Privatisation, Offshore Processing and Externalisation: Who Benefits?

Mark Yin, University of Melbourne

Mark Yin

We know that Australia’s offshore detention regime is fraught with human rights abuse. Since offshore processing centres reopened in 2012, examples of human rights violations have never been far from the headlines.

However, the role of private corporations in sustaining this regime and the externalisation of refugee policies is less well understood—even as the cost per asylum seeker of offshore processing continues to grow.

The detail of how offshore detention centres operate, including the activities of private contractors, tend to be highly secretive in a manner that facilitates human rights abuse. In this context, the 2019 Paladin Scandal sheds some light on how the conduct of contractors and subcontractors and their symbiotic relationship with government may also contribute to systemic human rights abuse in offshore detention.

The scandal uncovered hundreds of documents detailing the Australian Department of Home Affairs’ day-to-day relationship with private security firm Paladin, who were contracted to administer Manus Island Detention Centre in 2017. An analysis of these documents revealed a compromised understanding of accountability within the contractual relationship, and a lack of momentum for change.

“Performance management”

The Australian government regulated Paladin through a ‘Performance Management Framework’ (PMF), which outlined indicators Paladin needed to meet each month; if Paladin failed to meet these indicators, they were fined through monthly ‘abatements’ for each unmet indicator. In September 2019, the Australian Financial Review reported that Paladin were fined in this manner more than 3,700 times in a year.

However, although this figure appears significant, the PMF system was hampered by two notable shortcomings. Firstly, inbuilt into their contract was a right for Paladin to negotiate their payable abatements. The government did appear to regulate Paladin through the PMF, but also provided them recourse by allowing them to submit ‘Excusable Performance Failures’ (EPFs) each month, which could save Paladin thousands of dollars.

Secondly, the PMF system also failed to recognise patterns in these failures, treating them as discrete incidents despite evidence that they were systemic in nature. A key example was the hundreds of cleaning services which Paladin failed to provide. Although inadequate cleaning services in offshore detention are routine, systematic failures which fundamentally dehumanise detainees. Although a failure to clean seems a mundane, unremarkable failure, Kurdish write Behrouz Boochani reflects in his book on the impact of unhygienic  conditions at Manus Island Prison (offshore processing:

‘The floor is always in the same state: piss up to the table. These toilets are so filthy that the toilet has extended along the ground for a few metres. The toxic water has seeped into the surrounding area, penetrating the space where various species of plants are growing.’ ,

There was simply no frame for the Australian government to apprehend this as wrongdoing. As such, it appeared that the PMF system was not designed to recognise systemic, underlying flaws as wrongdoing.

No impetus for change

It may seem reasonable that a contractor like Paladin would want to follow the directions of government, and of course ,this is to be expected that they compy with these directions. But there was a financial incentive to pass the required performance metrics, and as long as they did this, there was no reason for them to push for change.

The question remains why the Australian government would have wanted to stay the course, even in cases that led to harm to refugees. The political appeal of appearing ‘tough on borders’ may shed some light on this, but it does not explain the nature of the PMF system nor the thousands of fines administered through it.

To understand this, we must contextualise the government’s correspondence with Paladin. A key clue can be found in a letter dated December 2018, where officials wrote, “the Department appreciates Paladin’s efforts to work with the Department…congratulates Paladin on the increased ‘Passed’ performance metrics and reduction in abatements, and looks forward to future months seeing 100% metrics achieving a ‘Passed’ metric”.

Less abatements means a financial loss for government. However, their desire to keep abatements limited is, perhaps unsurprisingly, political. When questioned about Paladin’s performance failures in 2019, then-Senate spokesperson for Home Affairs Michaelia Cash said, “Paladin demonstrated continuous improvement in meeting service standards during the course of the contract”.

In this context, it becomes clear that the appearance of effective function was a political tool for maintaining the state-corporate relationship. The more performance indicators were met, the more money Paladin would save, but also the more legitimate government would appear. That there were still some fines allowed government to maintain the image of holding Paladin accountable, but deeper accountability would have also deepened scrutiny of government, and of the policy of offshore detention itself. Paladin and government thus shared an interest in maintaining the status quo—at the expense of asylum seekers, not to mention Paladin workers as well.

Human rights and standards of care

The Paladin documents paint a picture of the ‘normal’ operation of an offshore detention contract. In particular, they suggest that in the course of administering such contracts, the government’s regulatory capacity or desire is limited. Even as Paladin were fined thousands of times for the same few service lapses, there continued to be a ‘normal’ level of unhygienic, inhumane, corrupt and otherwise harmful conditions under their administration.

How best to address these conditions is not a novel question. Abolition remains a clear answer, not just for offshore processing but all forms of detention, immigration or otherwise. It must be noted that Australian prisons are also by and large privately-run: in fact, more Australians are kept in for-profit prisons than in any other country proportionally speaking.

To be able to imagine a decarceral future in this context is both challenging and vitally important.

At the same time, the case of Paladin revealed that although contracts are the salient measure of performance which mediates accountability outcomes, they can operate in a compromised manner, unable to apprehend human rights harm. As such, they too present an opportunity for change.

Human rights enforcement may seem peripheral to government contracts, but their absence at present is precisely what sustains the punitive nature of incarceration. Without ‘teeth’, without the threat of substantive consequence, the capacity for human rights harm remains embedded in carceral spaces, and the contracts which enact them. Meanwhile, the maintenance of the relationship between government and private contractors in the Australian setting appears crucial to maintaining also the system of externalisation of responsibility for refugee protection.

Mark completed an Honours thesis in Criminology in 2021, titled “Privatisation and accountability in Australian immigration detention: A case of state-corporate symbiosis”. He lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri Country.