°Internment
The above is a tour of the migrant detention centre currently being built on Christmas Island, estimated at around 364 million AUD, and with the capacity to intern 800 people - with a soundtrack I can almost, but not quite, name.
Enormous, isn’t it? See an earlier post by Bryan Finoki. Much like the Baxter internment camp in South Australia, it has electric fences, motion detectors, countless CCTV linked to a remote control room situated in the nation’s capital, Canberra, so guards in there can watch detainees around the clock. All detainees will be fitted with ID tags - an accompaniment to the already huge range of biometric devices and procedures that have been routine for many years. Doors can be centrally-controlled to enable a camp-wide lockdown, and each cell is fitted with a camera.
For some years, undocumented migrants have been detained in makeshift facilities on Christmas Island. Christmas Island lies about 500 kilometres south of Jakarta. Curiously, while Christmas Island is nearing completion, the Australian Government have decided to extend the ‘Pacific Solution’ and are proposing that Indonesia formalise its arrangements with Australia for processing undocumented migrants there.
Again, there have been ad hoc internment camps situated in Indonesia for some time, holding people who en route to Australia or, in many cases, the families of those who are detained in Australia. Many of those who drowned about the SIEV X, for instance, had family members in Australian internment camps.
Related, here’s a short video (you need a divx plugin), less interesting for the fiction that the problem is the Prime Minister than for noting the trajectory between the internment of undocumented migrants and the extension of internment under the so-called ‘war on terror’.
And I’d also recommend The Death of a President - which you can watch online here.
