Thank you very much for your question.
Australia has had a mandatory detention scheme in place since 1992 for anybody who arrives without a visa. It has been incredibly politically contentious, and exceptionally costly, but in terms of asylum seeker outcomes, I think probably the most significant thing is that mandatory detention has not really affected the number of arrivals in Australia or the security and criminality mix of the people who are actually arriving. Just knowing that people are going to be detained has not in itself seemed to act as a deterrent, nor has it acted to enhance security.
One of the things that mandatory detention in Australia has achieved is that it has really driven the processing priorities. People who are detained have hearings because of all the liberty rights infringements with detention. That mandatory program has taken over all other types of processing. People who get in detention have their claims settled more quickly.
That is, of course, the correct legal outcome, but it does mean that detention is controlling who is in what queue rather than other government objectives that might reasonably be expected to control processing times.