Talking points
- Staffing costs alone at Melbourne’s Mantra Bell City amounted to $2.5 million for one month
- It cost about $3 million a month to detain people at the Mantra in Preston
- It costs $4429 a year to accommodate a refugee in the community on a bridging visa
- The threat of protests deterred the hotel sector from bidding for detention contracts
- The details are contained in Serco and Border Force documents released by the Federal Court
Taxpayers stumped up about $3 million a month to lock up sick refugees at just one of dozens of sites across the country used as makeshift detention facilities.
The Mantra Hotel, in Melbourne’s north, was selected as a temporary detention facility in 2019 to accommodate dozens of refugees and asylum seekers rushed to Australia for emergency medical treatment from Nauru and Port Moresby, where they had been detained for six years.
Police guard the Park Hotel in Carlton (formerly the Rydges on Swanton hotel) in December 2020.Credit:Jason South
After months detained in hotel rooms at the Mantra and later at the Park Hotel in Carlton, most were released into the community, where it costs $4429 a year to live on a bridging visa.
The revelation comes as the federal government defends a challenge in the Federal Court of Australia to the legality of its use of hotels and other sites as alternative places of detention for refugees and asylum seekers.
The court is being asked to decide whether the Commonwealth acted unlawfully by detaining Kurdish refugee Mostafa Azimitabar in two Melbourne hotels, in a case that could pave the way for dozens of other detainees to seek compensation.
Azimitabar’s legal team has also sought to prove that immigration facilities in Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide were established unlawfully, and are similarly not valid forms of detention.
Private emails between security contractor Serco, which runs Australia’s detention network, and Australian Border Force personnel show officials conducted a rushed search for accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers flown to the mainland for emergency medical treatment in 2019.
According to Serco, there had been “continuing and ongoing high numbers of medical transferees from Australia’s offshore processing centres on Nauru and Manus since July 2018” – eight months before hundreds of people were rushed to Australia under the short-lived medevac laws, which took effect from March to December 2019.
As the number of people evacuated from offshore centres intensified, accommodating those people became more urgent. Mainstream detention centres were increasingly housing non-citizens awaiting deportation after committing crimes, and the department deemed these centres unsuitable for vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers.
An internal report dated July 18, 2018, shows by this stage Serco had already been using motels and hotels as makeshift accommodation options for two years, including the Clayton Monash Motor Inn, the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn, Mantra in Tullamarine, Moonee Valley View Apartments in Moonee Ponds, Quality Inn and Suites in Wantirna and Dorset Gardens Hotel in Croydon.
Refugee activists gather at the Mantra Hotel in June 2020.Credit:Jason South
Serco told home affairs it had also deemed three other properties at 215 Bell Street, Preston (Mantra Bell City), as being suitable for temporary detention.
Between July and November 2019, dozens of refugees and asylum seekers moved into the Mantra. Some would not leave for more than a year.
Border Force’s superintendent of detention management and planning, Gerard Watts, who is responsible for the overall management of people held in detention facilities in Australia, told the Federal Court that he approved facilities being used as temporary places of detention for refugees and asylum seekers “at least once or twice a month”.
“It was not appropriate to accommodate this cohort of transitory persons within an [immigration detention centre] because of the different risk profile of the cohort and the difficulty of … keeping the cohort separate from the existing IDC population,” Watts reported.
While the eventual cost of the two main hotels Border Force used to detain refugees and asylum seekers was redacted from documents released by the court, they do show that staffing the Mantra Hotel in Melbourne’s north as a detention facility was quoted at $2.5 million for 30 days, for up to 112 detainees. By mid-November, internal emails show the department was renting 65 rooms for $13,100 per night.
The documents show it also cost an average $63,400 a month for International Health and Medical Services to provide care for the detainees on site.
In November 2020, with the Mantra contract soon to expire, the department began scouting for other options.
A Serco options paper complained in November 2020 that there was a lower-than-expected participation rate by businesses in the hotel and motel market, “due to the interest-motivated group [protester] activity” outside the Mantra Bell City.
The department settled on the Park Hotel, in Swanston Street, Carlton, which remains a detention option for Border Force, and which offered a cheaper price than Mantra. The costs of the Park Hotel were redacted from court documents.
Other hotels were canvassed, and rejected, including Bayview Eden, opposite Albert Park Lake, because of the “threat” Serco calculated of there being protest activity outside.
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