Refugee centres condemned in report
by Jules Andrews Prime Minister Howard is quickly learning that he can't buy friends. Committees that Mr Howard personally hand-picked to backup his policies have, one after another, condemned his profit-driven meanness and revealed that his stated aims of "family values" and "a fair go" are just empty catchphrases. The latest report, released by the Federal Parliamentary Committee for Human Rights, has condemned Australia's privately operated refugee detention centres. Key recommendations for change include: * the introduction of a 14-week limit on the time spent in detention; * community sponsorship for released detainees provided they pass a security check; * facilities that allow families to stay together. The all-party committee is controlled by the Liberals but its report was released without dissent. The report is now the fourth inquiry into the refugee camps which condemns their existence and the treatment of the asylum seekers. The release of the report caused Mr Ruddock to launch an unprecedented attack against his own Liberal Party colleagues, labelling them as "extraordinarily naove", calling their work "superficial" and questioning future funding of the Human Rights Committee. Mr Ruddock said the report was compiled by "a group of people who haven't put in the hard yards" and who lacked "life experience". Yet Mr Ruddock, since graduating from law school, has spent his entire working life cloistered in the Liberal Party — far removed from the reality of the majority of Australians. The Labor members of the committee defended the report: "If you believe in the status quo of detention centres, then I think this is a pretty confronting report. It will challenge both the government and the opposition about their conception about what life is like in detention centres", said Labor MP Roger Price Perhaps this was a thinly veiled reference to Labor's immigration spokesperson, Con Sciacca who, while saying that a Labor Government would consider all the recommendations in the report and questioned the camps being privately run, went on to say that, "Labor does not support the dismantling of the detention system". He supported Ruddock's view that "they're not concentration camps, they're nothing like that". Mr Sciacca has also continued his hard-line against so-called "trouble- makers", saying that they should be held in separate "high-security" camps and dealt with harshly by the law. Third strike against Howard The Human Rights Committee report is the third in the space of just three months to have questioned government policies. On June 15, the Australian national Council on Drugs, another Howard hand- picked body, recommended a drastic rethink of Australia's drug policy, including a strictly controlled medically supervised heroin trial. The Council suggested that such a trial would reduce the amount of crime committed by addicts, prevent the spread of HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases and reduce the tragic death toll from overdoses (1,000 deaths last year). Flying in the face of independent research, and seemingly oblivious to Australia's heroin crisis (with an estimated 76,000 addicts), Mr Howard rejected the report, saying that the Government's current drug policies were "working well". As reported in The Guardian (April 11, 2000), Mr Howard suppressed a report from his handpicked "Youth Pathways Action Plan Taskforce". The report condemned the Government's handling of youth issues. It blasted policies that Mr Howard is particularly proud of, such as the work for the dole scheme, the strict activity test for unemployment benefits, the lack of apprenticeships and the new privatised employment services. It said Mr Howard's policies were directly responsible for driving youth to crime and drugs.