Australia Is Closing Immigration Detention Centres But it's Not All Good News

The Australian government has hailed its "stop the boats" policy as a success. So much so that they've closed 11 detention centers in the past year, a number that will soon include Darwin's Bladin Alternative Place of Detention, as announced over the weekend.

Bladin, which houses families and children, will close its doors on April 7, only months after the Human Rights Commission released a report lambasting widespread levels of mental illness and sexual assault amongst detained children. So while refugee advocates are pleased there are no longer enough detainees to necessitate Bladin, they're concerned about where the centre's detainees will go next.

Ben Pynt, of the Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network, told VICE that their greatest fear is that detainees would be shifted to the harsher Wickham Point facility or back to Manus Island or Nauru. "We don't think that's appropriate for anyone, particularly for women and children," he said. The Immigration Department has not confirmed how many current detainees will be released on bridging visas or sent to other immigration detention centres.

Caz Coleman, director of Melaleuca Refugee Centre in Darwin explained that there are around 150 people at Bladin scheduled to return to Nauru. "It's highly likely other people will just go to different detention centres around Australia," she said.

Since the Human Rights Commission report, which Prime Minister Tony Abbott panned as "blatantly partisan", the Immigration Department has confirmed its knowledge of 44 allegations of sexual assault in detention centres between January 2013 and July 2014. Just last week, a 16-year-old girl was admitted to a Darwin hospital after jumping from a first-floor balcony at an unnamed detention facility in the Northern Territory.

Bladin is one of two immigration detention facilities in the NT. The other is neighbouring Wickham Point immigration detention centre, where a number of Iranian men have been on hunger strike since late last year. The Department of Immigration classifies both Bladin and Wickham Point as Alternative Places of Detention (APOD), which means places suitable for people of "minimal risk", such as families and children. Despite this, the two facilities are in stark contrast to each other, despite the shared classification.

"Many other detention centres were designated as APODs simply by putting in support for families," says Caz. "But Bladin is low security and doesn't feel like a maximum security centre. It has recreational options. Comparatively, it's one of the better ones." Meanwhile, Ben, who has visited both the Bladin and Wickham Point centres describes Wickham as a high security prison. "They have lock style gates that you have to walk through to get to different parts of the compound," he says. "There are hundreds of CCTV cameras and fences that I've been told to not call electrified, but 'energised'. It's just a concrete jungle."

The current Immigration Department statistics don't detail how many detainees are in the Bladin Centre but Ben estimates there are around 200-300 people there.

As mentioned, the government is hailing the closure of Bladin as indicative of falling boat arrivals, but for them it also comes down to fiscal savings. In a statement over the weekend, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said the Bladin closure would save taxpayers $18 million a year in land leasing money alone. The Bladin facility also sits next door to the Ichthys project, a multi-billion dollar gas development site. It's likely that the centre will go onto house fly-in-fly-out workers for the project.

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