Immigration detention centres are overfl owing as ASIO struggles to complete security checks on asylum seekers. Is the spy agency up to the job? Russell Skelton reports.
IMAGINE the situation. Australian Federal Police and Immigration officers are poised to raid a house in the western suburbs of a major Australian city when they suddenly notice that they themselves are under observation.
Down the road an ASIO team, binoculars in hand, are watching them and the suspects they are about to arrest. Although the operation has been months in the making, when approached the ASIO agents attempt to persuade the police and immigration officers to withdraw.
When asked why, the ASIO agents refuse to say what their interest is in the suspects. For those caught up in the standoff, it had all the elements of an episode from the television spy drama Spooks, with government law-enforcement agencies arguing out their differences in the middle of a suburban street.
Eventually, common sense prevails. The raid goes ahead and arrests are made.
It is impossible to verify the facts of the above confrontation between the agencies and ASIO because none of the organisations involved comment on operational matters. However, The Age has been told on good authority that the above incident happened, and not for the first time.
There is a strongly held view within the federal government and its agencies that ASIO is overly secretive, withholds information from the arms of government with which it needs to work and is falling down on key aspects of its role.
Within the immigration community — government and non-government — there is a belief that ASIO's excessive secrecy is compromising the whole immigration processing system, particularly in regard to expediting security clearances for asylum seekers.
In recent months, Australia's top domestic security agency — which has been growing in size and capability since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — has come under adverse scrutiny for its tardy delivery of security clearances for hundreds of asylum seekers held in overcrowded detention facilities on Christmas Island and mainland Australia.
At a Senate estimates hearing last week it was revealed by officials from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship that 900 asylum seekers — or about 13 per cent of all those in detention — assessed by DIAC to be legitimate refugees were being kept locked up because ASIO had failed to deliver a security finding.
In some cases, such as that of the Burmese Rohingyan asylum seekers held in the Darwin detention centre, the wait has been 18 months. In the case of unaccompanied Afghan minors, it has been seven or eight months.
ASIO's case clearance rate has steadily risen from 37 days per case in 2009 to 66 days this year.
A spokeswoman for ASIO says the organisation has diverted significant resources to cope with the increased number of security assessments referred by DIAC. "ASIO has implemented new measures, including the establishment of a dedicated team responsible for protection visas and other complex . . . non-visa cases."
She also insists the organisation works closely with Immigration on the caseload and what the priorities should be.
Despite the reforms to ASIO caseload management, there has been, according to Liberal Party senator Russell Trood, a doubling of complaints made about ASIO to the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security over what critics claim is the "glacial processing" of security checks.
The backlog is exacerbating the chaotic conditions in overcrowded and under-resourced detention facilities as boats continue to arrive unimpeded from the Indonesian ports.
According to psychiatrist Louise Newman, an independent adviser to the Immigration Department, there is also anecdotal evidence that incidents of self-harm and violence between asylum seekers are on the rise because of the delays and the frustrations caused by prolonged detention.
However, it is not just delays in security clearances that are causing concern within the government. Questions have been raised about the competency and effectiveness of ASIO as an organisation and its ability to meet the increased demands being placed on it. For example, The Age has been told that ASIO's assessment of Afghan asylum seekers, always a forensic challenge, has been rudimentary and far from exhaustive.
Clearly, ASIO's task is a difficult one. It is well established that people smugglers insist that clients, particularly those with relatives already living in Australia, destroy all their identification papers and adopt false identities to make them difficult to trace. Also, clients are often provided with false histories in which they claim to have fled from Taliban-controlled regions where the Afghan government has little or no authority. It is ASIO's brief to sort fact from fiction.
According to a source within the intelligence community, ASIO checks do not go much further than simply asking the Afghan authorities if the person seeking asylum in Australia is on the Karzai government's list of known Taliban suspects.
While even that process can apparently take months, the assessment is far from conclusive and not much help in determining if a person is an economic refugee or genuinely fleeing persecution. Yet it is pointed out that in almost every village in Afghanistan there is a register of landowners and families where claims and identities can be easily checked.
Another case in point was ASIO's assessments of Sri Lankans taken from the Oceanic Viking and dispatched to an emergency transit centre in Romania for resettlement elsewhere. According to those familiar with the cases, almost half the group of 17 refugees — including two children — were rejected by ASIO after Canadian authorities refused them on security grounds.
The grounds for rejection cited by the Canadian authorities were suspect. They determined that anybody who had paid taxes to the Tamil Tiger separatists and had lived for any period of time in Tiger-controlled territory was by definition a security risk. "When ASIO rejected the Sri Lankans, they were simply protecting their backs; they did not want to be seen to be at odds with the Canadians," a source told The Age.
ONCE ASIO had rejected them, there was no way for them to return to Australia to settle. It was widely regarded as an overly harsh determination. The Tamil Tigers had ceased to exist as an organisation and there was no evidence that any of the rejected Tamils had done anything other than live in an area controlled by the Tigers, who effectively ruled by the gun.
To make matters worse, the Australian government attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the rejected Tamils to return to Australia to a life of indefinite detention.
These days ASIO is bigger than it has ever been and politicians are reluctant to question its efficiency or effectiveness. But its dilatory processing of security checks has attracted critics on a broad, if predictable, front who claim the organisation is largely unaccountable and shadowy, making often arbitrary and inexplicable decisions.
Despite comprehensive powers of surveillance, there has been no let up in the boats coming and few notable prosecutions of the people smuggler networks operating in Australia.
Critics include the federal Ombudsman, Greens MPs, refugee lawyers and credible non-government organisations such as the Refugee Council of Australia. Even Immigration Minister Chris Bowen and Attorney-General Robert McClelland, while avoiding any direct criticism of ASIO, have conceded the organisation needs to lifts its game. Meanwhile, the opposition blames Gillard government policies, not ASIO, for failing to stop the boats.
This week a group of refugee lawyers, activists and non-government organisations was in Canberra lobbying MPs to make ASIO decision-making more transparent and accountable.
Sophie Peer, of the Refugee Council of Australia, told The Age the security agency should face greater scrutiny and be required to explain adverse decisions.
"We have a situation where immigration caseworkers and lawyers are kept in the dark. Nobody knows why decisions are taking so long."
She points out the extraordinary situation where asylum seekers do not get to read a decision made against them, nor are they, or their lawyers, told why their claim for asylum has been rejected. There is no avenue for appeal.
"It is an unacceptable situation," she says, because "ASIO is not held to a particular time frame. Nobody knows whether the decisions are well founded. What is needed is something like the situation in New Zealand where a former High Court judge gets to review adverse security assessments, can call for the file and ask questions. We don't have that in Australia."
In a prepared statement, Attorney-General McClelland says ASIO security assessments for asylum seekers arriving by boat are complex. "In conducting an assessment, ASIO draws on classified and unclassified information to examine activities, associates, attitudes, backgrounds and character taking into account credibility."
He says it is always the aim of ASIO to complete assessments quickly, but with the increase in boat arrivals there had been a corresponding increase in the number of cases referred to ASIO by Immigration. "This is not always a straightforward matter, as security assessments require appropriate skills and expertise."
ASIO's budget has exploded along with the number of people working for it. In the next two years the number of people employed is expected to reach a record 1800. A significant part of the recent increase is to expand ASIO's border security role by providing closer airport and maritime scrutiny. Its principal tasks, however, are to carry out intelligence gathering, monitor politically motivated violence, espionage and foreign interference, and anticipate attacks on the defence system.
Trood, the Liberal senator and member of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, believes ASIO is doing the best it can in tough circumstances. An academic specialising in international relations before entering Parliament, Trood believes the agency has been "overburdened" by the explosion in "illegal maritime arrivals" and says he is sceptical of claims that it has been less than co-operative with the six other agencies involved in fighting people smuggling.
"There is a level of bureaucratic weakness in the sense that ASIO does not have enough resources to deal with the challenge. There was a time when ASIO was turning around security checks in a month, but it is now taking twice as long. Now I don't believe that is due to a lack of will, but a lack of capacity."
As for concerns that ASIO is not co-operative with other agencies, he says: "I won't say there are not any problems from time to time. But the present head of ASIO has told me that the situation is a lot better than it was."
However, Trood says he is seriously concerned that ASIO is moving people from key areas to meet what he claims is the government's failure to stop the constant arrival of boats. "We do not know which parts of the agency are being denuded of staff as a result," he says.
On the question of of oversight, Trood believes the Inspector-General for Intelligence and Security has more than adequate powers to investigate complaints about ASIO and notes a doubling of complaints in the past 12 months. But he concedes that with only 13 staff, the Inspector-General is in no position to review the thousands of security checks ASIO carries out.
According to ASIO's 2010 annual report, it provided security checks on 2822 asylum seekers classified as irregular maritime arrivals that year. That is small compared with the 38,438 regular security clearances it undertook in all other areas during that time — such as in airports and sea ports, and checking those who apply for government jobs.
David McKnight, an associate professor of arts and social sciences at the University of New South Wales, and long-time observer of ASIO, says he does not know why ASIO is taking so long to clear the backlog of asylum seeker cases, but says security assessments are one area that takes up an extraordinary amount of time.
"It's a vast undertaking. ASIO is the appropriate agency to conduct the checks; it has a long history of expertise in this area and the benefit of extra resources over a long time."