Refugees fighting for permanent protection in Sydney
Every hour on the hour, members of the refugee encampment in western Sydney’s Punchbowl chant together. Sometimes the chant is “Permanent visas now!”, sometimes it’s “Tony, Tony, stop this limbo!”.
This is a direct call to Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke, whose office they have been camping outside since 6 August, or 26 days at the time of writing. Twenty-six days, or 624 rounds of chanting, may seem like a lot, but for these refugees, waiting is nothing new. Most of them have been waiting more than thirteen years for a permanent visa and its basic accompanying rights.
Almost everyone at the encampment has a story of a child growing up back home without them, or the missed funeral of a parent. One of these people is Tamil refugee Benedict, who at 24 years of age was forced to flee genocide in Sri Lanka, leaving behind his wife and three-month-old baby. Benedict, now 36 and stuck waiting on a bridging visa, said to Red Flag, “The whole country is like a prison, and every hour is like one year”.
Sowriya, who is also Tamil, arrived in Australia when she was 7 and tried to study at university this year. Without citizenship, Sowriya was unable to pay the exorbitant international student fee, she told Red Flag.
Abdulhossein is another encampment member who was kicked out of university back in Iran after criticising the government. His brother was murdered for speaking out against the regime, after which Abdulhossein sought asylum in Australia, only to be locked up on Christmas Island. With the limited working rights that a bridging visa affords, he has been employed as an abseil painter—an extremely dangerous job that landed him in hospital last year without worker’s compensation or Medicare. For him, life on a bridging visa is a “slow death”.
As for Tony Burke, his singular response to the protest encampment was an invitation for a small group of refugees to meet with him, only to tell them that all he would do is “listen to their concerns”.
Tony Burke has immense power over these people’s lives—for some, he may even be responsible for denying them asylum when they first arrived. Burke was the immigration minister in 2013, during the brief Labor government led by Kevin Rudd, who proclaimed that “asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia”.
But the encampment protesters aren’t sleeping on the streets of Punchbowl every night, risking their precarious jobs and chanting every hour just so they can have twenty minutes of Tony Burke’s pretended concern.
Like the refugees in Melbourne, whose encampment has been running since July, they are determined to keep fighting for permanent protection. They do so with renewed conviction following the recent deaths of two young Tamil refugees. We should all share the encampment protesters’ desire to fight the ALP, and fight for Mano Yogalingam and Sasikaran Selvanayagam to be the last of the refugees killed by Labor’s barbaric treatment of refugees.
