Refugees still fighting under Labor
Refugee protesters have established camps outside the electorate offices of Labor MPs across the country, demanding permanent protection visas.
For two weeks in Melbourne, dozens of refugees and asylum seekers have slept in tents at the doorstep of (now former) Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil’s office in Oakleigh. This was an escalation of a year-long campaign against O’Neil and other Labor Party figures, provoked by the ALP’s decision last year to exclude more than 12,000 asylum seekers from access to permanent protection visas.
12,000 Captive Souls, the Tamil Refugee Council, and Refugee Women Action for Visa Equality are some of the activist groups involved in organising peaceful protests, sit-ins and occupations, and even a 650km protest walk from Melbourne to Canberra.
Abbas, a 26-year-old asylum seeker from Iran, said that they had no choice but to camp. “We started by protesting one week here and one week there. Now we’ve said we aren’t going to leave until we get a result”, he told Red Flag.
One of the main demands of the campaign is the abolition of the Fast Track process and the Immigration Assessment Authority, which the ALP promised to scrap while in opposition in 2021.
The IAA is unpredictable and complex, and can sometimes leave people waiting up to seven years for a judicial review, stuck applying for bridging visas every six months in the meantime.
This year's federal budget abolished the Fast Track system and the IAA. But for the 12,000 refugees who have already passed through the defunct system, who have been left stranded in the country for over a decade on bridging visas or no visa at all, the announcement has offered no end to their uncertainty, and no pathway to permanent protection.
“All of the refugees who were unfairly assessed have been told nothing can be done for them”, Aran Mylvaganam, co-founder of the Tamil Refugee Council, told Red Flag.
Amin, another Iranian asylum seeker involved in the encampment, told Red Flag:
“The thing I’m worried about is that the Labor government doesn’t have enough time. The election could be in the next year, even if they start reviewing all of our cases one by one from today, they won’t be able to finish all of us, unless they are elected again.
“The Labor government has political purposes for doing this. How broken is the system that I can have two daughters, both born in Australia, one is six and the other is eight months old, one has no Medicare and no visa, the other has Medicare and a bridging visa. They want to use refugees in the next election to collect some more votes. It’s so hard—nothing has changed. Everyone is struggling.”
Despite this, the refugees continue to fight. After the prime minister announced a cabinet reshuffle, the Melbourne protest was relocated to the Department of Home Affairs in Docklands. And another camp will be established at new Home Affairs and Immigration Minister Tony Giles’ office in Sydney.
The protesters encourage supporters of refugee rights to visit them.
