PoliticalClaims.au

**What the claim gets right:** - The incident reporting categories were indeed changed - Births and clinical depression were removed as formal "incident" categories - Self-harm reporting was downgraded from "critical" to "major" **What the claim gets wrong:** - **Attribution:** The changes were made under the Labor government in March 2013, not by the Coalition - **Implications:** The removal from "incident" categories does not mean these events stopped being recorded or monitored, only that they were no longer classified as reportable "incidents" requiring immediate departmental notification **Why the changes may have occurred:** While no official justification was provided in the sources, the March 2013 timing coincides with the final months of the Labor government when detention centre populations were high and the government was managing the transition to offshore processing arrangements with Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

The reclassification may have been an attempt to streamline reporting, though this is speculative. **The broader context:** Mandatory detention policy itself was introduced in 1992 and has been maintained by both Labor and Coalition governments [3].

The mental health crisis in detention centers has been documented under multiple governments, with the Australian Human Rights Commission and Commonwealth Ombudsman consistently raising concerns about conditions in immigration detention [4]. **Key context:** This is **NOT unique to the Coalition** - the incident reporting changes were implemented by Labor, and the broader issues of mental health and reporting in detention centers have been concerns raised by oversight bodies across multiple government terms.