Refugees are standing up to Labor

For more than a month, refugees have maintained a permanent protest camp in Melbourne to demand that the Albanese Labor government end the ongoing persecution of thousands of asylum seekers in Australia.

The 24/7 encampment is located outside the Department of Home Affairs in Docklands. Another camp has also been established outside of Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s Sydney office.

The camps are calling on the federal government to grant permanent residency and citizenship rights to an estimated 12,000 refugees trapped on short-term bridging visas. The visas have to be renewed regularly and leave people open to the threat of deportation to countries such as Sri Lanka and Iran, where they face persecution or worse.

“We are here for twelve years living in uncertainty”, Rathi Barthlote, a camp organiser and member of Refugee Women Action for Visa Equality, told Red Flag. “Our kids can’t go to uni, we don’t have Medicare, we don’t have work rights. There’s so much pain—I haven’t seen my mum for eighteen years. I lost my father in the genocide in Sri Lanka. I lost my baby. We are here for freedom [but] Australia is like an open jail.”

After a decade of brutality under the federal Coalition, there was some hope among refugees and their supporters that a change in government would lead to better outcomes.

When Labor came to office in 2022, one of its first acts was to grant protection to a Tamil family from Biloela in Queensland. The family had spent years fighting deportation and had won mass support around the country. Later, permanent residency was granted to 19,000 who had been recognised as refugees but offered only temporary protection visas under previous governments.

Many of those now protesting at the Melbourne camp campaigned for the ALP in the federal election. However, after two and a half years of the Albanese government, it has become increasingly clear that they must keep fighting under Labor.

Harini is a young Tamil refugee at the Melbourne camp. She is still on a bridging visa despite having arrived more than a decade ago. “I’m fed up, I’m frustrated”, she told Red Flag. “A person that came on the same boat as me, played with me when we were young, is now able to call themselves an Australian citizen. I wasn’t given that fairness and I don’t think that’s right. I had to drop out of uni because I was labelled an international student, while my friend was able to go on and study the same degree, to become a doctor.”

“Labor was meant to be for workers, for people”, Barthlote said. “But that’s not what they’re doing now. They’ve said that we are not genuine refugees ... They have played with our lives for twelve years. This action came out of desperation.”

Since being elected, the Labor Party has maintained its steadfast commitment to Australia’s anti-refugee border policies. Even before taking office, Labor MPs consistently voted with the Coalition to continue boat turnbacks and indefinite detention. Now in government, Labor has attempted to bring in laws that would make it illegal for someone to refuse to cooperate with their own deportation.

Barthlote explained that she and other refugee activists had been thinking about how to advance their campaign when the wave of pro-Palestine encampments erupted on university campuses earlier this year, inspiring them to adopt a similar tactic to make their voices heard.

“The Palestinians are under attack. When they come to seek refuge in Australia, Australia is going to say: ‘No, Palestine is a safe country now, go back’”, said activist Prasanth Prasana, speaking to a rally at the camp on 16 August. “That’s the same thing that happened to Sri Lanka, the same thing that happened to Iran, the same thing happened to Afghanistan, the same thing that happened to Pakistan!”

Politicians and the media have spent the better part of a year attempting to smear the movement for Palestine as racist and antisemitic while the genuine victims of racism in this country continue to be maligned and mistreated by the same politicians and media.

Those protesting in the two camps are courageously standing up to this hypocrisy and refusing to back down.