Manus Island inquiry: Students tell of working in detention centres without job interviews, training

Updated

Two former workers at offshore immigration centres have told a Senate inquiry they were recruited by the Salvation Army through social media and were not given any training before being sent overseas.

Nicole Judge and Christopher Iocono both worked at the centres on Nauru and Manus Island from 2012 until the early part of this year.

The pair were employed as support workers – Ms Judge's only previous work experience was as a sales assistant, while Mr Iocono had worked at a fast food restaurant – after answering a Salvation Army advertisement on the Macquarie University Facebook page.

"I was given no training; I didn't even have a job interview," Ms Judge said.

Mr Iocono said: "I didn't even hand in a resume or talk to them before I landed on the island for the first time."

Ms Judge said she was working for the Salvation Army on Nauru as a support worker - sometimes for up to 12 hours per day - just three days after answering the advertisement.

"I called the phone number and I rang and they asked me when could I go and did I know anyone that could come along," Ms Judge said.

"[I] called them and ... three days later we were in Nauru.

"I honestly thought, going into this, that it would be some kind of fun experience.

"I hate to say that because it sounds so naive, but that is what I thought. I wasn't expecting the heat, the hours, the change in shifts, nothing like that."

Ms Judge told the inquiry she was sexually harassed by expatriate and PNG staff.

"I took it to my management at some of the peak times, when I started to feel really overwhelmed and scared, and one of the managers said to me 'well, what do you expect? This kind of stuff happens at bars all the time'.

"So I just had to go with it. I still wanted to work there and it was something I just had to put up with."

Workers warned of 'criminal action' for speaking out

Despite being very young and without training, Ms Judge said she talked detainees out of suicides and helped them with their unhappiness at being confined.

Ms Young said detainees told her "every day" they would prefer to die.

She said she should have been trained to deal with these people's problems.

When asked why her story had not been heard before, Ms Judge said she had been told her communications would be monitored and that she could face "criminal action" if she spoke out.

"When we first started they even suggested our phones were listened to and our emails being monitored and we [that] couldn't contact anyone," she said.

"[We were told we] shouldn't even speak to our own mother or father about what we've seen.

"I was told I couldn't do that or I would be penalised or I would lose my job.

"I've been threatened with criminal action ... [telling] me that I could go to jail for speaking about my experiences."

Chief executive officer of the Salvation Army's Humanitarian Mission Services, Sharon Callister, speaking at the inquiry on Wednesday, said witnesses were called on to come forward and training was provided to anyone who needed it.

"We specifically called for any witnesses who could provide critical information to facilitate the investigation of these allegations to come forward," she said.

"In our submission, we indicated that without such information we had no means of investigating or responding to some of these incredibly serious or so far untested allegations.

"No information has been received by the Salvation Army by any of those former employees or in fact from anyone since we provided our written submission to this Senate inquiry."

She distinguished between two groups of employees: people who had specific jobs needing specific training and general support staff, such as Ms Judge.

"There were specific qualifications that were required. For instance, if you were a teacher, you needed to have teaching qualifications," she said

"We did have a number of other roles, which were general support roles, and for those roles ... being general and support, the kind of tasks that the staff would perform included rosters for telephone access, computer access, running the canteens. There were no specific requirements that were needed for their roles."

In a statement, a spokesman for Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said service providers like the Salvation Army were contractually obliged to ensure staff were appropriately qualified and trained.

"All service provider staff deployed to offshore processing centres are required to undertake pre-deployment training, which covers expectations regarding staff behaviour and interactions with transferees," the spokesman said.

"The Minister is advised the Department was not aware of such alleged practices.

"The Minister is advised that no one from the Department threatened Ms Judge with legal action for revealing her experiences on Nauru and Manus Island."

Manus Island report author rejects criticism over thoroughness

The development came as the author of the Federal Government's independent review into the death of asylum seeker Reza Barati on Manus Island defended his investigation to the inquiry.

The report by the former secretary of the Attorney-General's Department, Robert Cornall, has come in for some serious criticism at the inquiry.

Mr Cornall said he conducted extensive interviews with detainees, but was careful not to intrude on the investigation by the PNG police.

Like other witnesses to the Senate inquiry, he told the committee there was anger, tension and confusion amongst the detainees on Manus Island about their circumstances at the time of Mr Barati's death.

"The first people transferred under the new policy arrived at the processing centre on August 1, 2013, so by the time you get the end of January it is six months," he said.

"They didn't want to be in PNG and a lot of them were very cross about that in the two-hour question and answer sessions that we had with them.

"They were concerned that the processing of their claims had been going in a very patchy way – that it had stopped and started.

"They were concerned that they didn't know what the future held for them and [that] they were getting limited information.

"There was just that general frustration that they really didn't know what was happening to them, or why."

Report found no evidence as to why Barati was targeted

Mr Cornall also reported on tensions between locals and detainees. He said he found no evidence as to why Mr Barati may have been targeted.

"We understand that, because of his height, he was a very noticeable person in the compound," he told the inquiry.

"His friend in Mike Compound described him to me as a very gentle person and that's in my report."

In the review, which was released by the Government last month, Mr Cornall reports an eyewitness allegation that a PNG Salvation Army worker was the first to hit Mr Barati, who ultimately died of severe head injuries.

On Wednesday, the Salvation Army told the hearing it was profoundly disappointed at the way the report – and, in particular, Mr Morrison's interpretation of it – appeared to single out their employee, who denies any wrongdoing and has not been charged.

Mr Cornall said he was quoting directly from the eyewitness account.

"What I did was I quoted directly from the ... the eyewitness, and said this is what he saw," he said.

"I didn't pursue the matter any further because I was very conscious of not intruding into the responsibility of the police to investigate any criminal matter, and, by intruding into an area, making it more complicated or difficult than I should."

He was also asked to explain why he did not speak to individual guards, like whistleblower Steve Kilburn, who gave an emotional account to the inquiry.

Mr Kilburn, who is a former Labor MP in Queensland, was not interviewed for the Cornall report.

"I felt I had enough information from the key players who were on site heading up the IRTs (Incident Response Teams) to answer the terms of reference quite fully ... also supported by detailed incident reports, intelligence reports and so forth, which came in from officers at all levels of [security provider] G4S."

Senator Hanson-Young questions money spent on report

The inquiry became heated when Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young asked Mr Cornall how much he had been paid to complete the review.

"This was one review that was asked to be conducted," Senator Hanson-Young said.

"There is evidence before this committee that suggests it wasn't thorough enough, [that] it doesn't come to conclusions. I think, in the fairness of transparency, the public funding that has been spent on this review should be known."

Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald took great offence at the question, pointing out Mr Cornall was a long-standing public servant who had been appointed by the Labor government to other inquiries.

"The implication of Senator Hanson-Young's question is outrageous and any witness before this committee would think twice about coming here in the future," Senator Macdonald said.

The question was allowed and Mr Cornall defended the thoroughness of his report.

"We talked extensively with transferees and with people who had direct evidence of what happened ... relevant to the terms of reference [regarding] basically what occurred on those days.

"The report responds to the terms of reference and explains how and why these things occurred. In my view, [the report] answers the terms of reference quite clearly."

Mr Cornall said he had been paid $82,000 for three months' work.

"That was calculated at the rate of $1,500 a day for eight hours or more," he said.

"There were quite a few days where there was more than eight hours' work.

"Let me just say it is significantly less than was common charging for the sort of work the Government normally engages - it is at the rate of about a second-year solicitor."

The Senate inquiry is continuing.

Imagery: Aerial view of Manus Island Regional Processing Centre taken on March 2, 2014. (DigitalGlobe)

Topics: federal-government, government-and-politics, refugees, death, australia, papua-new-guinea, pacific

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