Australia’s grubby little secret is exposed in the Nauru files. A callous bureaucracy damns itself

Australia’s grubby little secret is secret no more.

The truth of the offshore detention regime financed, controlled and run by Australian government on the remote Pacific island of Nauru has been brutally exposed by the revelation by the Guardian of the Nauru files.

For all of the extreme measures to which the Australian government has gone to keep its offshore detention regime from public eye – moving detention centres to remote foreign islands where compliant local governments keep journalists away; an extreme and unapologetic secrecy about the “on-water matters” of boat turnbacks; legislation to jail doctors and detention centre workers who speak out on behalf of those held; and restricting access for international agencies such as the United Nations – the truth about its remote camps has continued to leak out over the four years of offshore detention. Now, it is laid bare.

The Nauru files are the most comprehensive insight into conditions in the island detention camp that the Australian public has ever been given.

They reveal suicide attempts so common as to be unremarkable: refugees find their friends hanging by their neck from bedsheets, barely conscious and moments from death; children calmly report their parents have swallowed screws and will be dead soon; parents coldly reveal their plans to carry their children as they walk into the sea.

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They show children left in states of extreme vulnerability and danger: a father, citing lack of proper medical care and his feeling he is “failing as their father and it’s torturing me”, threatens to kill himself and his children on three separate occasions before there is intervention; a girl becomes the subject of more than 60 incident reports that reveal she has been sexually abused and has self-harmed; another girl, aged under 10, also the victim of sexual abuse, undresses in front of a group of adults and invites them to stick their fingers into her vagina.

They expose the basic privation of detention: people refusing to use fetid toilets that haven’t been cleaned for weeks; women bullied into exposing their bodies to guards so they can have enough water to shower; women suffering incontinence denied sanitary pads.

And the Nauru files unveil how conditions in the camps are clinically euphemised for the outside world: critical incidents, in which refugees have attempted to kill themselves, or are raped or assaulted, are downgraded to the classifications “major” or “minor”, ensuring that Wilson – the security subcontractor on the island – won’t be fined for failing to report them in time; doctors’ orders that someone be moved for urgent medical treatment are overruled by a department slavishly determined to uphold a policy, regardless of medical consequence.

The dry, disengaged language reduces the endless cycle of crises to mundanity. The cache of documents is, at once, horrific and banal.

The systemic failures of the Nauru detention regime have been known previously. Alongside the testimony of those detained on the island, and of those who have worked there, evidence has emerged in government inquiries and reports, in parliamentary committees, and in the promises that problems have been addressed and improved.

But the Nauru files are damning, and they are damning because they are the words of the detention system itself, the regime’s own bureaucracy revealing its casual, callous brutality.

This is the machine revealing itself to be awful, and just how awful it is.

The files prove how the organisations running the island camp – including the Department of Immigration and Border Protection – deliberately seek to suppress the reality of the island being revealed, to stop information getting out.

They demonstrate how the detention regime’s massive bureaucracy is used to obfuscate, mislead, and distort information.

The downgrading of reports allows those running the camps to sanitise the conditions inside them, to claim that the situation is better than they are, to report to their Canberra superiors and paymasters that life in the detention centre, on the island, is under control, even improving.

But the whitewashing can only cover so much.

The files vindicate the whistleblowers of the Nauru regime. People such as the traumatologist and psychologist Paul Stevenson, who said conditions on Nauru were the worst “atrocity” he had ever seen in 40 years working with the victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, people such as Dr Peter Young, formerly the chief psychiatrist responsible for the care of asylum seekers on the island, who said the camps were “inherently toxic” and that the immigration department deliberately harmed vulnerable detainees in a process akin to torture.

The files clearly demonstrate the broader trends on the island: that mental health deteriorates precipitously the longer people are held; that the clinical advice of doctors is overridden by bureaucrats insistent that “the policy” be upheld; and, most disturbingly, that children are, by far, the most damaged by the nature and fact of indefinite detention on Nauru.

Children carry the additional burden of keeping their parents alive – mothers and fathers regularly report they would kill themselves were it not for their children. When even that is not enough, children are regularly the ones who raise the alarm when their parents do try to take their own lives, often in the forlorn hope it will mean their orphaned offspring will be moved to Australia.

Nauru is but one in a line of “solutions” engineered by Australia to address the issue of irregular migration (“solution” implying that people fleeing is a novel problem rather than a millennia-old human activity, and a domestic issue at that, one that can be fixed with a simple, single fix).

Australia now has a suite of these failed “solutions”: the Pacific, the Malaysia (struck down by the high court in 2012), the Papua New Guinea, the Nauru, the Cambodia.

None have been solutions at all.

Fundamentally, Australia’s “Nauru solution” is built on one fundamental lie – that this place is any kind of answer at all.

It is a lie enabled by countless deceits every single day. Those are revealed in the Nauru files.

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