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"I have been in this camp for 14 months and I have a little son here. Give me a solution. What am I supposed to do? My son has been here a long time. I think he is very tired mentally, and I do not know what to do."

So says a woman in detention at the Curtin Centre, near Derby in Western Australia. Her application for asylum has been rejected. She came from Iraq, a country that will neither take her back nor issue her with a passport.

She has no future in Australia and no prospects of finding a life anywhere else. She has been consigned to a too-hard basket of refugee policy and it is not a pleasant or happy place to be. But she has plenty of company.

Another, who has been in detention for two years, put his case in more desperate terms. "I prefer to go back and be killed," he says. "You die and suffer for one day and it is all over. Every single day here I feel I am dying gradually.

"Please have mercy on me and send me back home. It is three months now that I have signed the documents that I want to be returned. Please send me back home."

Another, a doctor who had been in detention for 20 months, outlined the symptoms of a condition he called "immigration detention syndrome". First there is frustration at being incarcerated, then stress, then depression.

The consequences of the condition are aggressive behavior, conflict and substantial character changes, he says, suggesting that the riots of the past 18 months are a direct product of the system.

The stories of these and other detainees are included in a remarkable and confronting report on detention centres tabled in Federal Parliament yesterday, a report that offers a comprehensive, commonsense agenda to make them more humane.

It doesn't oppose mandatory detention, but it does attempt to strike a better balance between meeting the nation's obligations as a compassionate society and sending a green light to the people smugglers.

The report is remarkable on two counts. Firstly, because it is bipartisan, reflecting the views of MPs from the Liberal and Labor parties, the Australian Democrats and Senator Brian Harradine. Secondly, because they are the first MPs to speak to detainees. They collected their testimony in a protected environment, with no departmental or detention centre staff in the same room.

It's confronting because it dispels the myth that abounds on talkback radio, that somehow these queue-jumping illegals have it easy. Too easy.

The most disturbing scene took place in Juliet Block at Port Hedland, when the MPs visited on January 30, not long after a serious disturbance. Labor's Colin Hollis insists it wasn't just the physical conditions that upset the MPs. It was that "there seemed to be a conspiracy to keep them from us".

Juliet Block was not on the official itinerary. It was only at the prompting of inmates that some of the MPs requested to see it. The ground floor was "horrendous", said Hollis, and officials said it was the same upstairs. The MPs asked to see it anyway, and discovered it was even worse.

As the report says: "They found shower assemblies incomplete or not working, toilet seats missing and, overall, conditions were totally unacceptable. ACM (Australasian Correctional Management) advised that detainees were released from their rooms for one hour in every 24 hours, and that only one detainee at a time was allowed in the ablution block."

One detainee told the MPs he had been isolated in Juliet Block for two weeks last year with his three-year-old son. During this time, he claimed the child was only allowed out for 45 minutes each day, that the room was checked two or three times each night and that because the showers could only be used by one person at a time, he could not wash his son.

At a later meeting, department officials told the MPs Juliet was not normally in use, but was occupied because another block had been damaged by fire last year. Those who were in the unit in January had actively participated in a disturbance the same month. A guarantee was given that it would not be used again until it was refurbished.

But Juliet Block was not the only place that shocked the MPs. The report says: "As a general comment, some members were shocked by the harsh picture presented by the exterior of some of the centres: double gates, large spaces between high fences topped with barbed or razor wire. The physical impact of the centres, and their psychological impact on the detainees, are among the lasting impressions of the visits."

And later: "... the strongest memory some of the committee members retained was the despair and depression of some of the detainees, their inability to understand why they were being kept in detention in isolated places, in harsh physical conditions with nothing to do."

For Hollis, who says he embarked on the study as something of a "hardliner", with little sympathy for illegal asylum seekers, it is hard to understate the grim reality of what he saw. "Nothing prepares you for the visible impact of visiting the centres," he said yesterday, saying it was "almost un-Australian".

Bruce Baird has been a state and federal Liberal MP for 13 years and says there are "very few things I have found as confronting". A feeling of despair permeated the centres, Baird told parliament yesterday, "with detainees either lying on their beds in the middle of the day or wandering around the camp aimlessly".

The report has 20 recommendations to improve the system, most of them aimed at making conditions within centres more humane, with better medical services, improved facilities and better access to education, especially for children.

But the most controversial recommendation - the call for time limits to be placed on the processing of applications - is aimed at those like the mother from Iraq, the long-term detainees.

It received short shrift from Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock yesterday, who said the MPs had been "extraordinarily naive" to suggest a time limit and that people were likely to "sit on their hands" and do nothing while waiting for their release.

He also questioned the life experience of the MPs, suggesting there were far more harrowing things to be seen if one looked at the treatment of refugees in countries such as Pakistan.

It was a predictable comeback, but the report is likely to challenge the thinking of both sides of politics - and the argument that Australia can and should be doing better is compelling.

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