Serco also held defence contracts worldwide, including the UK government’s contract for the operation and maintenance of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. Its defence arm was responsible for fleet support at the three main UK naval bases and functions on RAF bases both at home and abroad. With two partners, Jacobs Engineering and Lockheed Martin, Serco made up the consortium that managed the British Atomic Weapons Establishment. It had a presence on every military base in Australia.
The company specialised in air traffic control services and ran international airports in Dubai and Bahrain as well as many of the smaller airports in the United States. Since 2004 it had, under contract from the US government, controlled the airports in Iraq. It provided facilities management services at three major UK hospitals; ran schools in Bradford, Walsall and Stoke-on-Trent; and was responsible for school inspections in the English Midlands. Serco was the provider of a student information system, Facility, used in several countries. It owned leisure centres across the UK, including the Manchester Aquatics Centre, a venue for the 2002 Commonwealth Games; administered a number of publicly funded websites such as Business Link; operated the IT infrastructure for the London Borough of Southwark; and was responsible for all motor driver examination centres in the province of Ontario, Canada.
Another specialty was detainment and all that involves. Serco made and supplied electronic tagging devices in the UK and operated four prisons, a young offender institution and a secure training centre there. (It is alleged that it increased capacity by 20 per cent in one of its English prisons by installing beds in the toilets.) The company also controlled two immigration removal centres in the UK and transported prisoners to, and detained them at, law courts across the country. Abroad, Serco operated Hünfeld Prison in Germany, Acacia Prison in Western Australia and Borallon Correctional Facility in Queensland; and was tendering to take over the operation of state-run facilities in New South Wales. And, in July 2009, it was given a contract by the Rudd Labor government to run all immigration detention centres in Australia. More facilities had since been added to the network, including those at Manus Island and Nauru, where offshore processing takes place: but these two facilities were operated by Transfield Services.
Serco’s $370 million, five-year contract, which may be extended for a further four years, was given in despite of Labor’s criticism of privatisation of detention centres while in opposition. In 2007, then Labor immigration spokesman Tony Burke, speaking of Serco’s predecessor, Global Solutions Ltd, said: This is the private company that has people coming in the doors with no mental health problems and going out as broken human beings. There is one answer and one answer alone, and that is there have been enough breaches of this contract for the government to take action to terminate the privatisation of our detention centres. It was a bad idea from the start. It should not have taken place. It should not be continued.
Immigration Minister Chris Evans later defended the about-face which led to Serco being awarded the five-year contract. He said, lamely, that a tender process to run the centres had been begun by the Howard government in March 2006 and pulling out would have exposed the Commonwealth to potential compensation claims from the tenderers. There is also an absence of alternative public service providers.
The last straw for Global Solutions Ltd (GSL), Serco’s predecessor, was probably the incident during which an Aboriginal man, Mr _______ Ward, died in their custody while being driven the four hundred kilometres from Laverton to Kalgoorlie gaol on a scorching hot day in the back of a van without air conditioning. As the temperature outside reached forty-two degrees Celsius, and the metal surfaces of the prisoner’s compartment heated up to 56 degrees C, Mr Ward was slowly cooked alive.
He had been born in the Western desert, into a family which was one of the last to leave their traditional way of life; they were filmed in 1965, when Mr Ward was still at his mother’s breast, gathering grass seeds to eat. Mr Ward was both an initiated man and a community leader. He was Warburton’s Community Chairman and employed in the management of the nine million hectares of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. He was educated, well respected and a friend of the local police. In the space of his lifetime, then, he had gone from a traditional way of living to representing his people in Perth and Canberra as well as in talks on land management in China. He was proud of his accomplishments; he sometimes called himself the last of the stone-age men.
Warburton is a dry area, so those who want to drink go south to Laverton, as Mr Ward did that Australia Day weekend in 2008. On a hot Saturday night, even though they noticed nothing untoward about the way the vehicle was being driven, police stopped Mr Ward on a bush track, breath-tested him and, when he was found to be four times over the limit, took him to the local lock-up. The private security firm GSL was called and a van booked to drive him next day to Kalgoorlie. There should have been a bail hearing before this booking was made but there wasn’t; the local JP was only called in next morning. He was inexperienced and, at the inquest, admitted that he’d never read the section in his booklet of instructions describing bail procedures. Mr Ward was woken up, a bail hearing lasting ten minutes was held at the door of his cell, then he was given a frozen pie and six hundred millilitres of water and sent off to Kalgoorlie.
The Mazda van in which he was transported had a history of problems, including problems with the air conditioning. The system in the cab, where the two guards sat, worked, but the one into the prisoner’s area didn’t. A plastic bag and some string had long ago become entangled in the fan. The security camera wasn’t operating properly either, so the two GSL guards couldn’t really see what was going on in the back. They didn’t make any stops along the way. It was only when, nearing Kalgoorlie, they heard a thud as Mr Ward fell to the floor that they stopped.
Even then, though they had been told at Laverton that Mr Ward was compliant and would give them no trouble, they didn’t take him out of the van: GSL rules forbade releasing prisoners anywhere but in a secure area. Instead, they tried flicking some water over him before driving him to the hospital, where he was packed in ice to try to get his temperature down. Upon examination he was found to have an extensive burn on his abdomen where the naked flesh had touched the hot metal of the cell floor. The Mazda was built very low to the ground and, the inquest was told, absorbed an excessive amount of heat radiating up from the road.
Of the two guards one, Nina Stokoe, was new to the job but the other, Graham Powell, was GSL’s most experienced man in the area; six months previously, however, he’d been suspended from his supervisor’s job because of racial slurs directed at prisoners, he knows it goes on and allows it. In fact he states that he participates in it. A year later, there had still been no disciplinary action by GSL against either guard. When asked why, John Hughes, the corporation’s general manager in Western Australia, said: I believe the view was formed that we hadn’t formally breached any company policies or procedures.
An incredulous Liz Jackson, the Four Corners reporter for ABC TV, asked Richard Harding, WA Inspector of Custodial Services: How can it be that you can put someone in the back of a van for a four hour drive on a blazing hot day and not check on their welfare the whole way, and that person die and you not to have breached any of the company’s policies and procedures? Harding said: It tells one that the interaction between the Department and GSL itself is not effective and is not actually directed at human rights concerns so much as commercial and technical issues.
That last sentence resonates, for the privatisation of prisons and detention centres will inevitably lead to a contradiction between human rights and commercial and technical issues; and, in the end, in a profit-driven enterprise, the latter will always prevail. Not surprisingly, given that company policy is to keep employees happy—even those who are thugs or brutes or reprobates—before anything else, similar accusations have been made against Serco, particularly in respect of the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre they operate in the UK.
I don’t
know what else to say about Serco; and feel reluctant to go any further into the corporate identity of GLS, now called G4S, which I researched previously, a few years ago, purely out of interest. It is like Serco’s sinister and more powerful cousin, a much larger company, with a presence in 110 countries: the world’s second-largest private employer. And, further, the world’s leading international security solutions group; a major provider of risk management and protection to governments and businesses. G4S runs prisons and detention centres, owns private armies of various kinds, and is probably evolving towards a corporate entity that is self-regulating, self-replicating and takes on all those distasteful tasks that governments believe are necessary to maintain social control, but don’t want the expense, or the opprobrium, of doing themselves.
The history of Australia’s detention centres continued to follow me round. When, the weekend after my kids had been to stay, I went out to do my regular two-day taxi-driving stint, on the Monday afternoon outside the University of New South Wales in Kensington I picked up a top Commonwealth bureaucrat who, it turned out, was one of a team of four which drafted the legislation enacting mandatory detention for illegal immigrants into Australia.
He was a tall, stooped man with rather swarthy skin and greying hair, wearing a tweed jacket and dark trousers, and carrying a heavy briefcase. I can’t remember how we started talking, nor why the question of mandatory detention came up, but do recall he wore a rather sardonic, amused look and thus seemed worthy of a bit of conversational probing. He was going to his hotel in Kings Cross and, as we rolled away up Anzac Parade, remarked: I can’t claim to have been the midwife of that piece of legislation, but I was in the room when it was born.
It was, he went on, the type of legislation Labor would have felt obliged to oppose while in opposition but was prepared, in certain circumstances, to promote while in government; and in what was thought to be the dying days of the first Keating administration, in 1992, those circumstances pertained. He described a period of frantic work, eighteen-hour days as he, a couple of other bureaucrats and the minister, Gerry Hand, sweated over the provisions of the new Bill, which they got before the Parliament just in time to have it enacted, with bipartisan support, before the last sitting ended. That infamous legislation specifically disallowed any judicial review but did impose a 273-day limit on mandatory detention.
The Keating government was, against all odds, re-elected and a couple of years later, in 1994, enacted, again with bipartisan support, new legislation that removed the 273-day limit, making indefinite detention a reality. The then record in Australia’s detention centres was the six years and ten months served by Peter Qasim, a stateless man of Kashmiri origin, who was refused a home by more than 80 different countries before he was finally granted a bridging visa here; and there had been more than two hundred cases of unlawful detention, sometimes of bona fide permanent residents like the schizophrenic former flight attendant Cornelia Rau. One, Vivian Alvarez Solon, a naturalised Australian, was deported to the Philippines.
But why? I asked the bureaucrat. Why was the legislation enacted at all?
He smiled his faintly contemptuous smile. That’s not for me to say, he replied. I was just doing my job. We bureaucrats don’t make policy, we just implement it. You’d have to ask the minister.
One widely accepted view, recalling Australia’s age-old fear of the Yellow Peril, is that the legislation was enacted as a response to the influx of Cambodian, Chinese and Vietnamese refugees over the previous few years; but this is surely nonsense, given that the Boat People, so-called, began turning up on Australian shores in the late 1970s; the major migration was during the 1980s; and by the early 1990s they no longer made up the bulk of refugees arriving here. The First Gulf War of 1991 is to my mind a far more likely primary cause of the legislation, which may have been enacted in the foreknowledge of boatloads of Middle Eastern and South Asian refugees, both Christian and Muslim, to come.
As for Gerry Hand, Keating’s Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, he had this to say back in 1992: I believe it is crucial that all persons who come to Australia without prior authorisation not be released into the community. Their release would undermine the Government’s strategy for determining their refugee claims or entry claims. Indeed, I believe it is vital to Australia that this be prevented as far as possible. The Government is determined that a clear signal be sent that migration to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country and expecting to be allowed into the community. This is really no different as a statement from the line that helped win John Howard the 2001 election: We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come. Therein lies a hundred- or two-hundred-year-old complex of insecurity, patriotism, racism and plain xenophobia, under cover of a nationalism that few know how to refute.
The top bureaucrat was an intelligent man. He knew all this, and more, without my having to tell him. But when I asked him how his conscience was, he looked away out the window of the cab towards the white towers of the city gleaming like a promised land in the west and smiled again. As if faintly weary of having to defend the indefensible. I transferred away from the Immigration Department soon after, he said. I now work in Education. Have done for the last fifteen years or so. It was as if I were one of the importunate young who continue to advance their absurd idealism in the face of a realpolitik they cannot or will not understand; but really, we were about the same age. He might even have been the younger man.
When I let him out on Kings Cross Road he was civil, even charming, without ever once relinquishing that reserve maintained by those with the special knowledge, or perhaps insight, which can only be gained from walking in the corridors of power and conferring there with the slit-eyed peacocks who rule over us. And, anyway, the policy of mandatory detention of refugees is not confined to Australia, it is a worldwide phenomenon, undoubtedly part of a cultural shift by which the countries of the First World attempt to protect themselves, their citizens and their way of life from the increasingly desperate poor who make up the majority of humankind today.
Managing the transition from writing to driving, and then from driving back to writing, is never easy. While superficially the two activities share some resemblances—you sit staring at a screen the way you sit staring at the road ahead—they are in fact quite different. I sum it up this way: driving, you contemplate, above all, risk and money; writing, however, is a way of sending the mind into a hitherto non-existent future, of learning to travel down roads that are not those you have driven a thousand times before, but ones which must be invented as you roll along them. Those threads of forgotten silver may be remembered even if they have not been traversed before. I always find the day after I finish my shifts for the week the hardest upon which to write. It is as if the clamouring ghosts of all those fares I took and did not take, all those conversations I did or did not have, all the voices heard or overheard, beat about my ears and make it almost impossible to concentrate on the matter at hand. Almost.
Not knowing what else to do, I picked up Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness and had another look at it. Apart from the sixty-odd pages summarising Jaynes’ life and thought, the most interesting pieces in it are the few papers Jaynes himself had written after his magnum opus. A brief one on William Blake called ‘The Ghost of a Flea’; a longer discussion, from 1989, called ‘Verbal Hallucinations and Pre-Conscious Mentality: The Meaning of King Tut’, an analysis of a mural, found on the north wall of the boy-king’s tomb, showing the ceremony of the opening of the mouth; and ‘Dragons of the Shang Dynasty: The Hidden Faces’, which discusses the specific ambiguity of dragon faces on Shang vases and other artworks. The three historical papers, all quite short, attempt to show that there were and are means by which both hemispheres of the brain, both forms of consciousness, might simultaneously be present in an individual: I would like to suggest that all of us have locked away within us an ancient mentality based on hallucinations of speech and
visions of gods. Blake was ‘a new kind of man’, one who had both consciousness and a bicameral mind.
A fourth, longer paper reports upon research carried out in the 1980s by Jaynes and one of his students, Michael Rosenberg. Subjects included hospitalised schizophrenics in a New York psychiatric ward; homeless people in New York City, mostly encountered on Broadway and at the Port Authority Bus Station on 42nd Street; a sample of students at Princeton University; children with imaginary playmates; and a group of cerebral palsied spastic-athetoid non-verbal congenital quadriplegics who have never spoken in their lives. All heard voices.
From the summary: Such voices were often multiple, critical in women but more often commands in men, and commonly religious. In a carefully randomised sample of normal college students almost a third had ‘clearly heard a voice when no-one had spoken to me’. From a study of ‘imaginary playmates’ it was concluded that verbal hallucinations were occurring here also. And a non-verbal group of congenital quadriplegics heard voices they identified as God, such voices usually being helpful.
A nameless black man interviewed at the Port Authority said: Voices? I hear all the voices. But they don’t tell me nothing I don’t already know. You see, I know everything. My thoughts are always ahead of everything. What voices do you want to know about? Cosmologian, terrestrian, solarian, universalian? You see, it’s the psychology. Yes, listen, when everything started the earth was made and God did it. I know all that. Jesus knows it. I already know everything even if they’re yelling. I know what’s wrong and what’s right. You see, I’m always trying to catch up with my reality. I don’t even try anymore. It’s always so far ahead of everything. I can’t even keep up with it … no one can ever know me or understand it.
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