn’t go out” he said of the deceased. The very next day another man tried to set himself on fire at the prison-like centre after being held there for two years.
Nine days after that, another man was taken in an ambulance to the Northern Hospital after he sewed his lips together. He had been on a hunger strike at MITA for the past two weeks, according to his lawyer Alison Battisson. When questioned on the incident, a spokesperson for the Australian Border Force said the department would not comment on individual cases. At the time of writing, Battison confirmed that the man is now in closed detention in Western Australia.
Two days later, a two-year-old girl had her black and decaying teeth surgically removed. Advocates for the family believe a lack of access to fresh food and sunlight within the centre and a subsequent vitamin D deficiency to be the cause of her dental issues.
In August 2021, Alobeidi was back at MITA to collect any possessions left behind when he first arrived, before being taken to his new home, a flat in leafy Heidelberg Heights. His new neighbours, along with the rest of Melbourne, were under some of the Victorian government’s harshest lockdown restrictions; the 5km travel limit, masks indoors and outdoors. Alobeidi felt the freest he had in years.
The officers pulled up at the end of the driveway and pointed at the unit, they said “that is where you will live” and told him there was furniture and food in the fridge. Once he was alone, he went to a park and felt the grass with his bare hands. He enjoyed sleeping whenever he wanted. In the hotel, he said you wake up every morning and wait for the “trauma to start again”.
It’s furnished with a black, modern, sleek couch and similar dining table. There are beige vertical blinds and a small TV that could be from 2010. When we arrive late in the afternoon of April 14th he has a 1950s sitcom playing on 9Gem, and the air-con groans.
Community detention was introduced in Australia in 2005 when the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) was amended to allow the Minister for Immigration to make residence determinations. It was designed to avoid retraumatisation of refugees and has been lauded for its ability to allow refugees to spend time in the community while they wait for their visa to be processed.
Alobeidi was in Iraq and in his early twenties working as a crane operator when the Howard government made this amendment to the Migration Act. In December of that year, George Bush conceded that much of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq “turned out to be wrong” but insisted the conflict was justified. There were 16,583 civilian deaths recorded across the country. It was an election year, which saw the Iraqis vote for their first, full-term government.
Two of Alobeidi’s brothers were kidnapped and his father was shot. He fled the country by plane and then boat. When the rickety vessel arrived on the shores of Christmas Island he thought he was on the Australian mainland, but it was just the beginning of years of detainment on our nation’s island prisons.
In Heidelberg, Alobeidi begins a new chapter of his life, physically free from the hotel but not able to work or study. The amendments in 2005 specified that the Minister may at any time revoke or vary a residence determination in any respect if the Minister thinks that it is in the public interest to do so.
The traumas faced by refugees like Alobeidi are compounded by the Australian detention system. Louise Newman AM is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne.
“The background to persecution, discrimination, or whatever issues they faced in their homeland, [then the] perilous journeys and essentially being in various forms of detention for a prolonged period of time. We know a lot about the effects of that experience in and of itself” she said.
The hotel detention environment is a sort of reality which is essentially incomprehensible to the human mind. On top of this, detainees are subject to tantalising lures. Albobedi was summoned down from his room to meet officials seven months before his actual release, and while fellow detainees were freed, he was told there was no visa for him.
“They might say ‘you might be getting out tomorrow’. [Then] tomorrow happens and they’re not let out these sorts of very cruel treatments, which only increase anxiety. They’re totally disempowered” Prof Newman said.
According to Prof Newman, the circumstances at the Park Hotel are a fair equivalent to some of the very harsh solitary confinement regimes in many of the countries Australian governments have criticised.
“I don’t know if that was deliberately thought through. But if you look at the way people have described it, the way penal institutions and institutions are constructed, to be permanently under observation and scrutiny has profound psychological impact.” said Prof Newman.
Just like MITA’s rap sheet, the hotel detention APODs were rife with incidents of self harm because even going to a hospital, or emergency department for a day was better than staying in hotel detention.
According to a study headed by Dr Kyli Hedrick for BMC Psychiatry, which looked into how incidence rates vary by held detention type, in the 12-month period from August 2014 to July 2015 there were 265 episodes of self harm per 1000 asylum seekers in APODs across the nation (including Christmas Island). Hedrick’s study is based on data obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
This data is more than seven years old because there’s nothing else. Researchers cite a lack of transparency from the government as the catalyst. A lack of transparency on behalf of the relevant government bodies is why this data is more than seven years old. For those in the mental health industry, who are not only willing but desperate to help, there is very little recent data on the effects of sudden release from detention.
The release itself is undoubtedly traumatic too. Once freed from the clutches of the hotel, the detainees are left with very little certainty of what their future holds. Prof Newman said that some have told her “that they would rather have faced execution than faced a sense of disposability.”
Others become acquainted with elements of Stockholm Syndrome which Newman describes as a survival mechanism to maintain a feeling of psychological organisation. According to psychologist Nicholas Mueller from Cabrini Health’s Asylum Seeker Outreach Program, one client was released into the community, but the first time he left his room was to attend his appointment at the Brunswick centre about a week later.
This was not the case for Alobeidi, he has made great efforts to exercise and volunteer at a community garden, and he’s currently fixing up a Suzuki motorcycle. The garden allows him to feel he is contributing to the community and society at large. At the garden in Heidelberg, Alobeidi helps to run education sessions for primary aged children with special needs, teaching them about conservation and the dangers of incorrect rubbish disposal.
Despite a vacuum of fresh and up-to-date data, there is burgeoning hope as other research departments begin new studies.
Prof Suresh Sundram from Monash University is heading a longitudinal study to understand the impact of long-term immigration detention on the physical and mental health of asylum seekers, after being released into the community. Participants released from detention will be contacted for follow-up interviews after three months, six months, 12 months and then once every year for up to 10 years.
The Government’s venture into hotel-type APODs was a stab in the dark. The research project, Health survey of refugees and asylum seekers with an experience of immigration detention is the first of its kind in Australia – because the very specific type of detainment exists nowhere else in the world.
It will fill a gaping void in efforts to rehabilitate the detainees like Alobeidi and while it is in embryonic stages, it is valuable because it can track the experience of former detainees now that the majority of APODs have been vacated.
When I last saw Alobeidi, he said he lives in fear of the government, but he wants me to remind you that since the election of the Albanese government, he feels more safe and even, positive about the future. A heroic achievement for a man in his circumstances.
Feature Image: Reuters
For a deeper look into Australia’s history of refugee treatment, listen to the podcast series Escaping Limbo.
