Privatisation and accountability in Australian immigration detention: A case of state-corporate symbiosis

Abstract

Across the global north, immigration detention has become an increasingly common punishment for ‘illegal’ movement between borders. The punitive nature of Australia's border protection laws is enhanced by a privatised and offshored model of operation, drawing in corporations and neighbouring territories to sustain a policy of indefinite, offshore detention. Reading these arrangements as resulting in actions that might be described as state-corporate crime, this article considers how such punitive regimes are sustained by the institutional actors who operationalise them. It analyses documents tabled before the Australian Senate in 2019 which detail the contractual relationship between the Department of Home Affairs and private security provider Paladin. Communications materials in particular, including emails and meeting minutes, reveal a compromised framework of accountability that failed to apprehend underlying forms of harm in offshore detention, therefore sustaining its capacity to punish. The results also suggest a shared interest between government and Paladin in maintaining this compromised framework, and an absence of voices which might challenge it. Noting that public-private contracts are commonplace in contemporary punitive regimes, the article concludes by interrogating the place for human rights compliance within these regimes.