Footnotes

• Competing interests (1) I worked in Alice Gaol for lower-than-average wages; I worked offshore for inflated wages; I banked all proceeds and I paid tax on them. (2) I have written and published elsewhere on these themes and continue to do so. They constitute a substantial element in my forthcoming book, ‘Burned Man’ (in press, Hybrid Publishers, for release in August 2016). (3) I signed a confidentiality agreement.. Fortuitously however, while in the process of preparing a report for publication, I was released from this undertaking when the senior civil servant in (the then) Department of Immigration and Customs gave a candid public description to a Parliamentary Committee of all I had seen and more.

• Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.