22 October 2010 in Jamie’s View
Labor detention centres coming to a town near you
The last thing Adelaide Hills residents would have expected to hear this week was that their community would be home to Labor’s newest detention centre.
The ambush announcement by the Prime Minister on Monday to turn the defence housing site at Inverbrackie near Woodside in South Australia into a detention centre has caused enormous concern amongst local residents.
Now, I know there are people out there who consider themselves morally superior to me. So to them I make this point very clear to begin with - my issue is not with asylum seekers; my issue is with this Labor Government and the decisions it has made.
They have comprehensively failed to manage Australia’s borders and this decision to house asylum seekers in the Adelaide Hills is an unfortunate and inevitable result of this fact.
Labor is not serious about addressing the severe problems arising from its softening of the stringent border protection measures introduced by the former Coalition Government.
If Labor was fair dinkum, Julia Gillard would pick up the phone to the President of Nauru.
But instead we’ve seen excuses and absurd proposals from Labor such as the temporary asylum freeze, which was used purely as an election fix. Then there was the East Timor processing centre thought-bubble that is no closer to reality than the day it was proposed.
Taxpayers are paying for this mismanagement, forking out millions and millions of dollars to create more beds and open new detention centres to accommodate the influx of asylum seekers. The centre in Inverbrackie will cost taxpayers $10 million alone, money which could be better spent on roads, schools and hospitals.
Residents have every right to be concerned and to ask questions and they should not be criticised for doing so.
The total lack of consultation with the local community or anyone associated with governance in South Australia is appalling.
In fact, even Premier Mike Rann expressed his frustration on Adelaide radio this week over the fact that he had only been called an hour before the decision was announced. He did not even get the opportunity to ask questions prior to the announcement of this decision.
What is very clear from the community feedback and the concerned citizens making contact with me and my office is that there is real concern about the plan’s effect on local schools, health services, law and order and community services. The immediate impact on property values in the area is of large concern to many of the constituents who have contacted me.
These are hardworking members of the local area who want to and deserve to have their say on the future of their community.
But what makes this decision even worse is that the Prime Minister herself was in the Adelaide Hills on Sunday for a photo-opportunity with our CFS, 17 kilometres from Inverbrackie and Woodside. She did not have the courage to get in her car, drive 10 minutes down the road and front the community to be honest with them and tell them what she intended to do with this site.
It appears that the Adelaide Hills is good enough for the Prime Minister to have a photo opportunity, but it is not good enough for her to ask the community what they think of having a detention centre down the end of the street.
But we shouldn’t expect anything less from this government. This, of course, is the same government that promised during the election to create a solution to fix this issue, led by the Prime Minister and her sidekick, Commander Bradbury. However, since that ill-fated visit to the Darwin customs command centre, we have seen nothing but more failures and more boats. I wonder whether the Member for Lindsay will highlight to his constituents in his first post-election newsletter exactly what the new policy of the Labor Party is on this issue.