Offshoring and outsourcing the ‘unauthorised’: The annual reports of an anxious state

Abstract

Since the inception of Australia's mandatory immigration detention policy for ‘unauthorised’ arrivals, border issues have generated significant public discussion. The policy is controversial and has been made more complicated by the outsourcing and offshoring of detention centre management and processing. Despite the diversity of actors involved in the government's mandatory detention policy (such as private security firms and intergovernmental organisations), we argue that the management of ‘unauthorised’ migration has been framed as a matter controlled by the state that is beholden to no other interests except its own. In order to explore the role of state and non-state actors in Australia's detention policy, this paper offers a reading of departmental annual reports over a 14-year period from 1996 to 2010. Using the theoretical work of Wendy Brown, we explore the representation of non-state actors in border management and the impact this has on the identity of the state as revealed in the annual reporting process. In line with Brown, we argue that the department's annual reports demonstrate the tension that exist between the apparent “opening and barricading”, the “fusion and partition” that underpins globalisation (2010, p. 7). In addition, we argue that emergent forms of border fortification provide an opportunity for the nation-state to reassert its sovereignty whilst at the same time these reflect deep anxieties over the role of the state in a globalised and privatised future. We contend that the annual reporting process provides a performative opportunity for the nation-state to demonstrate its strength and relevance. At the same time it is dependent on multinational security firms and inter-governmental authorities to execute the policy.

1 Introduction

Australia has enforced a mandatory detention policy for ‘unauthorised’ arrivals since 1992. In 1996, the newly elected Howard government outsourced the management of these detention facilities to a private contractor in a move that was deemed fiscally responsible and symbolic of a new era of ‘efficient and effective’ government. Despite this show of strength, the policy attracted significant domestic and international controversy and has been the source of much ongoing national debate. In 2001, the Howard government passed legislation that allowed them to excise certain external territories from their migration zone, including Ashmore, Cartier, Christmas and Cocos Islands. In the excised zone an ‘unauthorised’ arrival has no right to apply for a visa to stay in Australia, instead they are permitted to apply for refugee status with the UNHCR and asylum seekers have no recourse to Australian courts (Chambers, 2011). In effect, the creation of an excision zone has placed both physical and administrative distance between Australia and people seeking asylum. In effect, by 2002 much of Australia's management of ‘unauthorised’ arrivals had been outsourced and offshored creating a complex mix of actors involved in the care of asylum seekers and the processing of their claims.

The questions surrounding undocumented immigration have been a continual site of political contestation in Australia, in some ways this has mirrored a global debate. Despite the relative numerical insignificance of the amount of people entering Australia outside of state sanction channels (both in regards to the size of Australia's population and numbers of legal migrants and visitors and the size of the global phenomena of refugees and displaced persons¹) the issue carries immense political weight and can be credited in part for both popularity of the Howard Coalition government and difficulties of the successive Labor Rudd/Gillard governments (Betts, 2003). Despite the diverse nature of this debate, the underlying discussion seems to share a core theoretical understanding: that the intensification of the border is a product and example of increased state sovereignty. However an examination of the narrative of the offshoring and outsourcing of the mandatory immigration detention centres, presented in the annual reports of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship unsettles this shared assumption. Rather, a consideration of these reports seems to indicate a dispersal of power, and unsettling or unstitching of sovereignty. This process is both illuminated by and reinforces the theoretical work of Brown (2010) and her analysis of the globalisation and the border. Central to this, she writes:

What we have come to call a globalized world harbors fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, reassure and reinscription. These tensions materialize as increasingly liberalized borders, on the one hand, and the devotion of unprecedented funds, energies, and technologies to border fortification, on the other (Brown, 2010, pp. 7–8).

Any consideration of detention centres in Australia requires a consideration of the idea of ‘the border’ as part of sovereign identity (Agnew, 2008). Australia by virtue of its nature as a nation-state that maps onto an “island continent” appears to be inherently bordered. This means that the border cannot be literally intensified; it is at present impractical or impossible to wall the sea. Thus the border can only be reinforced either through increased naval patrols or regimes of detention. According to Perera (2009, p. 163) it represents a form of nation building that are produced by a claim to racial-geographical exceptionalism (“the island continent”) based on insular consciousness”. Given this, mandatory detention of unauthorised arrivals works as a form of bordering and walling within an island continent and can be thought about in similar ways to the US–Mexico, or South African–Zimbabwe borders. The difference of course is that detention has some unique dimensions in that it does not simply repel people it holds them. And in an extension of this logic, the detention centre detain today's asylum seekers in the hope of repelling tomorrow's. We liken these regimes of detention and the physical walls that constitute them, to Brown's analysis of nation-states who are building physical walls to create symbols of security and exclusion to protect them from ‘the outside’ (such as the walling of the US/Mexico border and the Israeli built wall through the West Bank) (2010). And like Brown we argue that these walled spaces of detention are not symbols of sovereign power, but are in fact “icons of its erosion” where detention centres “project an image of sovereign jurisdictional power and an aura of the bounded and secure nation that are at the same time undercut by their existence and also by their functional inefficacy” (2010, pp. 24–25).

Whilst the policy of mandatory detention came into effect under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, at the time it did not attract a great deal of public attention. Under the Howard Coalition government the policy moved onto the centre stage of public debate. This may have reflected the larger structural changes that the new Coalition government embarked upon; its centrality may also have been located in the political tactics of the new government and their decision to capitalise on what they saw as a rise in anti-immigration sentiment (Crock, 2010). The public rhetoric of the Howard Coalition government reinforced the ideal of a solid and powerful sovereign with its unique national and democratic characteristics that allowed ‘us’ to determine who was authorised to enter Australia. This public rhetoric emphasised the power of the state and the state's capacity to reflect a clearly defined and constructed ‘we’. According to Perera (2009, p. 5) the focus on our border acted as a public demonstration of sovereignty whilst, paradoxically, reflecting its “retraction and dis-location”. Extending this further, Perera argued:

The search for enemies institutionalized symbolic borderposts and checkpoints without and within as “un-Australian” subjectivities and bodies were hunted out, and perceived security threats and “failed states” subjected to intervention at home and abroad (2009, p. 5).

This struggle with sovereignty at a time when Australia is demonstrably committed to an increasingly privatised and globalised future is reinforced in the narrative found in the annual reports provided by the government department responsible for the operation of Australian detention centres. Our reading of these reports suggest that as the perceived threat to these sovereign ideals increased, the more it appeared that the state was the only ‘real’ actor in the migration debate. This we know to be far from the truth given the complex international geopolitical forces at play in the stories of refugees, and the complex range of actors that we know are part of the Australian governments mandatory detention policy. The presence of state actors and the absence of non-state actors within the narrative provided in the department's annual reports present an interesting paradox wherein the display of state control and strength is underpinned by deep anxieties about its role in an increasingly unmanageable, transnational and privatised future – much of which has been the creation of the nation-state itself. As Brown argued “political walls have always spectacularised power – they have always generated performative and symbolic effects in excess of their obdurately material ones” (2010, p. 40). In effect, our reading of the department's annual reports tells a story about an anxious nation-state using its walls (detention) as a symbolic display of its relevance whilst obscuring its dependence on non-state actors from the readers view. Rather than a concentration of the sovereignty of the nation-state what can be seen are dispersals to non-state actors and the shifting and delinking from the ideal of ‘the border’. This process of ‘walling’ as a performative and symbolic activity is what Brown suggests is evidence of the difficulties – not the certainties – of the nation-state. She writes “Thus would the walling of the nation-state be the death rattle of landed nation-state sovereignty” (2010, pp. 43–44).

Brown's argument locates the the current profileration of wall building as part of the transformations and contradictions inherent in globalisation:

What we have come to call a globalized world harbours fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription. These tensions materialize as increasingly liberalized borders, on the one hand, and development of unprecedented funds, energies, and technologies to border fortification, on the other. Globalization features a host of related tensions between global networks and local nationalisms, virtual power and physical power, private appropriation and open sourcing, secrecy and transparency, territorialisation and deterritorialization. It features tensions between the national interests and the global markets, hence between the nation and the state, and between the security of the subject and the movements of capital (2010, p. 8).

Brown has argued that the very tensions inherent in globalisation “nest…in the new walls striating the globe” (2010, p. 8). On one hand there is a proliferation of walling, but this walling not only does not dispel the challenges of globalisation it actually embodies it. Brown argued that despite the uniqueness of each walling they share common paradoxes. She argued that despite apparent political opposites “neoliberals, cosmopolitans, humanitarians and left activists” might “fantasize a world without borders… nation-states, rich and poor exhibit a passion for wall building.” That despite the seeming ubiquity of the concept of democracy “we confront not only barricades, but passageways through them segregating high-end business traffic, ordinary travellers, and aspiring entrants deemed suspect by virtue of origin or appearance” (2010, p. 20). These paradoxes are present in the Australian process of mandatory detention of ‘unauthorised’ entrants. Whilst both Federal Labor and Coalition governments have been actively committed to the tenants of ‘Free Trade’, liberal democracy and some form of liberal international order, they have also worked hard to limit human movement. Detention centres work to stop people from ‘unauthorised’ entry and provide physical and administrative barriers to those outside the “high-end” and the “ordinary traveller” referred to by Brown (2010, p. 20). To Brown, this is symbolic of a deeply anxious state. This may strike as counter-intuitive as the detention centres themselves seem to be evidence of state power and of the continuing power of the nation-state. In order to explore these ideas in more detail, the remainder of this paper provides a reading of the department of immigration and citizenships annual reports over a 14-year period. Drawing on the work of Brown, the centrality of the state in the framing of these reports reflects the deep anxieties of nation-state identity in a neoliberalised global economy.

2 Annual reports and state identity

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship's² annual report is the focus of this paper as it is an official text of the nation-state designed to provide an account of financial and performance events over the previous year. Ideally, the report should provide both quantitative financial and performance information and qualitative information about activities and outcomes. Given the importance placed on reporting and disclosure practices within contemporary liberal democracies, the annual report is the formalised structure through which the department can discharge its public accountabilities (Bovens, Schillemans, & Thart, 2008). As the government has sought the services of non-state actors to provide part of their core activities, this reporting process has become even more important. Despite the fact that the details of private contracts and the arrangements with intergovernmental organisations are often unavailable for commercial reasons, the report should provide an opportunity to disclose these arrangements to the community and enable some form of public scrutiny. The annual report provided by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship has grown considerably over the 14 years under examination. They have moved away from simple reports on the financial position and performance of the Department to include qualitative information about programs, outcomes and any other issues that are deemed important in that particular year. More recently the reports have included video messages and visual imagery indicating an increasingly sophisticated use of the reporting process (Campbell & McPhail, 2009). This reflects a broader change within the reporting process that is present within both the public and private sector and an acknowledgement that an annual report is central to the formal processes of accountability that exist when there is a separation of ownership and control or in the case of the public sector government and citizens (Barton, 2006; Messner, 2009).

The importance of the annual report as a constructer of identity has been well documented within the critical accounting literature where reports are seen as highly politicised documents that are wedded to the ideologies of their creators (Gaffikin, 2009). Financial information must undergo an audit and is for the most part rigorously interrogated, however the qualitative information that is provided sits outside the audit requirements and as such, this part of the report presents an opportunity for the government to be ‘more accountable’ for their activities, whilst at the same time producing forms of accountability through the narratives that are created within the report. In effect, the use of qualitative disclosures by the department helps constitute the territory for which the department becomes accountable and at the same time it can serve to delimit the boundaries of accountability. Both the presence and absence goes some way towards constructing the identity of the reporting entity (Catasus, 2008). Over the last 30 years, critical accounting researchers have argued that the annual report is never a bland technical account of financial information. Instead it is seen as a complex communicative device filled with technical data and detailed narratives (Gallhofer & Haslam, 1997). Within this critical literature, neither the technical nor the narrative are seen as impartial portrayers of truth. Instead the document is seen as a very public strategic device that both communicates and constructs identity (Hines, 1988).

In the context of a government department the annual report is a central text of the state. For these reasons, we have chosen it as the central empirical anchor for this paper. The remainder of this paper draws on the Department of Immigration and Citizenship annual reports over the last 14 years to explore the paradoxes set up by a nation-state intent on defining and defending its borders from ‘the outside’ whilst being dependent on that same ‘outside’ to provide the architecture upon which the border is built both physically and conceptually. As we explored earlier, the way the Australian government manages entry into its borders has become increasingly complex and requires the participation of many non-state actors, private contractors and unusual jurisdictional spaces (such as Christmas Island, Nauru, Cocos Islands) (Douglas, 2006; Every, 2008; Stratton, 2009). We argue that whilst the state presents itself as all powerful and commanding through its determination of authorised and unauthorised entrants to Australia, they engage in both a performance of power and a performance of sovereignty. It is a performance precisely because it present a spectacle of solidity and control at the same historical moment the attributes classically associated with sovereignty are dissipated to non-state actors, and the relationship of the state to this broader matrix is opaque and marginalised. This performance is important to both the state itself in terms of identity reproduction and to the community more broadly, yet the structures in place to enable such power are diffused within a series of actors with complex drivers, including profit and return (the private contractors), international human rights agreements (such as those produced by the UN) and non-state migration experts (such as the International Organisation of Migration) (Brown, 2008). Although the public face of migration originates from state actors, the organisation and execution of this authority is shared. It is shared with private contractors, other sovereign powers and nation-states and within structures set up by international governance organisations. This complexity is not readily apparent, and the departmental annual reports analysed in this paper disclose little information about the nature of the arrangements with non-state actors. In fact, our reading of the reports suggests that during the years when border issues and ‘unauthorised’ arrivals were particularly controversial, the annual report from the department said very little about the activities of non-state actors. The absence of information on private contractors and intergovernmental organisations is notable given their significance in the delivery of detention and the processing of claims.

3 A note on method

In order to provide a reading of these annual reports, all of the reports were downloaded and searched for quantitative and qualitative content that related to immigration detention and refugees. Broadly speaking there was over 100,000 words dedicated to a discussion of these issues within the reports and there was only limited financial information that was directly attributable to refugee issues. We then narrowed our analysis to include only information about non-state actors and ‘unauthorised’ entrants. We have drawn on examples from this text to demonstrate the complex nature of the relationship between state and non-state actors over time. A clear inverse relationship emerged between heightened border controversy and the amount of information presented about non-state actors. Our reading of the reports reveals that at times when there Australia saw an increased in the number of ‘unauthorised’ arrivals, the less the annual report acknowledged the role of non-state actors in the management of the crisis. This is in spite of the fact that the role of these actors changed little over the same period. The data is organised chronological to explore changes present within these texts over the period under study (1996/1997 to present).

3.1 1996/1997: the new coalition and responsible contracting

In 1996 a Federal Coalition Government was elected ending a 13-year period of Labor rule. The annual report from the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (as it was known then) focused on the restructuring of the department under the leadership of the new government. The report clearly orients the reader to a new ‘economically responsible’ management of migration and it articulates a shift away from migration based on family reunions to one based on ‘skills’. The report also introduces the idea of privatised management of immigration detention facilities³ stating that:

The Department commenced a process aimed at entering a long-term strategic relationship for delivery of the detention function. Underpinning this long-term relationship will be a specific three-year contract for the delivery of detention services. The contract was put to tender and a number of proposals were received by the tender closing date of 9 May 1997. A decision will not be made until after 30 June 1997 (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1996–1997a).

Immigration detention appears to be an important part of the new government's program “to enforce entry and stay requirements and to facilitate the timely removal of unlawful non-citizens by providing lawful, appropriate and economic detention” (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1996–1997b emphasis added). This section of the report positions the privatisation of immigration detention facilities within the context of performance data such as budgeting and staffing numbers, timeliness of processing and cost effectiveness of programs – all of which provide compelling ‘evidence’ that the previous programs were underperforming and an irresponsible use of taxpayer funds. The emphasis on “promptness and efficiency”, “timely removal” and “reduction of numbers” present within the discussion (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1996–1997c) speak of refugees in clinical terms that are devoid of the underlying humanitarian dilemmas that are present within this part of the departments responsibilities. In the context of this budget, the decision to privatise immigration detention management appears a logical, responsible and necessary policy decision. The decision to include non-state actors in the management of ‘unauthorised’ arrivals was clearly articulated in this report, as it was seen to denote a ‘responsible’ future.

The importance of economic criteria for regulating and organising detention is evidence of the very processes which Brown has identified. As discussed previously, Brown argued that the sovereignty of the nation-state involved a process of containing and organising the economic forms which undoubtedly it relied on. This of course can only be understood as a rising tendency rather than an accomplished condition. Brown continues that “neoliberal political rationality, which disseminates market rationality across the social and governmental fields, is itself a prescription for and endorsement of capital as would-be global sovereign” (2010, p. 65). Brown argues that the overt shaping of government policy by neo-liberal criteria is no longer the case of the state making decisions about the normative operation of the ‘economic’ but rather the state conforms to a new situation in which it is like the “feudal fiefdoms at the dawn of modernity”, that is a subordinate element of a new assemblage. But importantly, Brown notes how capital as global sovereign does not look or act like political nation-state sovereignty, that it lacks any clear element of “decisionism” or the “friend–enemy distinction” (2010, p. 65). What can be seen in a scattered and elementary form in the rest of the annual reports are indicators of phenomena relating to this: a dispersal of power to various non-state and private actors seemingly governed by the rationales of capital accumulation (private contractors) or inter-governmental organisations (specifically the International Organisation of Migration) facilitating between states and private actors and then the theatrical acting of state power.

3.2 1997–1998: border management as outsourced ‘core business’

According to this report, the restructuring of the department was finalised during the year introducing a new mission prioritising the “lawful and orderly entry and stay of people” (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1997–1998a) as the first key objective of the department. Although not the only mission, its position above broader department responsibilities of migrant settlement, citizenship acquisition and “cultural diversity within a framework of national unity” (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1997–1998a emphasis added) is notable. Accordingly, the report claimed the department was now focused on its core business.

One of the main changes was to strengthen the Department's border management function. The new structure also enabled a number of functions to be outsourced to the private sector (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1997–1998b).

It was announced that the contract was awarded to ACS a company jointly owned by Australasian Correctional Management Pty Ltd. (ACM) and Thiess Pty Ltd. Without providing any detailed evidence of the contracting arrangements the report stated that the introduction of ‘contestability’ into the competitive tendering processes “has had the effect of containing costs”. In effect, the report connects privatisation with cost-effectiveness and manages to produce a narrative that marks the inclusion of non-state actors in border management as a proactive and responsible stance. The report says nothing about the detail of these relationships, but the presence of non-state actors in border management is central to the emerging identity of the ‘new’ coalition government.

3.3 1998–1999: more ‘unauthorised’ arrivals and limited control

Again, this report emphasises the role the department plays in the maintenance of ‘lawful and orderly entry and stay’ within Australia. Within this context the report noted a rise in asylum seekers arriving by boat without any explanation for this or any reference to experience in the past. The performance of detention centres is to be measured against three criteria – timeliness of removal where appropriate; cost effectiveness of detention; and lawful/appropriate delivery of detention arrangements – yet these performance outcomes had deteriorated over the last year without explanation. Despite the governments previous claims that immigration detention could be managed ‘more effectively’ by a private contractor which implies performance outcomes are controllable, the report admits:

While every effort is made to expedite this process, the Department has limited control over the time taken by foreign countries to issue travel documents, or for a decision to permit return. Removal can be delayed where detainees do not cooperate, or provide false or misleading information about their identities (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1998–1999).

This emergent ‘loss of control’ recognises that the management of ‘unauthorised’ entrants is dependent on actors outside the control of Australian officials – a problem that no amount of outsourcing or offshoring would be able to solve.

3.4 1999–2000: more boats and less disclosure

During the year, there was a large increase in boat arrivals and it is the same year in which the controversial temporary protection visa was introduced as another way of managing asylum claims. Despite the fact that people arriving on boats were held in immigration detention centres managed by the private contractor ACM, the report makes no mention of this. The positioning of the discussion makes the contractor all but invisible, it talks of “significant pressures on the Department's detention operations” that requires “the re-commissioning of immigration processing and reception centre (IPRC) facilities at the RAAF base in Curtin, Western Australia and the construction of a new IPRC at Woomera in South Australia” (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 1999–2000). The document does refer to ACM, the private contractor responsible for managing these centres and instead, the narratives appear to assert an exclusively “departmental” response to pressures. This provides an interesting contrast to previous periods, where the contractor and the benefits of privatisation were very present within the reports. Our reading of this change in the text is that the annual report as an official text of the state provides an opportunity to reassert the authority of the state as ‘visibly in charge’ of the crisis. By implication, the absence of information on non-state actors reveals deeper underlying anxiety about the relationship between state and non-state actors. Placed in the context of the previous reports, we contend that the crisis presented the government with a dilemma given the dispersal of authority and responsibility that had occurred over the previous two or three years. Perhaps this is an implicit acknowledgement that the presence of non-state actors in border management undermines the authority of the state.

This acting out of state power does not necessarily mean that we are seeing a reassertion of state sovereignty. Rather it could be read as the very expression of the nation-state crisis. The making opaque of the role that private actors have in managing and facilitating the very enforcement of the boundaries of this state could be seen as part of the “theatrical” acting out of state power that the processes of walling itself is part of (Brown, 2010, p. 98). This narrative is a part of the crisis caused by the evacuation of sovereignty from the nation-state, Brown writes:

Walls provide spectacular backdrops for politicians and parties facing quagmired immigration and amnesty policies and who are concerned to cultivate racialized constituencies on both sides of the immigration divide. They also resurrect an image of the state as sustaining the very powers of protection and self-determination challenged by terrorist technologies, on one side, and neoliberal capitalism, on the other. They are potential spectacles of such protection and self-determination and more generally of the resolve and capacity for action identified with the political autonomy generated by sovereignty (2010, p. 92).

Thus in the face of a crisis, and in the more subdued tones of the annual report, a narrative is put forward that acts out the solidity of state power, as a performance. Yet a longitudinal reading of the annual reports reveals the increasing role of non-state forces. These reports have already detailed the rising importance of the non-state actors in the provision of Mandatory Detention and the underlying neo-liberal rationale in its operation. Thus the annual report's narrative works to efface these realities through a rhetorical assertion of solidity and power, through the rhetoric of sovereignty.

3.5 2000–2001: national concern and a national response

This year the report outlines the “wide range of border control and nation-building issues” that involved the department (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 2000–2001). Given the increase in boat arrivals this year and the year previously, the situation was positioned as one of ongoing national concern. Specifically:

Unauthorised arrivals have a significance beyond their numbers because they directly challenge the long-standing approach of successive Governments to manage the arrival and settlement of people in a planned and orderly manner, which in turn has been accepted and respected by the Australian public (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 2000–2001).

This statement captures both the tension between national identity as ‘sovereign’ and the loss over control that is present in an increasingly globalised and highly mobile world. It positions asylum seekers as a threat to the nation-state that must be controlled and managed in a way that meets the expectations of the “Australian public”. It locates the state response as non-political, representing a shared mainstream understanding of the correct response to challenges of this kind. Just as the previous report made no mention of ACM, they are not mentioned in this report as well. From a reading of this report in isolation, you could easily believe that the department was fully responsible for all aspects of the detention process. There is no discussion or examination of the promised efficiencies and cost savings associated with privatisation that seemed so important in the early years of the Coalition government. The year was significant as ACM lost the contract to manage the centres, but there is no discussion of this – let alone the rationale that underpinned the decision. Given the earlier excitement associated with privatisation, this is no accident and reflects deeper anxieties about the role and capacity of governments to maintain borders whilst faced with the human desperation that leads people to care little for ‘rules’ and ‘processes’ that sustain an illusion of control and order. Thus it appears that the state is acting in way that fits with Schmittian ‘decisionism’ in which the sovereign is the one that can act beyond the rules, in a way that establishes these rules themselves. This Brown argues is “the modality of political action because the political itself is sovereign, subject neither to norms nor to law, accountable to nothing else and derived from nothing else”(2010, p. 55). However to acknowledge that the policy depended on the services of a for-profit multinational to deliver the policy significantly undermines the wholeness of the sovereign ideal. The very absence of reasons why this decision was made is testament to the state's difficulty in constructing a rationale beyond the neo-liberalism to provide a narrative of its own activity.

Interestingly, although the report makes no mention of the private contractor, it does introduce the International Organisation of Migration (IOM⁴) as another non-state actor with a role in national policy but the role and identity of the organisation is still somewhat opaque. The role of the IOM in detention centre management is not clear and the significance of the organisation in the management of refugees is also difficult to discern although some have described the work of the IOM as an organisation that “acts on behalf of nation-states by using the language of human rights” to “order the flows of migration” (Ashutosh & Mountz, 2011, p. 21).

3.6 2001–2002: stopping the flow and the Pacific Strategy

This report reflects a deeper change in the framing of the annual report as it is the first report to be framed as a response to events. According to the report, the activities of the department have been “shaped by a number of key events” (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 2001–2002). The events included the increased number of ‘unauthorised’ boat arrivals and “the government's decision to stop the flow” September 11th; new laws enacted the “strengthen Australia's territorial integrity” through the use of the “Pacific Strategy” with refugee determinations being made possible on Nauru and Manus Island and in the Australian external territories of Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) Island (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 2001–2002).⁵ These new arrangements saw the idea of the Australian mainland take on new meaning in the context of ‘authorised’ and ‘unauthorised’ human movement. The successful protection of this mainland from the ‘unauthorised’ was seen as a policy success with the report stating that “no boats have reached the Australian mainland since August or Australian territory since December 2001” (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 2001–2002). Although these policies seem incontestable, the reports reference to “clearly articulated” and “revised” standards acknowledges that the legitimacy of policy lies in the department's capacity to convey authentic accountability arrangements. Again the report provides only limited discussion of non-state actors despite the fact that in 2001–2001 the design and construction on Christmas Island of Australia's first permanent purpose built detention centre had been tendered to a private contractor.

3.7 2002–2003: resolutions of unauthorised boat caseloads

The ‘crisis’ presented by unparalleled arrivals by boats that dominated previous years is presented here as a crisis that has been resolved through good management and policy on behalf of the department. Specifically the report talks of “Key highlights – Resolution of Unauthorised Boat Caseloads” where the processing of claims is presented as orderly and smooth under the Pacific Strategy at Offshore Processing Centres (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, 2002–2003). In this discussion, there is no mention of private contractors and their role in the management of these centres. The report does briefly acknowledges that Group 4 Falck Global Solutions has been chosen as the new contractor to provide all immigration detention facilities, but the reader is given no information about performance expectations or costs. The relationship between the private contractor and IOM is also confusing with the report suggesting that the IOM will oversee the operations of offshore detention. Given their significant roles, the absence of information about these non-state actors is conspicuous. For the most part the government and its departmental offices are position as the only ‘real’ actors in the management of unauthorised arrivals.

3.8 2003–2004: who is responsible?

Extending the narrative style of the previous year, the reportage on detention is simple and matter of fact. The simplicity of the text has the effect of portraying a functioning detention policy that detains and processes in an uncomplicated manner. Again, there is little mention of the contractor in the report except to say that

GSL (Australia) Pty Ltd. (Group 4 Falck Global Solutions) replaced Australasian Correctional Management as the detention services provider at all immigration detention facilities. A greater level of reporting and clarity of service delivery expectations from the detention services provider was built into the contract with GSL (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, 2003–2004, p. 5).

And there is little explanation of the shared responsibilities for managing offshore detention facilities with both the contractor and the IOM, except to say that the Papua New Guinea centres are “managed by the IOM at the invitation of the governments of Nauru and PNG” (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, 2003–2004, p. 99).

This absence of details in the report reduces these phenomena to technicalities. The very peculiarity of the specifics: that the practice of intensifying Australia borders involves detention facilities in the territory of other states; that management of these facilities is delegated to a global NGO whose nature the report does not clarify nor its relationship to the Australian state; and that the actual practice of how the camps are run are invisible; is rather indicative of how the arrangements and assemblages of power and governance are decoupled from the clear intersections of territory and power that typify the sovereignty of the nation-state. Those reading the reports are presented a story which is very light on detail about practicalities as part of a narrative that presents the IOM provision of detention facilities as one that is simply a matter of practicalities, devoid of any of the troubling implications these phenomena could be seen as being filled with.

3.9 2004–2005: the IOM

This report expands its description of events, much of which is centred on the controversy surrounding Cornelia Rau.⁶ For the first time, the report outlines in more detail the relationship between the department and the IOM. It reports that the IOM is paid annually to play a role in the overseeing and management of offshore processing centres in Papua New Guinea. This, we are told is at the request of both Australia and Papua New Guinea and in no way undermines the sovereign authority of either country to decide who oversees this process. The report is largely bereft of information on the private contractor but the information about the IOM is interesting as the detail appears at a time when the government was feeling more confident that border management was under control and that their detention policies were working. It also has the effect of reversing some of the earlier impulses of the Coalition government to assert ‘independence’ and ‘self-determination’ in light of pressures from unauthorised arrivals, and it reconnects Australia's policy with the international community.

3.10 2005–2006: talk of people but not the contractor

This report provides substantially more information on detention than previous years. It details the number of people in detention and it details reforms to the detention process. Although there is scope to introduce a discussion of the private contractor responsible for the administration and management of the detention centres, they are still largely absent from the document. There is no information about the performance of these contractors, no information about the expected quality of care that should be experienced within a ‘processing centre’ and there is no information about the amount of money that is being spent on detention.

Considering the humanitarian stakes of the debate around the Pacific Strategy this might be seen by critics as a positive re-humanisation of those subject to Mandatory Detention and a pleasing change in the state's rhetoric in relation to the question. Of course the people that appear in these reports whether as a statistic or an individual are representations; that is ideological or discursive figures. As Brown argues the processes of the dissolution and displacement of sovereignty from the nation-state to capital and non-state actors is felt and experienced not simply at the level of governance but also involves the creation of various fears and desires in the population on a whole. It creates certain subjectivities. The processes of performing walling are in some ways a response not only to how the state as an entity experiences the fluxes and crises of late modernity but also how the population does. “Here, the nation-state's vulnerability and unboundedness, permeability and violation, are felt as the subject's own” (2010, p. 108).

Annual reports of course exist in a wider social terrain of meaning. Their reportage about people, either as individuals or as a group, fits somewhat awkwardly within larger social debates. Brown argues that the popular desire for ‘walls’ responds to the dissolution of nation-state sovereignty, “(t)hus, as sovereignty weakens and borders are more routinely trespassed and as the nation itself loses clear definition, it is hardly surprising that the alien is drawn as an especially powerful and dangerous figure, even in the epoch of the global village” (2010, p. 115).

We seem this representation of the ‘unauthorised’ entrant as powerful and threatening within the report. And further, the annual report attempts to answer these fears by providing a smooth classification of those who crossing border and emphasises the Department's potency in managing these flows:

Establishing a dedicated air smuggling unit has provided real time tactical support and intelligence to assist in the prevention of people smuggling to and through Australia's airports.

More than 50 people were detected entering Australia by suspected illegal entry via maritime vessels in 2005–2006. A number of regional countries were active in preventing and deterring people smugglers and the movement of potential illegal immigrants towards Australia. Without this assistance the number of people entering through the maritime environment could have been higher as people smugglers remain active in both the region and source countries and can be expected to continue targeting vulnerable people for possible movement to Australia.

We continue to work closely with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) on people-smuggling issues. The joint-agency People-Smuggling Strike Team (PSST) has achieved considerable success through extradition and prosecution since it was established in 2000. The work of the PSST resulted in convictions for three separate people-smuggling matters in the past year:

convictions were recorded on nine charges relating to people-smuggling resulting in a sentence of five and a half years’ imprisonment,

convictions were recorded on two charges relating to people-smuggling resulting in a sentence of eight years’ imprisonment following a retrial,

convictions were recorded on seven charges relating to people-smuggling, resulting in a sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment (The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, 2005–2006).

But the question of criminality itself shows a complex problem. That walling tends to exasperate the very problems that it creates, “walls armed at drugs and immigration produce even more sophisticated and Mafia-like smuggling economy…” (Brown, 2010, p. 112). Thus the rhetoric of effective crime prevention ignores how much the criminalisation of movement arise in reaction to the state's acting out of sovereignty in reaction to the changing organisation of the globe. So too the change of rhetoric at the end of the Coalition Government and start of the Labor Government's tenure towards criminality and service delivery can be seen as a response to popular desires for security. Again there is the distance between the actually organisation of the current detention and border regime and the construction of a narrative which hopes to allay or obfuscated the very problems such a regime reacts to and exacerbates.

3.11 2006–2007: state-driven management

Again, this report does not mention the private contractor but does briefly mention the financial contribution the government makes to the IOM which is deemed a “State-driven approach to managing migration” (The Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2006–2007). This assertion of the centrality of the state through the IOM is interesting because the IOM is not a state entity, nor does their charter allow them to work on behalf of a particular government or state. Given the limited discussion of organisations beyond the state within the reports, the configuration of this discussion of the IOM is notable.

3.12 2007–2008: end of the ‘Pacific Strategy’ and the start of purpose build offshore detention

This report is the first to be released by the newly elected Rudd ALP government and it outlines some significant changes that will take place within the department. Most importantly, the government commits to abolish the Pacific solution. In effect, this meant the closing of the centres in Nauru and Manus Province, Papua New Guinea but it did not mean the end to detention on Christmas Island. In fact, the purpose built detention centre on the island opened in April, 2008 ceiling its place within the new government's asylum policy as an appropriate place to house and process asylum claims. The report indicates that the contracts for detention are up for tender and provides the first real insight into how the contracting process is to be organised. The request for tenders is on three different contracts, detention services for people in immigration detention; health services for people in detention; and detention services for people in immigration residential housing and immigration transit accommodation. Although the role of non-state actors in the execution of detention policy is undeniable, little detail is provided. The report is interesting as the Rudd ALP government attempts to differentiate the new government from the old, but the role of the state and non-state actor's remains unclear. The end of the ‘Pacific Strategy’ is used to signpost a civilised future but at the same time the outsourcing and offshoring of detention facilities was entering a new era of permanence.

3.13 2008–2009: “new directions in detention policy”

This report positions the outcomes of the tendering process as a newly responsible era of detention management with clearly defined ‘immigration detention values’. For the first time, the report provides some details of the new contracts without providing any details about performance measurement or outcomes. The discussion is quite different to previous years. The report asserts that the new government is committed to a new level of accountability and detention is repositioned as a ‘choice of last resort’ requiring speedy processing. Discursively, the report sets itself apart from others using different terminology and providing some additional details. The terminology in the report has changed to describe ‘unauthorised’ arrivals as “irregular maritime arrivals” and there is a greater emphasis on “well-being” and “integrity” (The Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2008–2009). Although there is a greater acknowledgement of non-state actors in the report, the details of their role is still limited to fairly superficial disclosures. There is no clear information about performance outcomes and detailed financial accounts of the costs associated with the contracts. This is significant, because although there has been a change in the narrative style to reflect what appears to be a change in approach, the report remains opaque and the state still appears to be ‘setting the tone’ of detention independently of non-state actors.

3.14 2009–2010: combating people smuggling

As is the case for the reports over the preceding years, there is little information that details the engagement of non-state actors within the report, however this report is interesting as it introduces the idea of ‘people smugglers’ as a global problem that needs to be combated with the assistance of other governments. In particular, the report outlines emerging relationships with Indonesia in Australia's attempts to protect its borders from outsiders before they set sail. Despite this apparent acknowledgement that Australia cannot do it allow and that non-state actors must be part of the solution, the report still frames the government as a proactive decider of policy taking action to ‘control’ immigration in ways they deem appropriate. Although this identity has been sustained throughout the reports and in many ways is constructed through the reports, the absence of detail about non-state actors and the subtle acknowledgements of global forces beyond ‘our’ control tell another story. Our reading of these texts suggests an anxious and self-conscious state, worried about its capacity to remain in control and legitimate in light of new pressures – particularly those presented so graphically by desperate people seeking asylum.

4 Conclusion

These are the preliminary results of our investigation. They reveal two separate yet interrelated strands that demand future research. On one hand the annual reports provide (admittedly often sparse) information about the formation and enforcement of mandatory detention. This regime is one where there is a complex process of the diffusion of power to non-state actors, primarily corporate providers of detention facilities and the International Organisation of Migration. The second strand relates to the narration of this process. We can find little concrete financial information about this process and various different narratives that all essentially serve the same function: they ‘perform’ sovereignty at the very historical moment that the link between sovereignty and the nation-state gives way. These two strands are illuminated by the theoretical work of Wendy Brown and give credence to her expositions. Our reading of the annual reports shows an intensified reluctance to report substantively on the details of immigration detention as the public profile of ‘asylum seekers’ was at its peak. Despite public pride in the tough management of “unauthorised” entrants and “queue jumpers”, the official documents of the state explored in this research provide little detail of the enactment of the policy. The shared sovereignty that is embedded in Australian asylum policies was marginalised in the ‘official story’ within the annual reports. The relative invisibility of the non-state actors required to mobilise Australia's border policies reinforces the appearance of a powerful state. It also provides an official narrative that sees the state as the central actor in the management of illegitimate ‘others’ (Perera, 2006, 2009).

This gives us a starting point for further research. If the nation-state and sovereignty have come unstuck then border policy must be seen as part of an anxious performance of strength and solidity, particularly given the unwillingness of the state to speak of its engagement with non-state actors in ways that are clear to the community. More research is needed into how the practices of state accountability work to highlight and mystify. This will help us see how this process of mandatory detention, as part of a global phenomenon of ‘walling’, which is mobilised by multiple actors, is either accounted for or can be held to account.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the Business School at the University of Sydney for providing the funds for this project, Dr. Susan Greer for her ongoing support of this research and the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable advice on how to improve this paper.

Notes

1 According to the Refugee Council of Australia, there were 647,000 formal applications for asylum across the globe in 2007. Australia takes approximately 13,500 per year with approximately 1500 of these being granted to people who make an onshore application – having arrived legally or illegally to Australia before making the application. Appendices 1 and 2 show the number of people arriving by boat and the number of people in detention from 1997 to 2008.

2 The department became known as this in 2006. During the period under study its name changed 3 times, it was the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs from 1996 to 2001 and the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs from 2002 to 2005.

3 These were the responsibility of Australian Protective Services (APS).

4 The IMO is an inter-governmental organisation that works to promote “humane and orderly” migration. They work with governmental, intergovernmental and nongovernmental partners with 132 member states.

5 This is referred to as the Pacific Solution in the press, but is in fact called the Pacific Strategy within the annual reports.

6 Cornelia Rau was German citizen and an Australian permanent resident with mental health problems who was detained for 10 months as an ‘unauthorised’ entrant into Australia.

Appendix 1

Boat arrivals by financial year since 1989 (Source: Phillips & Spinks, 2-2011, http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/boatarrivals.htm).

Table

Year	Number of boats	Number of people
1989–1990	3	224
1990–1991	5	158
1991–1992	3	78
1992–1993	4	194
1993–1994	6	194
1994–1995	21	1071
1995–1996	14	589
1996–1997	13	365
1997–1998	13	157
1998–1999	42	921
1999–2000	75	4175
2000–2001	54	4137
2001–2002	19	3039
2002–2003	0	0
2003–2004	3	82
2004–2005	0	0
2005–2006	8	61
2006–2007	4	133
2007–2008	3	25
2008–2009	23	1033
2009–2010	118	5609

Appendix 2

The total number of people held in immigration detention per year (taken directly from National Communications Branch Department of Immigration and Citizenship (2010)).

Table

Year	Number of people
1997–1998	2716
1998–1999	3574
1999–2000	8205
2000–2001	7881
2001–2002	7808
2002–2003	6602
2003–2004	6196
2004–2005	7410
2005–2006	6510
2006–2007	4718
2007–2008	4514