Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Again, I will need to take some parts of the question on notice. As a general comment I will say that there are all sorts of considerations that come into this for the government when deciding where to place detainees: the nature of the detainees, the appropriateness of having different groups of people in different centres or separated et cetera. Again, we must remember the significant objective while seeking to honour, as we have done, our international obligations with regard to asylum seekers. At the same time we have an obligation to the Australian community to protect our borders. So there are many issues regarding the decisions taken as to where people are best detained while their applications for asylum are being properly processed. In many cases the detainees are not applying for asylum. In fact, often they are there short term before they are sent back home. There are all sorts of reasons, and I will do my best to give you some sense of those in the response.

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