It is plain to me that Fred is using "horrible" with irony in the suage. IMHO he (and I as well) agree that the detention policy is sensible.
The number of people smugglers in Indonesia making a fortune out of placing people from all over the ME into leaky, rotten or rusty boats and casting them off with vague directions to Ashmore Reef off the coast of Western Australia, had to be stopped. One such ship sank with the loss of over three hundred lives. The Indonesians were making a business of telling simple, uneducated village folk, many from Afghanistan, that the Australians would welcome them with open arms and provide them with welfare and accommodation.
The detention camps exist and are not hidden from the world because they are a message to the unwary and gullible. Don't give your money to an Indonesian people smuggler, to him you are nothing but a commodity. They do not care how many never make it to our shores. And we have no idea how many drowned, how many boats sank on the way.
The 'boat people' as they are called, are literally human trafficking carried out by utterly unscrupulous Indonesians.