The great egalitarian spirit of this country is very much a gift of the soil, it is a gift of the air we breathe together, it is a gift of the land we share together.
John Howard’s New Year Federation Address
Twenty minutes from Melbourne’s CBD, eighty people, referred to by the Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock and much of the mainstream media as ‘illegals’ or ‘queue jumpers’, are locked up in the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre. Some are adults, others young children. Some are new arrivals to this ‘egalitarian land’, but others have been incarcerated for up to four years. Most of them have fled from countries like Somalia, Kosova, Iraq or Iran.
Throughout Australia, around four thousand people are locked up in detention centres, for no crime other than having come to Australia to seek asylum. Australia is the only country in the world with a policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers. Far from being a ‘soft touch’, Australia has the world’s harshest detention policy. As Justice Einfeld has said:
We are now the only country in the world which practices indiscriminate, indeterminate, incommunicado detention of such people. Alone of all the countries in the world, including Canada and the United States and all the nations of Europe, we have indiscriminately detained all of them, the elderly, the children, the sick and the pregnant.
In the past year, the detention centres have come under increased scrutiny, due largely to the struggles of the detainees themselves, who have fought back with incredible bravery against chemical sedation, tear gas and, for the first time ever in Australia, water cannons. Until recently, Maribyrnong had escaped the attention which has focussed on Woomera due to child abuse cover-up allegations, or on Port Hedland due to the resistance and breakouts of detainees.
Last year however, just before Christmas, a Tongan detainee at Maribyrnong was killed when he jumped head-first from the top of a basketball pole. This tragic event has drawn attention to the situation in Maribyrnong, both from the media and from the trade union movement. Viliami, who had spent seventeen years in Australia, climbed the pole in an attempt to negotiate with immigration staff over his impending deportation. In the eight hours he was allowed to remain there he made repeated requests to speak to an official from the department of immigration, all of which were refused by detention centre staff.
According to detainees who witnessed the events, Viliami was taunted by staff, one of whom shot a ball repeatedly through the basketball hoop. The other stories they tell are just as horrific. Unfortunately these stories may never be told to the coronial enquiry. Of the ten witnesses to Viliami’s death, four have since been deported and one is in Port Phillip Prison accused of threatening other detainees, an accusation the detainees explicitly deny. Those who remain are under incredible pressure to agree to leave Australia. Since the death, the climate of fear and intimidation in the centre has been exacerbated after friends who had spoken out to the media were banned from visiting.
It is in this context that I, along with six other refugee-rights activists, staged an occupation of the roof of the detention centre last January.
The struggles of those who are locked up in detention have outweighed, to date, the campaigns of people outside the centres. The day before we occupied the roof, detainees at Port Hedland ‘rioted’ in response to an ACM guard assaulting a refugee the night before.
Only weeks before the action, Phillip Ruddock travelled to Iran, one of the major countries of origin of refugees in Australia’s detention centres. He took with him a briefing paper which warned those planning to seek asylum that they ‘would face racial hatred because people were angry at having to support them’. The irony of a Minister for Immigration, Reconciliation and Aboriginal Affairs travelling overseas to send a message that Australia is a nation riddled with racial hatred is hard to escape.
It was for this reason that we chose ‘not in our name’ as the slogan for our action. We believed it was necessary to send an opposing message; that there were many people in Australia who were prepared to ensure that those inside the detention centres were not left to fight on their own. We wanted to stress that rather than Australia being a nation inherently predisposed to justifiable racism towards asylum seekers, Phillip Ruddock and the Coalition government were in fact encouraging and propagating this racism.
The double standards applied to those inside detention centres, who are treated as guilty until proven innocent, was evident from the response to our action. Behind Maribyrnong’s walls, refugees are subjected to incredible surveillance which extends to having torches flashed in their faces at fifteen minute intervals each night. In contrast we were able to drive down the driveway of the centre, with a car loaded with ladders, rush the ladders up to the front wall, and scramble up onto the roof. We even managed to pull our extra water, sleeping mats and megaphones up before a lone guard wandered out to investigate, and stared at us aghast as we unfurled our banner, reading ‘Close these hell holes. Free the refugees’ down the side of the wall.
If anything this response was symptomatic of Phillip Ruddock’s message, that refugees are dangerous criminals, but that ‘ordinary Australians’ outside the centres have no sympathy for their plight, and are certainly unlikely to take action in support. A particularly inspiring element of the roof protest was that it merged the actions of the refugees inside with those of activists, trade unionists and community groups outside. At one point, as we sat on the roof chanting ‘Lock up Ruddock. Free the Refugees’, our voices mingled with chants of ‘Give us freedom’ from a simultaneous protest inside.
Similarly inspiring was the great support we received from the Victorian Trades Hall, whose executive unanimously endorsed all the demands of our action, including the closure of the detention centres and freedom to live in the community for those inside. The Trades Hall now intends to publicise the plight of refugees to trade union members throughout Victoria.
After six hours we were removed from the roof by police with a cherry picker and safety harnesses. We had to wonder why these could not have been used to save Viliami’s life. Ironically, unlike those inside we now really were ‘illegals’. Unlike those inside, we really had ‘trespassed on Commonwealth land’.
Several days after the occupation I visited Maribyrnong with a delegation from Trades Hall. A young girl I visit regularly rushed up to me. ‘You were on the roof,’ she exclaimed. ‘We could all hear you.’ Then she added with excitement, ‘Could you hear me? All of us kids had a protest too. I screamed for two hours "I want freedom" ’. Her mother later told me that after the protest her daughter had sobbed herself to sleep. As I was leaving the centre, she grabbed onto my arm. ‘Can you go back on the roof tonight?’ she asked.
While a new heavy gate has been erected which could make further roof actions difficult, it is essential that the Left takes action in support of those who are locked away. As the spectre of Pauline Hanson is raised once more, the issue of ‘boat people’ is again eclipsing the publicity given to the conditions in the detention centres. It is essential that we do not allow the justifiable anger over issues like unemployment and the growing class divide to be focussed on vulnerable scapegoats. The campaign to free the refugees is an essential part of rebuilding the Left, not on nationalist lines, but in a spirit of internationalism.
