responsible in recent years for depriving thousands of people of their liberty – detention and
compliance – were staffed by basically untrained officers ignorant even of their own department’s
instructions and rules. The detention and compliance sections were dominated by what Palmer called
an “assumption culture”. If someone was locked up it was assumed their incarceration remained legal.
If someone showed signs of deep depression it was assumed that was normal. If someone criticised
policies or practices it was assumed they were driven by political agendas and ought to be ignored.
Even though the department deprived people of their liberty it had no sense of urgency. Officers were
not encouraged to use “common sense”. Routinised procedures had in all circumstances to be
obeyed. The department was, as a consequence, “process rich and outcome poor”. No one took
responsibility for individual cases. Everyone saw themselves as a “bit player”. In the face of criticism,
the instinct was to be “self-protective and defensive”. The department was incapable of “self-criticism”.
Its culture was one of “denial and self-justification”. Such problems were by no means found only in the
lower ranks. The rot began at the top.
In the history of the Australian Commonwealth, there has never been a more devastating assessment
of the work of a major department of state than the one contained in the Palmer report.
Only two elements were odd. The responsibility in this mess of the immigration minister, Amanda
Vanstone, was not discussed. For the department’s failings only its secretary Bill Farmer, before being
moved sideways to the Indonesian ambassadorship, formally shouldered blame. Upon the release of
the Palmer report, the prime minister rejected calls for the replacement of Vanstone. Apparently, in our
system of government, a minister does not have to resign even when systemic and disastrous failings
in the department for which they are responsible are revealed. In the constitutional history of Australia,
the Howard government’s behaviour following the Palmer inquiry will be seen to mark the formal end of
the Westminster principle of ministerial responsibility.
An even odder feature of the Palmer report was its failure to discuss the relationship between the
diseased culture of the immigration department and the policy which had given rise to the disease –
mandatory, unreviewable and indefinite detention of asylum seekers, whose only crime was to have
appealed to Australia for help. It was as if, to deploy an admittedly extreme analogy, an independent
inquiry into the Gulag Archipelago should have criticised fiercely the “culture” of the Ministry of the
Interior without mentioning that this same culture had some connection with the policy of turning
supposed class enemies of the revolution into slave labourers of the Soviet state.
There was one person for whom the findings of the Palmer inquiry seemed entirely irrelevant: Cornelia
Rau. Public opinion saw her movement from the Baxter detention centre to the Glenside psychiatric
hospital as the righting of a wrong. Cornelia saw it merely as the continuation of her oppression. Five
months after her transfer to Glenside, she sent a rambling 15-page handwritten letter to two journalists
at the Adelaide Advertiser . The letter is dominated by a single question. How can the continued
incarceration of a healthy and fun-loving woman be justified or explained? Locked inside the prison of
her illness, Cornelia could not understand that the people who loved her most were those who were
most insistent that she remain under psychiatric care and take the medicines prescribed.
Mental illness should never be sentimentalised. It is frightening and uncharming. Yet the humanity of
the afflicted must also never be forgotten. Towards the end of Cornelia’s letter a passage concerning
freedom takes us to the very heart of her private tragedy. “If I had a pet,” she writes, “I’d like a possum
that lives outside and just pops into the garden every now and then.” She simply did not understand
why, like her imagined possum, she could not be free.
As published in the Sep. 2005 issue.
Republished with permission.
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