Full text: Letter to the Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister

We write to notify you of a significant, unidentified risk to Australian Government priorities as a result of proposed legislation to enable mobile phones to be confiscated from refugees in detention (Migration Amendment (Prohibiting Items in Immigration Detention Facilities) Bill 2020).

As your departments will be aware, the Ads-Up Refugee Network works with partner organizations in Canada to sponsor both onshore and offshore current and former Manus and Nauru detainees through Canada’s unique Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program. 

Assisted by a network of volunteers in Australia, expats in North America and allies across Canada, our group and others have lodged applications for more than 100 refugees who have been unable to take advantage of the US-Australia resettlement deal. 

Applications under Canada’s PSR require a significant amount of detailed paperwork and identification documents, as well as five volunteers to form resettlement teams and approximately $16,500 CAD in resettlement funds. Access to mobile phones is vital in enabling us to fill out paperwork on the refugee’s behalf, for their ability to save and send relevant documents, and to source relevant documents in their home countries. We see no satisfactory substitute for mobile phones which enable real-time access across multiple time-zones, or for maintaining connections between refugees and volunteer resettlement groups. 

The Canada resettlement pipeline – which will save Australian taxpayers millions of dollars and end the ongoing nightmare of indefinite detention – will experience significant adverse impacts if your government bans access to mobile devices. It will hamstring our ability to lodge applications for onshore detainees. 

We have differences of opinion over your government’s refugee detention policies and the damage they inflict on refugees, their children and Australia’s moral character. We recognise that we have an aligned interest, however, in ending the long-running Manus/Nauru nightmare and the costly, indefinite detention of refugees and asylum seekers. The Ads-Up Refugee Network plans to lodge dozens more applications in Canada in the months ahead, and we ask that you not stand in our way with this unnecessary, self-defeating legislation.

Full text: Our Letter to Senator Lambie

Please find enclosed a letter sent to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Home Affairs regarding proposed legislation which would enable the government to ban mobile phones from immigration detention centres. 

As noted in the letter, such a move would have a significant impact on the ability of refugee organisations, like ours, which operate in Canada and sponsor current and former Manus and Nauru detainees in offshore and onshore detention. Together, groups in Canada have now lodged fully funded applications with Canadian authorities for over 100 individuals, and we expect a significant number of arrivals in the year ahead.

A ban would significantly reduce our ability to lodge further applications, which require close and ongoing contact with refugees over multiple time zones. A ban would turn an intensive, weeks or months-long process into a months or year-long process and would cost taxpayers millions of dollars in additional detention costs.

In 2019, Equity Economics estimated the cost of onshore detention to be $346,000 per refugee, per year and offshore detention to be $573,000 per refugee, per year. On these figures, the Canada pipeline has already saved the government millions of dollars through the handful of arrivals so far, and is on track to save taxpayers in excess of $50,000,000 in the years ahead. 

We respectfully request you take this into consideration, and vote against this unnecessary and self-defeating piece of legislation.

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