What I would urge you to do, actually, is to look at the report of the senatorial inquiry in Australia that just came out in March 2012, after a very in-depth study of their system, the umpteenth study, because they've had problems again and again and again over the years, and they have reports stacked quite high.
Basically, they found, among other things, that in 2010-11 the self-harm rate for about 6,000 detainees was 1,100 incidents of self-harm. Self-harm means self-cutting, attempted hanging, drinking shampoo or detergent to try to kill themselves, voluntary starvation, these kinds of acts, and six actual suicides. That's an extremely high rate. It's ten times the normal suicide rate in Canada, just to give you an idea. And this is a population held for less than a year in general, so not that far from what we would see under Bill C-31, quite possibly.
Basically, the committee concluded, and we quote this in our brief, that it was crystal clear that detention had disastrous effects on mental health. This has been proven over and over and over again. And now what Australia is doing, after 20 years of mandatory detention for so-called irregular arrivals, is they're moving to a system that is much closer to our current system in Canada; that is to say, people will be held essentially during identity checks at the beginning and then they will be released on what they call a bridging visa, which is actually equivalent to normal asylum-seeker status in Canada.
So after 20 years of mandatory detention, Australia said it was a failure, it wasn't working, it has been a disaster in mental health terms, it's very costly. Ninety percent of the asylum seekers who came as irregular arrivals and were detained were later accepted as refugees in Australia and have gone on to become Australian citizens. So you can imagine the cost to society is huge.