Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Reigniting hope for refugees and asylum seekers
Sunday 31st July 2005

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Pamela Curr

Asylum Seeker resource Centre, Victoria

Before we start I'd like to tell you a story that I heard this week. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard it and I’ve been back and checked. I’m telling it because all of us working in the refugee movement are going to start to hear some of the stories and some of the truths of what has really been happening during this awful phase of our history.

This is a story from Operation Relex, from Siev 4, the “children overboard” boat. It was the first boat that came into view after John Howard called the election. He had a lot riding on that boat on repelling it. His message to Australia was that only he could save us from the hoards coming down.

I’ll take you to the time where the boat has gone down. The naval officers have been ordered directly from Canberra, the Prime Minister and Cabinet not to rescue those people until they were in the water. The captain of the Adelaide, Captain Banks followed these orders to put 223 people into the ocean, many who had never learnt to swim.

We know that many people, adults, coming from Indonesia were issued with kids life-vests that had written on them ‘not suitable for weights over 50 kilos’. The one thing that Banks did was make sure that they had good life-vests. Each one of those lifejackets had a red light.

Between 4 and 5.30pm as the light was fading and it was freezing cold, they were rescued. They were pulled up onto the naval ship. At this point an Iraqi man started shouting. He was speaking Arabic so the soldiers did not know what he was saying and everyone else was busy checking themselves as they had lost all of their possessions including money, jewelry and identity documents. Finally the Iraqis translated that he couldn’t find his son. He had three children, the eldest, seven years old, was lost. The navy told him not be ridiculous everyone was accounted for. Then some sailors spotted a blinking red light out in the distance on the waves. They found him, lying on his back, sound asleep, face to the sky. He was brought back and given to his father. This boy had been sick and distressed on the boat and his father had given him an adult sleeping tablet. The little boy had fallen asleep when he hit the ocean. Our government took that risk with a child’s life. That family are now in New Zealand.

I tell that story because as you know we’ve suffered the most incredibly brutal time and what went on in ‘Operation Relex’ is still to be revealed. That’s why we need a royal commission with full powers of discovery. We need it so that they can call for any document that they like and get it, so that they can call witnesses and they are compelled to give evidence. We know that there are many in DIMIA, in ACM and GSL who want to blow the whistle. Some of these people are ashamed of what they’ve been involved with, some of them got out early because they couldn’t bear it, but they know things and John Howard knows it too. I believe that is the reason that John Howard through the Palmer Inquiry has pointed the finger at no-one. He knows that once one person is blamed they will break ranks. That’s why Farmer, the former head of the immigration Department was beaten with feathers, received an award and an Ambassadorship to Indonesia.

Let’s look at the refugee advocacy movement. I’ve been involved from a political side and now from an agency side. We are coming into a difficult time. John Howard is a wily politician. He has tried to diffuse the issue by removing the two lightening rods that were galvanising action. One was children in detention. Even Australians who thought that “boarder protection” from refugees was a good idea, still felt uneasy about locking up kids behind wire. There was also the long-term detention. Many Australians who had initially supported Howard started to feel that it was not right. So he gets rid of both. The long-term detention is not over yet, but as you know the last children were removed from detention last Friday.

But fundamentally nothing has changed. Mandatory detention still exists. Temporary Protection Visas still exist, and with it the denial of family reunion. The whole range of policy under the Immigration Act still exists. Nothing has changed. Our job as activists and advocates is to make sure that the public is aware of this. We have to work hard because they’ve taken away that emotional element that aided us in getting people on side.

If you look at us as a movement we are diverse. From time to time people say, “I don’t know why you can’t all get under one umbrella”. As activists we know why. We could have expended all our energies in trying to unite ourselves, which we have tried to do. Or we can agree that we have some differences but we share core principals and on that basis go out and work to change policy. I believe that what we have done is very successful. Some people like to see a pyramid with someone at the top and everything neatly arranged underneath, but life’s not like that. That’s why we need the broad range of activity. We have the activists at RAC who have always been the lightening rod, who have never agreed to compromise, who are fighting on the streets doing things that other groups think shouldn’t be done. We need the people in the middle running the services and helping them when they come out of detention because God knows the government doesn’t. We need the people who lobby the politicians. We need the churches with their credibility. We need the broad range and we need the multi-layered campaign.

We should acknowledge that we have been successful. The children out of detention and the long term mandatory detention stuff didn’t come because one day the politicians woke up and discovered their moral values. No way! It happened because we have been slugging it out in our many and varied ways over the last 5-6 years to make this an untenable policy to continue.

Even so, what we have done is not change it fundamentally but change the way that it’s operating. We have to keep going because nothing underneath has changed.

35 people are still on Nauru. When John Oakley was questioned in Senate estimates about Nauru he said the camp is open now, people are free to come and go so actually they have achieved their goal of getting a sort of asylum. Then we see Amanda Vanstone standing outside Marybrynong Detention Centre saying the same thing. That was a warning bell.

100% are off Christmas Island, which is a huge success. But they are on bridging Visas and TPVs and we are going to have to fight to support them in the community and to stay here if they want.

There are also other worries. Why is this government investing millions of dollars in new detention centres? There is a proposal for one in Burpingary, Brisbane; one in Darwin, to lock up the fishermen. They are spending a million dollars a year to maintain Manus Island, and $300 million on Christmas Island, both empty detention centres.

There are countless people in Indonesia, we don’t know how many, locked in camps. The Australian government is paying IOM to keep them warehoused. Many of them have family members here in Australia. Some Indonesian NGOs visiting the ASRC told us that they are setting up an island in Indonesia where they are taking all the Afghani and Iraqis in the camps and where ordinary Indonesians can’t get access. We have to expose what is going on there and that’s going to be a hard fight.

The government has also made no mention of the asylum seekers in the community who have arrived by plane and sought asylum. Many of these people are being denied the right to work, the right to healthcare, and income support. They are left here as beggars.

Right now the Sri Lankans are being targeted. They came here during the civil wars in the early 1990s, have lived, worked and had children here who have never been to Sri Lanka. The government now wants to send them back. They offered the Timorese and the Afghanis a package but are offering the Sri Lankans nothing and they want to send them back to a country that is on the brink of another civil war, has been hit by a tsunami and its economy is on its knees.

Another thing – Australia has appropriated thousands of square miles of ocean. Traditional fishermen from Indonesia who have no radar on their boats, they sail by the stars, are being intercepted by the Australian Navy who take them to Darwin and hold them on their boats, and their boats are burned. Two young men have died in the last eighteen months in captivity and neglected on their boats.

We need groups to research and expose this information. Unless we put it in front of people’s faces they are not going to hear it.

What we have done to the refugees we are extending to the next group. How long will it be before young men in the streets with dark hair and beards are rounded up and detained for no good reason? It’s up to us to stand up for those who will be targeted. There is a list of international conventions to which we are signatory and we are breaching those conventions in our treatment of the people in our own community.

At the core of it we are fighting for human rights. We are a so-called democracy and there is no bill of human rights. As the law did not support Indigenous people in this country the law has not been able to support refugees. Our law has been framed by the politicians to exclude human rights. This is our battle.

Ayslum Seeker Resource Centre http://www.asrc.org.au/

Other refugee organisation links

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