The Nauru files have dominated a bellicose Senate estimates hearing into the immigration department, which also revealed Australia is building a third detention facility in Papua New Guinea.
The government revealed it established a dedicated taskforce that spent several months conducting an analysis of the Nauru files, despite the fact the 2,100 incident reports contained within them were the property of the government.
Incident reports filed on Nauru are sent to no fewer than 19 @border.gov.au email addresses within the department.
In August, the Guardian published more than 2,100 incident reports from Nauru’s detention centre, which included reports and allegations of sexual abuse on women and children, assaults of children, rape, widespread mental harm and epidemic rates of self-harm and suicide attempts, among other more prosaic complaints and reports.
The immigration department secretary, Mike Pezzullo, told estimates that bureaucrats spent several months, including working on weekends, cross-checking the Guardian’s redacted reports.
The government’s analysis confirmed the veracity of the incident reports: almost all were able to be cross-checked.
Pezzullo said, in response to the 304 critical and major incidents within the Nauru files, in 96% of cases, the actions taken were “immediate and appropriate”. Critical and major incidents include an act of self-harm, suicide attempt, sexual assault of a child, or serious assault, estimates heard.
Pezzullo said the majority of reports on Nauru were “minor” or “information” reports and not allegations or evidence of serious criminality.
Guardian Australia did not report that every single file related to a sexual assault or child abuse allegation. The reports range from extremely serious allegations to mundane daily reports that show the totality of life on Nauru. Guardian Australia clearly documented the full spectrum of incidents and conducted a detailed data analysis of each of the incident categories.
The chairman of the committee, the Queensland senator Ian Macdonald, criticised the Guardian for publishing the files and said the reports were over-dramatised – “most of these were trifling at best” – while also telling the committee he hadn’t read them.
“It’s good to have the truth in this estimates today.”
He wanted to know if people held in offshore detention were “middle class”.
The circularity of discussion was evident in an exchange between the Greens senator Nick McKim and Pezzullo about the future of the Manus Island detention centre, which was ruled “illegal and unconstitutional” by the PNG supreme court in April but remains in operation.
Pezzullo: “The Manus regional processing centre is no longer required in the foreseeable future and it will close in the foreseeable future.”
McKim: “How long is the foreseeable future?”
Pezzullo: “A future that we can foresee.”
McKim: “What do you mean by that?”
Pezzullo: “The ordinary sense of the meaning.”
The government confirmed it would spend $20m building a third holding centre for detainees on Manus Island. It has already built the detention centre itself, at Lombrum, on a remote military base in Manus province, as well as the East Lorengau Refugee Transit Centre near Manus’s main city, Lorengau.
The third secure facility will be built at Bomana, in Port Moresby, to house up to 50 people, as a transit centre for asylum seekers who are being deported or who have chosen to go home.
The government also confirmed it remained in discussions with third countries about resettling refugees it has sent to PNG but would not reveal which countries it was speaking to, or the progress of any discussions.
The department denied it ordered or requested Wilson Security to hire a private investigator to “aggressively” pursue confidential sources who provided information to refugee advocates and journalists, including Guardian reporters.
