Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

The Minister for Immigration and Citizenship has provided the following answer to the honourable senator's question:

(1) All immigration detention facilities provide telephones for the personal and business use of asylum seekers.

The detention service provider, Serco, will facilitate the use of a phone for clients' business use with Migration Agents, lawyers etc. The Department also facilitates calls by the asylum seekers to family, when they first arrive by boat, to inform that they have arrived safely. All other personal calls made by clients are via the use of phone cards, purchased by clients using their Individual Allowance Points.

(2) --

(3) Business calls to Migration Agents, lawyers etc are not generally logged so there is no data available on number, country or cost. There is also no data available on personal calls made using phone cards.

(4) Staff at the immigration detention facilities do not monitor phone calls. Any monitoring of phone calls would be an invasion of the client's privacy.

(5) There is no limit on the number of phone calls.

(6) There is no duration limit on phone calls subject to reasonable use so that others can make phone calls.

(7) All immigration detention facilities provide computers with Internet connections for the personal and business use of asylum seekers.

(8) --

(9) Some facilities have time limits on the use of computers. These restrictions are only applied to ensure all clients have fair and equitable access to the equipment.

(10) At DIAC detention facilities, Internet access is made available to people in immigration detention. On Christmas Island DIAC provides Internet services, and the detention service provider, Serco, is responsible at all other sites.

DIAC policy is to ensure that people in immigration detention do not access:

DIAC and Serco use well-regarded 'Internet Content Filter' products to review every request for access to an Internet site. A Content Filter trawls the Internet & categorises Internet sites against keywords. These services, and there are several of them, work by trawling the Internet and examining large numbers of sites. They regularly update the local content database, and they attempt to categorise every site on the Internet by matching the content against 'keywords'—'news', 'shopping', 'pornography', 'blogs', 'social networking', 'terrorism', 'malware' and many more.

On Christmas Island DIAC, through its service provider, Optus, uses the McAffee Web Gateway content filter. Serco uses the Barracuda Content Filter. Both products allow individual sites to be allowed or denied against the default category treatment.

(11) Websites are allowed or denied according to the categories which have been established in Content Management Filters. See answer to question 10 for examples.

(12) Websites are allowed or denied according to the categories which have been established in Content Management Filters. See answer to question 10 for examples.

(13) Content Management Filters block access to ranges of sites, as described in the answer to question 10. Beyond that there is only manual surveillance of viewing habits by Serco staff.

(14) Content Management Filters block access to ranges of sites, including foreign language sites. There is no additional monitoring of foreign language material accessed by detainees.

(15) If the client breaches the DIAC Computer and Internet Conditions of Use Agreement, the following actions could be taken: