KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Two remote tropical islands. Six hundred and ninety nine asylum seekers, trapped in a sea of misery and discontent.

ASYLUM SEEKERS: "We want freedom! We want freedom!"

STUART DAVEY, FORMER NAURU CENTRE WORKER: Some men were hanging themselves. There was a constant fear of men cutting themselves.

JOHN VALLENTINE, FORMER DOCTOR, MANUS ISLAND DETENTION CENTRE: For the first time in my life I felt ashamed to be an Australian, up there.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Inside Australia's off shore refugee processing centres, welcome to Four Corners.

Little more than five years ago the newly elected Rudd Government pledged to quickly dismantle the Howard Government's Pacific Solution, to stop the flow of asylum seekers. When Manus Island and Nauru were closed down a few months later, the then Immigration Minister Chris Evans, stated that quote: "The Pacific Solution was a cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise.

Today the ghosts of the past are back with a vengeance. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has reopened the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres in an effort to stem the growing number of boat arrivals. You can argue whether this decision was cynical, but it's already proved very costly and it's definitely not successful. Since off shore processing began in August last year, 15,543 people have arrived in 259 boats. Seven hundred are on Manus or Nauru and the cost is heading into the billions. There are other echoes from the past. Trench and criticisms of conditions and broken international governance. And in this program, heart wrenching descriptions of suffering people including children, from distressed staff at the centres, and from inmates themselves. Here's another thing that hasn't changed with government. Media access to these camps is severely limited, and the Immigration Minister, the third in five years has simply refused to front up for an interview.

Tonight with the assistance of some staff and hidden cameras we take you inside the centres. The reporter is Debbie Whitmont.

DEBBIE WHITMONT, REPORTER: It's a Friday night and after six months on Manus Island, the Salvation Army's Major Paul Moulds is back in Sydney, giving a service to the poor and the homeless.

(Audience clapping)

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Tonight it's dedicated to asylum seekers.

MAJOR PAUL MOULDS, SALVATION ARMY: They have a special place in the heart of god. Do you know that?

(Band plays)

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Since last September, Paul Moulds has been the Salvation Army's Director of Offshore Missions in Nauru and Manus Island.

(Church goers singing and clapping)

DEBBIE WHITMONT: The Salvation Army has a $75 million contract with the Australian government. And it's bound by a confidentiality agreement. But Paul Moulds is disturbed by what he's seen. He's decided to speak exclusively to Four Corners.

BAND FRONT MAN: Welcome to church...

PAUL MOULDS: I've worked in homelessness in Australia for almost my whole career, particularly with young people. I tell you I've had some hard days and I've seen some pretty ah difficult things in that role, but I don't think I've ever had a harder job as ah, what this called for as we work with asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Paul Moulds isn't alone.

JOHN VALLENTINE: The whole time I was there it was it was just a disaster, medically.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: For months, there've been children and sick adults detained on Manus Island, despite warnings from a doctor they should never have been sent there.

JOHN VALLENTINE: These people really ought not be there. They ought not be in Manus Island. It's just ah too remote and the medical facilities are quite inadequate.

PAUL MOULDS: Look can I say quite honestly, the people I work with on the island from government and from the host countries I don't think they want to injure asylum seekers. I don't think they want to see more damage done to them. But Australia has to determine, it has to weigh up the consequences of what it's doing, it has to think deeply, and I hope there is a really um you know reasoned and logical and intelligent debate about this policy.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Australia reintroduced offshore processing last year. After two asylum boats sank in one week, and more than 90 people died, the government gave an expert panel six weeks to find a way to stop the drownings.

ANGUS HOUSTON, EXPERT PANEL ON ASYLUM SEEKERS: We recommend a policy approach that is hard headed but not hard hearted. That is realistic not idealistic. That is driven by a sense of humanity as well as fairness.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: The Panel recommended regional processing and that Australia take more refugees. And there was a new principle called No Advantage.

ANGUS HOUSTON: We also believe that a No Advantage principle should apply whereby irregular migrants gain no benefit by choosing to circumvent regular migration mechanisms.

TV ADVERTISEMENT: There is no advantage in paying a people smuggler to travel to Australia.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: The idea was to make regular migration more attractive, and to stop people coming on boats by sending them to Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

TV ADVERTISEMENT: Australia by boat? There is no advantage.

ANGUS HOUSTON: We think Nauru and Manus or Papa New Guinea will provide a greater discouragement effect than other places.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Under 'No Advantage', asylum seekers who came on boats would have to wait as long as other refugees to be resettled.

JULIA GILLARD, PRIME MINISTER: The whole Panel's ethos, their outlook, their insight is that you need to equalise treatment for asylum seekers so you don't get a better deal if you get on a boat. And as part of that they are saying the arrangements with Nauru and PNG should have those time frames built into them, so you don't get a better deal if you get on a boat.

CHRIS BOWEN, FORMER IMMIGRATION MINISTER: From this point forward, anybody who comes by boat runs the risk of being transferred to an offshore processing place.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Its twelve years since I first reported on Australia's detention system for Four Corners. Back then, we smuggled a video camera into this detention centre at Villawood to show for the first time what life was like behind the razor wire.

(Hidden camera vision inside Villawood, 2001)

DEBBIE WHITMONT: The images of a young boy so traumatised, he refused to eat or speak shocked Australians and sparked a public campaign to have children released from detention centres. In 2001, speaking from inside this detention centre, an Iraqi asylum seeker told us we were being kept in the dark.

AAMER SULTAN, IRAQI ASYLUM SEEKER: (Inaudible) these fences around are not to prevent us from escaping, these fences have been set to prevent you, the Australians, from approaching us. It's pretty clear.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Twelve years on, the government's changed but the policy is little different. Journalists and cameras are given restricted, if any access, to Australian detention centres. So once again, we've used smuggled cameras and inside witnesses to report on Australian detention. This time, off shore.

PROFESSOR GILLIAN TRIGGS, PRESIDENT, AUST HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION: It's not as though we didn't know what off shore processing could bring, but we know how dangerous and, and debilitating it was. We know the effect it had on people so I think there was a lot we knew before the panel ah um recommendations were implemented ah but I think frankly it was caught up in a political environment at the time and ah not enough serious thought was given to what the consequences were going to be.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: The problem is that this time around, offshore processing hasn't deterred asylum seekers. Instead, the number's gone up, with more than 14,000 arriving since the policy began last August.

PAUL MOULDS: The feeling at the time was that this policy would lead to a significant decline in the boats and that most of the people who came after that date then therefore would be subject to offshore processing. Well in fact that didn't happen.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Though nearly 700 people have been sent to Nauru and Manus Island, thousands who arrived over the same period have ended up in Australia. To those sent offshore, it looks like a lottery.

PAUL MOULDS: This issue causes a lot of distress amongst people. They feel unfairly treated. They can't understand why this person is in the Australian community and they are, you know, they are here on one of the off shore processing islands.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Paul Moulds says that when people asked why they were sent offshore, he couldn't explain it.

PAUL MOULDS: I have no idea why they're there and their friend's in Australia.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: A four and a half hour flight from Brisbane and almost on the Equator, you could easily blink, and miss Nauru. Only six kilometres long, and four wide. So small, that they have to close the main road whenever a plane lands. We went to find out more about what's officially called the RPC or Refugee Processing Centre, better known by locals for the money some people are making.

JULIE OLSSON, NAURU ASSOC OF NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANISATIONS: We call it the revenue processing centre because I think that is the view of most people. We are milking the, the golden goose.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Though Nauru's now one of the poorest countries in the world, it used to be one of the richest. Nauru's blessing and it curse, are the marine deposits that gave the island the world's highest grade phosphate. When Four Corners first visited in the early nineteen sixties, the island had been mined almost to extinction.

(Four Corners footage of Nauru mining, 1963)

FOUR CORNERS REPORTER, 1963: For more than fifty years now, ships have loaded at Nauru and returned to Australia, where the phosphate is processed into super and railed to hundreds of country centres.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Australia grew rich on tens of millions of pounds worth of Nauruan phosphate, paying the Nauruans only a few shillings a ton.

FOUR CORNERS REPORTER, 1963: Generations of farmers have enriched their land from spreaders drawn by horses, tractors, and now from the air. The wheat and the barley country, the grazing lands, in fact the whole of our agricultural economy depends on phosphate supplies from Nauru.

NAURU OFFICIAL: The Nauru Independence Act, 1967...

DEBBIE WHITMONT: When Nauru became independent, it made its own fortunes, and then lost them. Australia's first John Howard era detention centre opened in 2001, and closed seven years later. When offshore detention was reintroduced last year, Nauru was given only a month to reopen it.

PAUL MOULDS: From the time that ah the policy was announced and the um - and things got moving, really we were on the island in weeks getting ready to receive the first transfers to the island.

KEIREN KEKE, FORMER NAURU FOREIGN MINISTER: We always felt that it was unrealistic. And we felt that it was pushing the, the boundaries. Um, it was, ah, ah, an imperative that came, ah, from Canberra.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Because of the rush, almost 400 men spent nearly five months in tents.

KEIREN KEKE: The tents were far from what we expected, far from what many people expected. And it wasn't just the fact that it was tents, it was cramped, it is cramped, there's minimal space between the tents.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Day time temperatures in the tents soared over 40 degrees, and then there were the torrential rains.

PAUL MOULDS: I don't think Australia means to put people in hot tents and give them inadequate facilities. I think again, the need to start fast lead to decisions being made that um, that have made it difficult for people.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: There's now more permanent accommodation, but Nauru says that, too, was done in a hurry.

KEIREN KEKE: The reality is that officials in Canberra raced on them, made plans, had plans funded, had materials bought, had buildings purchased and on the wharf and ready to go. We, we said that there's deficiencies or there's issues in the design, but by that stage it was too late to make major changes because the materials were on the way.

(Footage of protests in Nauru)

DEBBIE WHITMONT: But the real problem in the detention centre is the uncertainty of processing. Protests like this one, filmed on a camera smuggled in for Four Corners, have been going on weekly, often daily, since last October.

PROTESTERS: We want freedom! We want freedom!

PAUL MOULDS: They're looking for processing information. What's gonna happen to me? How long's it gonna take? That's the thing. That lack of clarity really causes them great anguish.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: What do you tell them?

PAUL MOULDS: Well I can't tell them anything.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: These interviews were done for us secretly inside the detention centre.

(Footage inside detention centre)

ASYLUM SEEKER : I want to die. I don't want to live more, because we don't have anything to do here. Your questions doesn't have answer, your fate is not clear, what will happen to you?

ASYLUM SEEKER II: As soon as we arrived here we started a hunger strike. It was very hard you know. After three days you wish for one drop of water. Not water, a drop of water. Every second you wish for one drop of water, it is very hard.

ASYLUM SEEKER III: Why did I burn myself? Well I felt sad and mad. I didn't know what to do. So I felt like I was going to stay here for life or something.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Stuart Davey worked in the Nauru centre shortly after it opened.

STUART DAVEY: Um there was a constant fear of men cutting themselves. There's a lot of regulations about the razors, um, and try to initiate a, a, an inventory of the razors.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Stuart Davey was there during a visit from the then Immigration Minister Chris Bowen. When detainees were told that Nauru which didn't have any laws for processing refugees, was still developing its system.

STUART DAVEY: After the Minister visited there was a lot of depression. Self harming increased um, at that point. Um, yeah.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Recently, Nauru has passed new laws and some asylum seekers have had preliminary interviews.

ASYLUM SEEKER I: They are processing us but we don't know that it is real processing or not until they transfer some of us to Australia. They say that you shouldn't be sure you will go to Australia when you become a refugee. I hope the Australian government doesn't make us toys for their politics for election.

ASYLUM SEEKER II: You see many guys here do suicide or hurt themselves, just because they don't want to harm the others. They just harm themselves because of bad situation, or because they show - they want to show their feelings.

MARIANNE EVERS, FORMER NURSE, MANUS DETENTION CENTRE: They start to scream at each other because this one has heard this and the other one has heard that, and it is all speculation. You know it is the not knowing of what is going to happen to them.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Nurse Marianne Evers worked in the Nauru detention centre health clinic.

MARIANNE EVERS: The very first night that I was on duty there, there, there was a person that attempted to hang himself, and it finished up that this poor soul was crawling on the floor like an animal looking at me saying please let me die, and that made a big impression on me.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: By last November there'd been reports of mass hunger strikes and at least eight attempted suicides. And a 35 year old Iranian man, near death after a 50 day hunger strike, had to be evacuated to Australia.

MARIANNE EVERS: He looked like somebody in the end stages of cancer. You see that - he was totally wasted away.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: By then, the camp was reaching capacity and there was nowhere else in Nauru to detain women and children. So they were sent to Manus Island. Manus Island is a few hundred kilometres north of Papua New Guinea. It's close to the equator and mostly a jungle.

JOHN VALLENTINE: Visually, the site is gorgeous but there are uh hoards of mosquitoes. There are temperatures in the 40s and humidity around 100 per cent. Heavy rain, no air conditioning and ah, insufferably hot. Um muddy tracks, um and when it rained a faecal smell of inadequately you know drained sewage effluent.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Last November, Doctor John Vallentine was sent to Manus by International Health and Medical Services, or IHMS, which the Australian government pays more than $2.5 million a month to run offshore health services. Doctor Vallentine arrived before the asylum seekers, to prepare the clinic.

JOHN VALLENTINE: Almost from the day I arrived it was obvious to me that it was not a clinic that would work in its current state.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: The army was still fixing the family accommodation. Derelict World War Two cabins and containers left over from the first Howard era detention centre. They put up tents for the single men.

PAUL MOULDS: You got to remember that these facilities had not been used for many, many years. I think on Manus Island it was a jungle when they started working um to you know really reclaim the centre back from the jungle.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: John Vallentine says there was some good equipment but an appalling lack of medical supplies. Concerned, he wrote to IHMS.

JOHN VALLENTINE: From early on I was sending lists both through my health services manager up there and directly to the medical staff of IHMS in Sydney saying "look, we desperately need this stuff." Stuff being oxygen, antibiotics, bladder catheters, suckers, tracheostomy equipment, ah anaesthetic agents, sedatives, morphine, ketamine, um, and these things didn't arrive.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Dr Vallentine warned IHMS the clinic had no oxygen. When the army left they lent him all they had, half a bottle.

JOHN VALLENTINE: The oxygen was terribly important and it didn't arrive. "Where was it? Where was it?" We kept asking, "Could we have it? Send it up." It never came.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: IHMS has told Four Corners that medical supplies and replacements are supplied as required. One night, just before the asylum seekers arrived, a local PNG worker employed at the camp had a cardiac arrest.

JOHN VALLENTINE: We were in a room, it was half a container with ventilators and suckers and fellas squeezing in and out doing cardiac massage and trying to read ECGs and the like, it was just hopeless. It was just too small. Foreseeable too, all foreseeable stuff.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: The clinic ran out of supplies. So at 3am Doctor Vallentine had to wake up the director of the nearest hospital, an hour's drive away, and the hospital had to lend the clinic anaesthetics, sedatives and oxygen.

DEBBIE WHITMONT (to John Vallentine): What would have happened if you hadn't been able to get those things from the hospital?

JOHN VALLENTINE: Oh I know that he would have died within 20 minutes.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Doctor Vallentine had to keep his patient alive nearly 24 hours, until a plane could evacuate him to Port Moresby. The 24 delay convinced Doctor Vallentine that Manus was no place for children.

JOHN VALLENTINE: Well, the thing about children from a medical point of view is that they get sick very quickly. You don't have nearly the same luxury of time to sort things out and one of the problems at Manus Island is its remoteness. We had very little in the way of paediatric equipment and facilities there, and worst of all this established 24 hour delay between calling for a medical evacuation by air and the plane arriving and getting the sick person out is just too long for kids. So I was worried about, about children being there at all I must say.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: The first children and their families arrived in Manus last November.

JOHN VALLENTINE: They were frightened, bewildered, confused, sad people. And a number of them said to me, "what is this place? Where are we? Where have we come to?" Ah, they hadn't been told.

(Hand held camera footage of Manus Island conditions)

DEBBIE WHITMONT: There are now thirty children in the Manus camp. Most have been there more than four months. Nearby, nearly 200 single men are living in tents. A young English teacher describes it:

FORMER SALVATION ARMY TEACHER: There's a lot of people who were not very happy to be there and the family section's very close to the men's section. There's just a fence really between them. So there's just a lot of tension. There's a lot of, a lot of pressure on the kids and there's no way that kids would come out of that unscathed.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: Journalists, cameras, and even photos are banned from the Manus camp. These pictures were filmed inside, secretly for Four Corners. Nearly 200 men have spent four or five months in these tents. There's no privacy, the ground is often flooded and the camp has to be constantly sprayed, called 'fogging' to keep away mosquitoes. There's often no power, and or no water.

FORMER SALVATION ARMY TEACHER: If there's any sort of code called, any kind of problem then the kids will hear the radios. They're going to see the G4S guards running through. They're going to know what's happening. They're going to know if someone's just hanged themselves. They're going to know if there's a fight or if there's an escape or something so yeah, they can see, they know exactly what's going on.

DEBBIE WHITMONT: According to the detainees, the camp's health service is still very limited. This interview was recorded inside the Manus camp in secret.

(Secret footage inside Manus Island detention centre)