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The pieces we are being given simply don't fit together in any meaningful way.
Under the new anti-terrorist legislation, someone can be held for up to 7 days without charges, without legal representation and without notification of any family or friends.
After searching through the articles, I cannot find any reference to any legal counsel being available. It would seem that people arrested by immigration authorities can be locked away without charge for almost a year. This makes the anti-terrorist legislation seem toothless in comparison. I did find this article which explains that someone was trying to provide her with legal support:
South Australia's Public Advocate, John Harley, says the plight of Cornelia Rau, the Australian citizen locked up in the Baxter detention centre, came to his attention in December last year.He says he was met with silence from the Department of Immigration and officials at Baxter and was forced to threaten legal action before they acted.
Mr Harley says officials at Baxter did not act when he contacted them because as a state official he had no jurisdiction to intervene.
He says the attitude from department officials towards him was appalling.
Which might explain why she had no legal representation but does suggest that Australia is seriously sidestepping it's human rights obligations.
It was Queensland police who initially arrested the woman from Sydney and a Brisbane hospital that assessed her mental health. On the other hand, this article states:
Ms Rau was incarcerated by immigration authorities in Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre on April 5, 2004, where she remained until she was transferred to Baxter Detention Centre.
More information is available in this article which states,
ALISON CALDWELL: Cornelia Rau was diagnosed with schizophrenia four years ago. On March the 17th last year, she escaped from the psychiatric ward of a Manly Hospital on Sydney's northern beaches. Later that month she turned up in the Aboriginal community of Coen on the Cape York Peninsula, where she checked into a local hotel.
It would seem that three years in hospital didn't do much towards curing her illness. It would also seem that she wanted to get away from the place because York Peninsula is a fair distance away from Manly. Could it be that she lied about her name to avoid being sent back to mental hospital?
But there's more,
PETER BEATTIE: Cornelia Rau was taken into police custody in Coen on the 31st of March 2004. She had no identification, no passport. Police could not confirm her identity. It was a suspected unlawful non-citizen. She told police her name was Anna Bromeyer and Anna Schmidt. She said she'd entered the country illegally.which is interesting when compared with this article which quotes Amanda Vanstone as saying,
My advice is she claimed that she was German... (she) spoke German, said she was German, said she was a visitor, said she had no friends and family and had with her a stolen passport. The same article states,
Cornelia Rau, 39, was reported missing in August last year after leaving the psychiatric ward of a Sydney hospital on March 17.
Hmmm, this passport thing is a bit strange, where did the stolen passport come
into the picture? If there was a stolen passport then it makes you wonder who's
name was on the passport... it couldn't have been Anna Braumeyer
nor could
it have been Anna Schmidt
because those people don't exist. Why would Cornelia
turn up with a passport and use a name different to the name on the passport?
Sure she was schizophrenic, but that doesn't equate to being stupid.
She made it halfway across the country on her own steam.
From this article
we get, They told us that in Germany there's a comprehensive national identification
card and they could not find her name on that, so we were surprised that alarms weren't
going off then.
further evidence comes from
another article
that states that the Queensland police found she had bags of money on her.
Where the hell did that come from? But it get weirder,
In 1998 she had dabbled with a religious cult based in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. Anna Schmidt was a composite of the names of two other cult members.
This makes you wonder, do the police have the right to demand the identity of an arbirtary person who has committed no crime nor done anything that to suggest that they have committed or are likely to commit any crime? Do they have the right to search such a person? Does every Australian citizen have the obligation to prove their citizenship when requested to do so?
I would have thought that the answer is "no" but clearly the police, government and immigration authorities behave like the answer is "yes". Suppose a perfectly sane person is arrested on no charge and does not identify themselves, can they be held indefinitely without access to legal counsel? Would Cornelia Rau have been better off if she had committed a crime just so that she would get charged with something and end up having a chance to beg for mercy in a court, rather than rotting in a cell?
If Australian citizens are already under legal obligation to prove their citizenship whenever requested, wherever in the country they may be, then we probably do need an Australia card so that citizens have a reliable method of carrying out their obligations. However, the rejection of the Australia card by the Australian people was in effect a rejection of the obligation that Australians should be subject to arbitrary identity checks. Now we find that our government has treated the will of the Australian people with disdain.
HELEN DALLEY: Then, according to David, something odd happened. A man approached their table and spoke to Cornelia.DAVID LIVINGSTON: He was probably close to 50, fairly well dressed. But he just looked like like an older hippy type. He was a bit agitated. He wanted her to go with him, and she said, I'm alright, and she was fairly aggressive in her manner.
HELEN DALLEY: So did she give you the impression she didn't want to go with this man, and she didn't want to include him in your conversation?
DAVID LIVINGSTON: No, it was very much, I'm sitting here with a friend, I don't want you around. I want my independence and my freedom. You've got no right to come down here and look for me. And she wasn't exactly being dragged away, but she was in a fairly disturbed state, and she walked off.
HELEN DALLEY: To this day that man's identity remains unknown. What is known is that Cornelia loved to travel. We now understand she headed on up the east coast of Australia as a backpacker, with $1000 in her pocket. Her new European passport had been issued two weeks before by the German Consulate.
So some hippy guy was involved and a thousand dollars pops up out of some place that no one can explain. Then she has passort issued. Once again, what was the name on this passport? Surely the German Consulate has some system for issuing such documents... the name on the passport must have corresponded to some real person.
HELEN DALLEY: Coen is the last town on the dirt road heading to the very northern tip of Australia. Cornelia walked into the Exchange pub on March 30th, less than 2 weeks after she disappeared from Manly Hospital
Still, the time doesn't make sense, that would suggest that the passport was issued before she left Manly. There's a link missing here.
HELEN DALLEY: No-one seemed to consider Cornelia might have been Australian, or sick. And so without any charge against her, police took her into custody, as agents of the Immigration Dept. This Australian resident, with a history of mental illness was, under the Migration Act, a 'suspected unlawful non-citizen.'DEBBIE KILROY, SISTERS INSIDE: The onus was on Cornelia to prove her identity. They did say at one stage that they had checked with Germany because they have a very sophisticated national identification card system and her name never came up. Now me as a lay person I think my alarm bells would be going off and thinking well maybe she doesn't come from Germany.
HELEN DALLEY: The Queensland Department of Corrective Services then received an order from DIMIA to detain her as a suspected illegal immigrant and Cornelia was imprisoned here in the women's gaol here in Brisbane on April 5.
Once more, this "very sophisticated national identification card system" must interlock with the issue of pasports from the German Consulate, surely ? If she was thrown in gaol, the authorities must have found the passport and peeked at the name on it. They might even have seen a photo on the passport, or asked the Germans for a photo. Is this rocket science?
This article has an explanation for the passport (but not the "hippy" man).
On March 17 last year, she slipped away from the psychiatric wing of Manly Hospital and stripped her account of $2000. She was off again. But within days something happened that would shape this story from beginning to end: she lost her new passport issued at the German consulate in Woollahra a few weeks earlier. To replace it would risk alerting her family and see her forced back to hospital. Somewhere on the road to far north Queensland she stole another. It was Norwegian and useless to her. By late March, Rau was trapped.What happened next has a definite if warped logic to it: a woman turned up at Cape York in the middle of the rainy season calling herself Anna Brotmeyer or Anna Schmidt. She said she was a German backpacker who had overstayed her time in Australia. Driven eight hours down the rutted road to Cairns, she announced first to the police and then to the honorary German consul that she wanted a new passport and wanted to go home.
The article also offers an interesting insight into people being required to display identification at all times or risk endless improsonment.
This is a country where public servants can, on their own authority, send people to prison for long periods. No magistrates, no judges. As Palmer pointed out, these are "exceptional, even extraordinary powers" and he found it a matter of great concern that immigration officers were expected to exercise them "without adequate training, without proper management and oversight, with poor information systems, and with no genuine checks and balances".Palmer does not address a deeper scandal: that the department has been at loggerheads with the courts for years over a fundamental question. What test must officers apply when holding people in detention for any length of time?
Here's a cronology, which doesn't even discuss the passport issue.
This article gives yet another angle to it all -- the Kenja cult.
One young man, Michael Beaver, who had been inside Kenja between 1988 and 1990, informed Mutch that he was now a diagnosed schizophrenic who had been hospitalised five times due to Kenja. Beaver had heard of four other people who suffered severe psychological difficulties following time inside. What right has this unqualified man, Ken Dyers, got to screw peoples minds up the way he does? Shortly after writing this letter Beaver killed himself. A number of ex-Kenja women spoke of Dyers sexual predations. Bev Garlick sent Mutch a diary entry containing details of Dyers fondling of breasts during a collective workshop. Another anonymous informant wrote of her seduction. During our weekly sessions, Ken became more and more interested in exploring the sexual hang-ups he felt I had. This involved more touching in the genital area, mutually This escalated to oral sex on my part Dyers suggested Energy Conversion lying down. This led to sex and he thanked me for it.
Another interesting point is the discussion of human rights:
The strange truth is that if Cornelia Rau had been picked up in north Queensland on suspicion of a serious criminal offence, rather than as a suspected unlawful non-citizen, she would have been afforded far greater protection. As a suspected serious criminal, facing long-term imprisonment, she would have become entangled at once in a thicket of laws and legal procedures, some going back several hundred years habeas corpus; presumption of innocence; intricate rules of evidence; the right to an appearance in a court; the right to legal representation; the right to silence; the right to a trial before a jury of peers; the right to plead innocence on grounds of mental health; the right to appeal, and so on. As a suspected non-citizen, Cornelia was, by contrast, almost a non-juridical being, with virtually no legal protections or legal rights. In order for her to be incarcerated, in theory for the remainder of her life, all the law required was that a junior official with authority under the Migration Act form a reasonable suspicion that Cornelia had no right to be on Australian soil. Even though the officer might be ignorant of the law or generally untrained, there was no system or process for the decision to be overseen by a court or ever to be reviewed. At one point the astonished official investigator into this case, Mick Palmer, broke out of his customary sobriety and spoke momentarily from the heart. Cornelia Rau might have been considered a non-citizen but she was not a non-person.
Scary concept huh?
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