Of course I will look at it. I have said to the Ministers that much of the Bill is worth while. My right hon. Friend is right about the pull factor, and there are many other things we can do. I have had discussions with the Minister about, for example, improving our surveillance. The irony is that at the moment Frontex, using British surveillance operations, does a better job in the Mediterranean than the Home Office does in the channel. There are many things we can do, and yes, I will look at all available options, as long as they are humane.
Clause 28 and schedule 3 grant the Home Office the legal powers to create an offshore processing system. I am afraid I must say to those on this side of the House that it is based on something of a mythology. It is based on the Australian Government’s approach in 2013. Its scope would allow children, modern slavery victims and torture survivors to be detained offshore, in a place where we have little legal control. The Australian model of offshoring was seriously problematic on a humanitarian level, and the supposed deterrent effect of the policy was really down to an aggressive push-back policy. What the Australians did was push those ships back effectively into the middle of the Pacific, or Indonesian waters in the Pacific. That was the biggest impact. It relates to the point made by my right hon. Friend about the attractiveness of these things.
The Refugee Council of Australia has documented the gut-wrenching sexual, physical and mental abuse that has pushed vulnerable children toward suicide. A 14-year-old girl, held offshore for five years, doused herself in petrol and tried to set herself alight; fortunately, she was stopped. A 10-year-old boy attempted suicide three times. A 12-year-old boy, held offshore for five years,
had to be medically transferred to Australia because he had tried to starve himself to death and had reached the point at which he could not even stand up because he was so weak.
Members might think that these are isolated cases, but tragically they are not. From May 2013 to October 2015, there were 2,116 documented assaults, sexual abuse cases or self-harm attempts. More than half of them applied to children. I say that more than half applied to children; only one fifth of the asylum seekers were actually children. So that is an astonishing humanitarian record for that policy.
I know there is a lot of doorstep politics involved in this, but if this were to happen on our watch, just imagine how the public would respond to serious harm being done to a child nominally in our care. Remember what happened when the Iranian Kurdish child of four was shown drowned on a Greek beach? It would be something like that, but in our own control. I do not want to see any British Government of any persuasion facing that.