Chris Bowen denies adviser asked for 'youngest looking' to be sent to Manus
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Version 0 of 1. Former Labor immigration minister Chris Bowen has denied his office instructed a senior departmental official to transfer the youngest looking children to Manus in order to deter asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia. The department’s former director of offshore transfers and processing, Greg Lake, has said that an adviser from Bowen’s office had told him in 2012 to “select the children that looked the youngest” to “send the message” that someone’s age was no bar to them being transferred. Following his public appearance at the inquiry on Tuesday, Bowen was asked by Guardian Australia if Lake’s account was an accurate description of what had occurred as the Labor government prepared to transfer the first asylum seekers to the centre in November 2012. Bowen said: “Certainly not from my perspective, no.” Guardian Australia contacted Lake who stood by his account in July to the Australian Human Rights Commission into children in detention. “I stand by my statement. If the [then] minister wasn’t aware of it, he certainly wasn’t aware of what his staff were doing.” The Gillard government, where Bowen served as immigration minister from September 2010 to February 2013, reopened the Manus detention centre in 2012, and transferred its first load of asylum seekers, which included four children in seven family groups, in November 2012. During the public hearing Bowen was asked by counsel assisting the inquiry Naomi Sharp what steps he had taken to “mitigate the harm they [children] would suffer” on Manus. Bowen maintained that children were subject to “appropriate vetting” before being transferred to Manus adding that “very, very few children were sent to Manus” under the Labor government. But later Bowen conceded that “further work was necessary to bring Manus island up to an appropriate standard [for children]”. Bowen frequently used the threat of people smuggling to justify his decision to transfer children to Manus, saying that intelligence agencies had briefed him that any “blanket exemptions to offshore detention … would provide a very significant incentive for people smugglers to bring that class of person”. Investigations by Fairfax, New Matilda and Guardian Australia used documents obtained by Humanitarian Research Partners under freedom of information, which revealed that at the time of the first transfer to Manus the immigration department were aware of the malaria risks to pregnant women, that there was significant issues with water supplies, and that fire safety requirements had not been met. During the hearing Bowen said he had considered reforming his position as legal guardian of unaccompanied minors during his tenure as immigration minister. “I always took my role as guardian very seriously,” Bowen said, but added that as minister he had to balance this with maintaining the “integrity of the system”. Bowen was asked why some children – particularly unaccompanied minors in Pontville detention centre – spent more than eight months in detention. He said that the high number of boat arrivals made it difficult for the department to cope with the volume of children. “When you have a high rate of arrivals, it does make it hard to release children into the community at a rate which keeps up with the arrivals,” Bowen said. The inquiry, which has heard from numerous former detention centre workers, immigration department officials and the current immigration minister Scott Morrison, is due to hand down its report next month. |