Section 256 of the Migration Act 1958 requires the detention centres to provide reasonable facilities to take legal proceedings against the Minister. As long as I am aware, this section has never worked. It certainly is not working in Villawood now. The Federal Court provides the forms in the Word format. The computers here do not have Word. There is a free software called Apache Open Office and I suspect that the Department will say it is equivalent to Microsoft Office. However, even though the name is similar, we cannot edit Word documents with Open Office. It is just a text editor. The only way I discovered to deal with a Word doc is to use Google docs online. But what Google docs can do is limited and particularly so with the outdated Internet browser. Furthermore, I often cannot access Google docs, either. The detention centre's outdated Internet browser does...
100 days in the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre