Asylum seekers will no longer be immediately asked by Australian officials if they have been tortured or suffer from trauma under new screening guidelines.

Documents lodged with the Senate have revealed the question was scrapped from the initial public health screening questionnaire in March.

It means asylum seekers will no longer be asked the question during their first contact with immigration officials and will instead have to wait until they proceed to another stage of screening.

Advocates fear it could also see asylum seekers potentially turned back to other countries before they have been given the option to formally declare themselves as victims of torture.

The 157 Tamil asylum seekers who were held on a Customs vessel for four weeks in 2014 were asked the question. Documents have revealed 107 people on board reported a history of torture and trauma and of those, 30 accepted torture and trauma counselling when they were eventually taken to Nauru.

Under the new system, the asylum seekers would not have been asked that question during their early encounters with immigration officials on the ship.

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection's own manual on identifying and supporting torture and trauma victims noted people affected by post traumatic stress disorder - which is linked to abuse - should be in "less restrictive" community based detention and should have their refugee applications expedited.

The department has defended the decision and claimed the former Immigration Health Advisory Group (IHAG) recommended the question not be asked immediately.

"IHAG considered it was more appropriate to ask the question later in the health induction assessment, where more comprehensive mental health screening occurs," the department said in a written response to questions at a February Senate hearing.

But a former member of the group, Professor Louise Newman, recalled a different version of events.

"I think this is called the rewriting of history," said Professor Newman, who is the director of the Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology at Monash University.

"There was discussion about it and that decision would be against it. From my perspective, there was a political process going on and [some thought] that it was simpler not to get the [torture and trauma] information as there is a moral and ethical responsibility to respond to it."

Professor Newman described the decision as "political convenience".

The advisory group - with the exception of its chairman - was removed in December 2013.

But another former member, Professor Amanda Gordon from the University of Sydney, said the group had discussed the removal of the question to avoid immigration officials "ticking the box" on a sensitive topic.

"Most of the people who seek asylum are victims of torture and trauma," she said.

"Our concern was they [should] only be asked about it when it was emotionally safe."

The advisory group included 12 medical professionals, among them psychiatrists, psychologists and GPs with specialist knowledge about refugees.

In its recent report into alleged abuse in detention centres, the Australian Human Rights Commission quoted an assessment which found 251 adults who reported torture or trauma experienced high rates of 'trauma scores', with 38 per cent having a score indicative of a clinical diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Some 6.4 per cent of the Australian population suffers from PTSD.

The director of the Human Rights Law Centre, Daniel Webb, said Australia "should never" return an asylum seeker without a thorough torture and trauma assessment.

"Yet that's precisely what the government refuses to do when secretly intercepting and returning people at sea," he said.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Peter Dutton referred Fairfax Media to the department's Senate statements.

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