I doubt the claims of water boarding and zipping but certainly the treatment of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island is nothing short of disgraceful.
The underlying principle is to break the people smugglers' business model by taking a very hard line, but intercepting boats and towing them back to their port/country of origin while maintaining the fiction that to give out any information to the Australian public will only encourage the people smugglers. Hence we have total secrecy on what the government calls "on water matters". They claim to have "stopped the boats" but it would seem that boats still attempt the journey.
For those who arrived earlier, the government has vowed that none shall ever be able to settle in Australia. They have been sent to Nauru and Manus Island where we pay the governments a lot of money to be allowed to dump these people. We pay private security companies to act as guards and by doing this the government is able to shrug off all responsibility for what happens in the camps. Australian staff are bound by a secrecy condition of their employment and face prosecution and imprisonment if they break it.
These unfortunates have effectively been sentenced to indefinite imprisonment - men, women, children and unaccompanied minors who have committed no crime. New Zealand has offered to take some 120 of them but our government has refused the offer. They only want them to be resettled in some hell hole. New Zealand is too nice.
Those men on Manus who have been processed and allowed to be free in PNG have actually asked to be allowed back into the camps because they were facing starvation. The only work they could get was so poorly paid that they could not survive without the support of a large family group. They had nowhere to live and not much to live on. Eventually, they accept repatriation, even though they go back into danger and a number have been killed on their return.
There have been reports of rape and child abuse on Manus, in spite of the secrecy, and on Manus a man was murdered by guards during a period of unrest when the inmates realised that they were never going to be accepted in Australia. They had been kept in the dark until a government minister shot his mouth. That guard was removed from the island before the PNG police could question him.
The people on Manus and on Nauru don't want the refugees and it isn't safe for them to leave the camp, even now that they are allowed to do so. They risk being beaten or worse by the locals. The medical facilities are substandard for the health needs of the refugees and they must be flown to Darwin or Townsville for emergency treatment. This isn't easy to do and some people have died due to delays. Children are being permanently damaged by their experiences in captivity.
I wouldn't advise any country to copy the Australian treatment of refugees. It is inhumane and very expensive. It would never work on the large scale that countries in Europe or US are faced with.
Australia has received a number of critical reports from the UNHCR but the government, and by an large the population, just ignore them. I am ashamed. The coming election will not change anything because both major parties are on a unity ticket. Only the churches and the Greens are speaking out against the cruelty.
