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"There have been times in our history when Australia has been generous and open hearted and times when it has been very mean. In 1938 at the Evian Conference about dealing with Jewish and other refugees from Hitler, Australia took a flint hearted position, saying that we did not want to import Europe's problems, or to increase racial differences, and that refugees should get back in the queue.

My name is Katie Brosnan. I am a permanent resident of Australia and a citizen of Ireland. I qualified as a high school teacher in Ireland in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in education. I have taught in Ireland, Poland and Australia in mainstream educational facilities as well as with marginalized groups e.g. refugees in Ireland, gypsies in Ireland.

The Commission is a national independent statutory body established under the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986. It has a President and five Commissioners. The five positions are currently held by three persons.

The Mercy Refugee Service is part of the relief and development cross-cultural work of the Institute of Sisters of Mercy Australia. Mercy Refugee Service is entrusted to serve without discrimination the uprooted and displaced people in our world. It was established in 1983 to respond to the plight of refugees in south-east Asia. At that time volunteers were called on to provide health care, education, social welfare and counselling support to refugees in camps in Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines and in Cambodia.

This bibliography has been prepared by the Rural Education, Research and Development Centre, Townsville, Qld according to guidelines established by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission to assist in its inquiry into aspects of rural and remote school education provision in Australia. It attempts to include highly relevant, more recent, seminal, theoretical and policy-oriented Australian materials. Only items which directly relate to rural and remote education have been included. More broadly based materials have not been included. Only a few overseas references are included.

Education is a key determinant in predicting health and well-being, longevity, employment, housing and economic stability. This section documents the issues emerging from the consultations and public submissions in relation to education.

Pursuant to section 11(1)(d) of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986 (Cth) ('HREOC Act'), I attach a report of my inquiry into a complaint made by Dr Julie Copeman. I have found that Dr Copeman's employment as a general medical practitioner was terminated by Derbarl Yerrigan Health Service (her employer) in circumstances that amounted to discrimination, and that such termination constitutes discrimination in employment for the purposes of s 31(b) of the HREOC Act.

The Face the Facts education resource is designed to complement the material in the Commission's Face the Facts publication. First published in 1997, Face the Facts reflects the continued demand for accurate and easy to understand information about Indigenous peoples, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

We needed more classrooms to run the classes so as to provide adequate contact time for both children and adults. To compensate for the lack of classrooms we used the messes and at times recreational rooms in the compounds. This didn’t provide nearly enough teaching venues and was really inappropriate as a teaching environment. Over the whole centre the total number of allocated classrooms (apart from the computer centres) in five compounds was five (three in the main compound, one in November compound, one in Mike compound and none in India and Oscar compounds).

10th April, 2002 Chatswood IEC has students from between 15 to 25 language groups at any one time. We have only a small number of children from detention centres, possibly because of our relatively privileged socio-economic intake area. However, all staff members have observed a clear difference between the behaviour, performance and general well being of ex detention centre children and all our other students. It should be noted that this difference remains clear between ex detention centre children and children from the same part of the world who have not been in detention.

The quality of educational opportunities is very bad because the students are too traumatized to concentrate and it seems as if there is very little psychological help. There are no programs, no curriculum, no accountability to management, no education plan, no photocopier, no textbooks, no continuity in learning because teachers (in general) do not stay longer than 12 weeks, before September 2001, contract teachers could only stay for 9 weeks. A lot of students got frustrated because of that.

This submission makes brief comment on the education of children in detention. It provides a more complete picture of the education services offered to these children by the Department of Education, Training and Employment in South Australia (hereafter the department) after they have been processed as refugees and released into the community. Note is also made of a group of children who have been sent to Adelaide as detainees in a place of alternative detention and also of recent discussions on the issue of children in detention being enrolled at Woomera Area School.

In Port Hedland there is a school outside ... I used to stand on a chair and look out at them. I like to see what they looked like in their school uniform. There was an officer … and she pulled my shoulder down and put me on the ground and said, ‘You are not allowed to look at those people because they are different to you.’ And I was like ‘Why are they different to me? Because they know English and they are Australian, does that make them better?’

I taught a small group of students (approx.12) for 3 and a half weeks at Port Hedland Detention Centre during March 2002. I am a qualified secondary E.S.L. and English teacher and have taught since 1987. I've taught mainstream English up to Year 12 and E.S.L to European, Asian and Middle-Eastern students in Melbourne and Darwin and I've taught on Aboriginal communities and have some understanding of Primary curriculum and the needs of younger students. I hope you find the following information relevant.

In regard to the payment of $1 an hour. It's true there was no actual payment in cash terms but the equivalent rate of one point to one dollar allowed the detainees to purchase goods according to the number of points they had gained. I think it is a mere technicality and that, argued in a court of law, they were being paid for their assistance. The perception anyway from the detainees and ourselves was that they were being paid at the rate of $1 an hour. In one case that I know, a detainee teacher bought more than his points value in dollar terms. In his account he had some of his own money.

The primary responsibilities of the Legal Section are to assist the President or their delegate in the preparation of notices and reports under the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986 (Cth); to act as counsel or instructing solicitor for the Commission in interventions and amicus curiae matters; to assist the Commission in work arising from legislation or bills raising human rights issues and to monitor and promote awareness of developments in international and domestic human rights law, including discrimination jurisprudence in the Federal Court and Federal Magistrates Cour