Abstract
In this chapter I will focus on healthcare in Australian immigration detention, what has been said about it and some of the major controversies surrounding its delivery. I will outline the contractual and administrative arrangements for healthcare services in onshore and offshore detention. I will then discuss what healthcare professionals, asylum seekers and professional healthcare bodies have said about the delivery of healthcare. In doing this I want to show two things: the disparity between the testimony of healthcare professionals and detainees, the contractual arrangements for healthcare and statements made by professional healthcare bodies. I also want to highlight the near futility in the delivery of healthcare within centres. I will also discuss the role healthcare professionals have played in demanding broader social and political change outside of detention, with a focus on three important issues: the Border Force Act, Medevac and the case of Baby Asha.
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Notes
- 1.
See community detention explanation in previous sections.
- 2.
Promoting healthcare as open and accountable while limiting the availability of financial information and contracts is one of many inconsistencies that characterize official discourse around healthcare in detention centres.
- 3.
The qualification about the “circumstances” on Manus Island and Nauru provides a further way to dodge the other stated aims of providing healthcare to a standard comparable to that found in the Australian community. More broadly, these statements, objectives and contractual arrangements are clearly incompatible with the government’s more general approach to immigration detention which I outlined in Chap. 2.
- 4.
Further specifics on the day-to-day delivery of healthcare can be found in other reports such as Australian Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Immigration Detention Network (2012).
- 5.
Salim was a Rohingya refugee who died in an apparent suicide on Manus Island.
- 6.
- 7.
The report also states, “While PIAC does not support the approach of mandatory immigration detention and maintains grave concerns about the time for which people are detained, the focus of this report is on ensuring people in immigration detention have access to the medical care and treatment they need, at a standard consistent with the Australian community” (p. 8).
- 8.
- 9.
For example, this came at a time the government was attempting to water down the Racial Discrimination Act, under the guise of free speech (Grant, 2017).
- 10.
For more details on the circumstances surrounding this case, see the Coroners Court of QLD (2019).
- 11.
Taiwan is also not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, meaning refugees cannot apply for asylum to prevent them from being returned to Nauru.
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Essex, R. (2020). The Delivery of Healthcare in Australian Immigration Detention. In: The Healthcare Community and Australian Immigration Detention. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7537-2_3
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