UPDATED: There are 723 children living in detention in Australia.

In good news today – major changes were made to Australia’s immigration system today. According to the SMH

More children and families will be moved out of immigration detention centres into community-based accommodation, such as centres run by churches and charities, under major changes to Australia’s immigration detention system announced today.

The federal government will also open two new detention centres for up to 1900 near Perth and Adelaide.

The new facilities will be built at Northam, about 80 kilometres north-east of Perth, and at Inverbrackie, 37 kilometres north of Adelaide.

The Northam centre will house up to 1500 single men. The centre at Inverbrackie will house up to 400 family members, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said.

The two new sites will allow the government to shut down temporary accommodation, including tents in use on Christmas Island, and some motels.

Most children would be moved out of detention centres by the end of the year, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said. The rest would be moved by June next year

Last night I watched Lateline while shaking my head in disbelief.  Did you know that there are STILL 723 children living in “alternative places of detention” in Australia?

The conditions are bleak, the children confined.  Imagine your children, the kids you see at the playgrounds every day, your nieces and nephews in a place of detention FOR MONTHS ON END.

Imagine the conditions inside these detention centres.  Or better yet come  “inside” Christmas Island with Natalie Zerial. Natalie is a lawyer and migration agent. She has travelled to several places of detention of women and children with the Refugee Advice and Casework Service, an NGO based in Sydney. She writes for us…..

“My regular work is as a lawyer for one of Australia’s top commercial law firms.  It requires long hours working for some of Australia’s biggest companies on legal problems that are often on the front page of the business section.

However, at the end of last year, my firm offered me an opportunity: to work for six months with a not-for profit agency representing asylum seekers.  My bosses asked me if I was emotionally prepared for it.  I said, confidently, that I was.  I consider myself to be fairly emotionally intelligent, and politically aware.

I was wrong, to be frank.  The simple, and very disquieting, reality, was that the things I ended up seeing and hearing about were totally unknown to me.  Naively, I had thought that I understood the issues that are so frequently splashed on our televisions and newspapers.  But, in the end, I had no idea what life was like for asylum seekers in our detention centres.  Among the biggest surprise was finding out that the government’s line that children are no longer kept in “detention” was, by and large, a fudge.  Yes, women and children are kept separate from single men, in “low security” facilities, but women and children are still detained, and often in facilities that were never designed for families living there for months at a time.

Over six months, I visited detention centres from Villawood to Darwin and Christmas Island.  Often, I met my clients in demountables, with air conditioning struggling to keep out the overbearing heat, making it difficult to hear people whose voices were often muted by their sadness and isolation.  My time with them was limited: I often got no more than a couple of hours to explain the whole legal process, to fill in more than a dozen forms, and to write down their life stories for assessment by Departmental officers who would determine whether they would be given a new, safe life or be sent back to the countries they feared.

What I saw at those places was the inevitable indignity of detention – particularly when, as is frequently the case with remote centres, the facilities were never designed for the needs of the people living there. For example, families at Christmas Island are housed in a former construction workers’ camp. The dusty centre, surrounded by temporary fencing, is crowded with demountable buildings, linked by cement walkways, and with little greenery or open space.

The shared facilities and cramped living conditions mean that entire families (some with children under a year old) spend months in detention with little or no privacy.  It is inevitably claustrophobic for families that are there for months on end.  The detention is made worse by stiflingly hot temperatures, 85% humidity and, perhaps worst of all, no idea of when it will be over.

The time in detention is made harder by the lack of adequate facilities for women and children.  Children who are old enough can attend school, but younger children have little space and limited things to do to pass the time.  While detention facilities for men include gyms and sporting facilities, these types of activities are usually inappropriate for women.  Few alternatives are available.  Once a week at Christmas Island, women have an “activities day”, where they can knit or have access to moisturisers and beauty products.  The rest of the time, they aren’t allowed to have sewing kits or knitting needles they could use to entertain themselves productively; they can’t have tweezers; they have limited access to basic grooming products; and they aren’t allowed to cook for themselves and their families, because they aren’t allowed to handle utensils that might be used as weapons. Prolonged inactivity can lead to depression, anxiety and an overwhelming sense of worthlessness for women in detention. And when mothers’ self-esteem and sense of dignity suffers, so does their kids’.

However, remote detention facilities come with problems that go beyond “undignified” and border on the dangerous. In Leonora at the moment, half a dozen pregnant women are detained in the middle of the West Australian desert, three hours’ drive from the nearest hospital in Kalgoorlie. The decision to house these families and pregnant women in the middle of the outback is illogical and inhumane. It makes antenatal care more difficult and more expensive than it needs to be. It also significantly increases the fear and anxiety that these women will experience in the lead up to the birth of their children.

Do we want a Government that is “tough” on women and children?  The vast majority of these women and children will be recognised as refugees, having fled from countries, like Afghanistan, where simply owning make-up or leaving home as an unaccompanied woman can put your life in danger.  The policy of detaining women and children in remote and under-resourced facilities prolongs and even increases their mental anguish.  It doesn’t fit with an Australia that is fair and compassionate.  It certainly doesn’t fit with an Australia that values the rights and dignity of women, and even (for the time being) has a female PM.