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.

Oscar Sterner

Refugees are standing up to Labor

Fifty-three-year-old Tamil asylum seeker Uthayakaran Periyathamby died in his sleep on 16 July. Officially, the cause of death is unknown. Yet to those who gathered for his funeral in Melbourne’s south-east on 25 July, it was clear this was another life claimed by Australia’s depraved anti-refugee policies.
There was sorrow as his closest relatives wept over the body. But in a hall filled with members of Melbourne’s refugee community, there was also anger. Even one of the Hindu priests presiding over the funeral gave a speech in which he tearfully condemned Australia as “an open jail for Tamil refugees”.
Uthayakaran, or Uthayan as he was known, fled the Sri Lankan government’s genocide of the Tamil minority and came to Australia by boat in August 2012. He was one of the first people sent to Manus Island after the Gillard Labor government restarted the policy of offshore detention, which led to a decade of abuse and torture for thousands of refugees. Released into the community in 2013, he was denied permanent protection by Tony Abbott’s Liberal government, which had implemented a bureaucratic system to “fast track” asylum applications (by making it faster and easier for the government to reject them).
Uthayan spent the rest of his life in limbo on a short-term bridging visa, faced with the threat of deportation each time it was up for renewal. He had no access to Medicare, nor the right to work legally. He was forced to survive on the kindness of those in the community, or by working cash-in-hand jobs for employers who were only too happy to exploit his situation.
When he fled Sri Lanka, his wife and children remained there, expecting to follow him once he had found safe refuge. Instead, Australia refused them the chance to reunite, and now his family will never see him again.
We won’t ever know exactly how Uthayan died. But we know what killed him. 
“He wasn’t like an ordinary person, mentally”, said Moganathas Nagarasa, a refugee activist and friend of Uthayan, after the casket had been taken away. “He was tortured. He didn’t have good contact with his family. Mentally, it’s something like madness, because of his visa issues. He shared it with his friends ... he was thinking about that all the time.
“If he had a visa, his family could be here. He became an alcoholic, and finally it ends up like this.”
The priest didn’t mince words: “I can’t accept people dying without explanation. These are murders, not natural deaths. This country is responsible for his death”.
As someone the Australian government branded an undesirable, Uthayan’s death won’t attract attention from politicians or the mainstream press. There have been no studies or investigations into the deaths of those subjected to the onerous conditions of bridging visas, so we don’t know how many refugees have died in similar circumstances.
Yet Uthayan’s experience of life in Australia is one shared by thousands of asylum seekers. “We have 10,000 people suffering the same as Uthayan”, said Nagarasa. “Even me too, I’m on a bridging visa. I can’t sleep—my mind is awake even though my body is getting weak. I keep thinking about something, and something, and something. I don’t know how it’s going to end up.”
Tamil Refugee Council founder Aran Mylvaganam says that, for activists and the community, the link is clear between refugee deaths and the hopeless circumstances asylum seekers are placed in: “Under the Liberals, every fortnight you would hear of refugees dying. The change in government gave people a bit of hope and made a difference. The deaths stopped for a while. Uthayan is a sign that people are losing hope again under Labor”.
When Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party came to power in 2022, one of the new government’s first acts was to grant permanent protection to the family of Tamil refugees Priya and Nades, who had been fighting their deportation with the support of a nationwide activist campaign for several years. Labor went on to grant permanent residency to the 19,000 refugees who were living in Australia on temporary protection visas. That decision excluded an estimated 12,000 people on bridging visas who had been denied refugee status by previous governments. Still, after a decade of rule by the Liberal Party and figures such as Scott Morrison, who notoriously kept a trophy celebrating his record stopping refugees in boats, it’s understandable if there was some optimism that Labor would do more.
Labor <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/19/factcheck-is-labors-policy-on-asylum-seekers-and-refugees-any-different-to-the-coalitions">made it clear</a>, however, that they intended to act no differently than the Liberals when it came to “border security”. Even before they ran the country, Labor MPs consistently voted en bloc with the Coalition government to extend and reinforce the regime of offshore detention and boat turn-backs known as Operation Sovereign Borders.
Now that they’re in charge, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-sets-the-agenda-on-refugee-torture">they’ve gone even further</a> by attempting to introduce new laws that would lay criminal charges against anyone who resists their own deportation (like Priya and Nades). When the legality of the indefinite detention of asylum seekers came under question in a series of recent High Court cases, Labor rushed to participate in the storm of anti-refugee racism, cooking up a swathe of draconian measures that would make unbearable the life of anyone released from detention.
After two and a half years, many refugees are realising that this government has no intention of carrying out further acts of mercy, and some want to fight back. Mylvaganam explains that some refugee families prefer to stay silent when a relative dies, fearing detention or deportation if they speak out. In contrast, Uthayan’s funeral was an open attempt to shine a light on the brutality of the Australian government, as well as a call to action.
One speaker was Rathi Barthlote—an activist from the group <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RefugeeWAVE">Refugee Women Action for Visa Equality</a>—who played a leading role in setting up a protest camp outside the office of Labor Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, inspired by the student encampments for Palestine. (On 28 July O’Neil was shifted from the home affairs portfolio to housing, and the protest camp moved to the front of the Department of Home Affairs in Docklands.) Barthlote stood by Uthayan’s casket and argued that remembrance isn’t enough: “Australia’s government and its refugee policies are responsible for Uthayan’s death ... Justice for his death means you should be involved in fighting for refugee rights. That’s the way you remember him”.
Two refugee-led protest camps are, at time of publishing, under way. One is in Melbourne outside the Department of Home Affairs, 808 Bourke St, Docklands, and one in Sydney outside the office of newly appointed Minister for Home Affairs and Immigration Tony Burke at 1 Broadway, Punchbowl. Some quotations in this article were paraphrased from the original Tamil with the help of an interpreter.

Another life claimed by Labor's refugee torture regime

In June, while the stupidity of a handful of billionaires led to their deaths aboard OceanGate’s Titan submersible, the world’s governments and media devoted an incredible amount of resources to find them. Meanwhile, hundreds of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean as the Greek coastguard looked on—adding to the 20,000 recorded deaths in the crossing since 2014. 
The suffering and deaths of refugees have become normalised around the world, a process in which Australia plays a significant role. Ten years ago, on 19 July 2013, Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd announced that no asylum seeker arriving in Australia by boat would ever be allowed to settle here permanently. Despite Australia being one of the world’s richest countries, thousands of refugees were dumped in poorer third countries, particularly Papua New Guinea. The “PNG solution” was an escalation of a war on refugees that has been waged for decades, with the support of both major parties.
Rudd’s predecessor, Julia Gillard, had reopened the notorious offshore detention centres on Nauru and PNG’s Manus Island. The PNG solution made these concentration camps the destination for all refugees arriving by boat. The Liberal government of Tony Abbott, elected the same year, seized on Labor’s initiatives and expanded them into “Operation Sovereign Borders”, which used the Navy to turn back boats carrying refugees into Australian waters.
The offshore camps became a hell on earth where asylum seekers had years of their lives stolen, suffering extreme neglect and abuse without any hope of release. In 2016, the Guardian published leaked documents, dubbed “the Nauru files”, detailing more than 2,000 cases of “assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm attempts, child abuse” in Australia’s detention system. It was “a picture of routine dysfunction and cruelty”. Facilities were squalid. Some children spent most of their childhood locked away—teenagers grew into adults without ever seeing the outside world. Many detainees were driven to suicide. Others died after being denied life-saving medical care.
There was frequent violence from guards and locals, including at least one murder. Reza Berati, an Iranian Kurd, was beaten to death by guards in 2014 during protests by detainees. Another refugee survived having his throat cut. Scott Morrison, who was immigration minister at the time, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/scott-morrison-contradicts-account-manus-island-unrest">tried to deflect responsibility</a> from the Australian government, while <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/iranian-asylum-seeker-killed-on-manus-island-named-reza-barati-20140221-336kn.html">at the same time celebrating</a> the border regime’s success. Every refugee death in detention was a result of the barbaric conditions consciously established by successive Australian governments.
The Manus Island camp closed in 2017 after PNG’s Supreme Court deemed it illegal, but the refugees were still denied entry to Australia. Hundreds of detainees stood firm and resisted the Australian government’s attempts to be rid of them. The <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6104">government responded</a> by cutting off electricity, water and other services to the camp, attempting to starve the refugees out and get them to move to even worse accommodation—all while Peter Dutton lied in the media, accusing the refugees of having vandalised their original lodgings. They were eventually forcibly removed by the PNG police and military, but the outrageous actions of both governments, as well as the bold resistance of the refugees, drew thousands into the streets in Australia to stand in solidarity with the victims of the siege.
Today, more than 14,000 asylum seekers are stuck in Indonesia, unable to reach Australia despite being officially recognised as refugees by the United Nations. Many remain imprisoned in detention facilities across Australia, and the government continues to deport refugees to countries where they face persecution. Refugees who do manage to make it here, such as those released from hotel confinement in Melbourne and Brisbane between 2021 and 2022, have been left in limbo on temporary bridging visas. These visas provide few rights and are reviewed every six months, leaving refugees in constant uncertainty.
Australia has been an international trailblazer for barbarity when it comes to dealing with asylum seekers.
In the United States, Donald Trump enacted brutal immigration policies, many of which have continued under Joe Biden. In 2017, Trump laughed with former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in a leaked phone call: “You’re worse than I am!”
The British government is currently attempting to implement a scheme, modelled on Australia’s offshore detention, that would deport refugees attempting to enter the UK to Rwanda, or lock them up on floating prison ships. UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has appeared next to the slogan “stop the boats”, first used by Tony Abbott in the 2013 election.
The European far-right—from the UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage to the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany—cite “the Australian solution” as <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/australias-brutal-refugee-policy-inspiring-far-right-eu-beyond/">a model that their own countries should aspire to</a>.
Some refugee supporters have tried to minimise Labor’s role in destroying the lives of refugees, arguing that the Liberal Party has been the main architect of terrible immigration policies, and that if we support Labor against the pressure of the Liberals and the Murdoch press, they’ll eventually do the right thing. Yet this attitude ignores the role Labor has played in constructing Australia’s border regime and stoking the fire of anti-refugee politics.
The offshore camps on Manus Island and Nauru were originally opened by Liberal prime minister John Howard, but the ground was laid by preceding ALP governments. Bob Hawke’s government <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/18/australias-refugee-policies-a-global-inspiration-for-all-the-wrong-reasons">opened</a> the first onshore detention facility in 1991, and Paul Keating introduced mandatory detention soon after. They sought to broadcast a “clear signal ... that migration to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country and expecting to be allowed into the community”, as it was put by Keating’s immigration minister Gerry Hand in 1992.
After defeating the Liberal Party in the 2007 election, Labor closed the offshore camps for a few years. But the fundamental goal of “border protection” remained, and with the PNG solution, Labor under Rudd went further than the Liberals had ever gone.
While in opposition from 2013 to 2022, Labor spoke out during moments of brutality, like the murder of Reza Berati or the Manus siege, to score political points against the Liberals. But Labor MPs always turned out to vote with the government for mandatory offshore detention and, from 2015, for boat turnbacks. In 2019, Labor senator Kristina Keneally criticised the Liberals from the right when she gave a fearmongering speech about “plane people”, saying that the government had “lost control of the borders at our airports”. 
Now in power, the ALP has issued permanent visas to refugees who arrived before 2013. But it has denied protection to the 12,000 refugees who arrived after Rudd’s announcement. In February, home affairs minister Claire O’Neil maintained her party’s <a href="https://minister.homeaffairs.gov.au/AndrewGiles/Pages/permanent-pathway-for-tpv-holders.aspx">ongoing commitment</a> to Operation Sovereign Borders, and the Albanese government passed legislation extending the use of Nauru for offshore detention with the backing of the Liberals, One Nation and the United Australia Party.
Labor can squabble with the Liberals over the exact details of Australia’s repressive approach to asylum seekers, but the two parties are equally committed to the oppressive, dehumanising and sometimes deadly immigration system.
Any political party seeking to run Australian capitalism must defend certain principles fundamental to the capitalist state. One of those is nationalism—the idea that all Australians, regardless of social class, have something fundamental in common that separates us from the rest of the world. This idea helps to obscure the fact that the rich and powerful are the ones making our lives worse—by deflecting the blame onto foreigners. Migrants and refugees are taking your job and making it impossible for you to buy a house, so they say. This makes refugees, who have had to flee the states to which they “belong”, one of the most oppressed groups in our society. They are easy targets for politicians looking to whip up racist hatred to help them win elections, build their own power and preserve the legitimacy of their system.
Yet the oppression of refugees can also provoke inspiring resistance. In 2002, refugee supporters travelled into the desert to protest outside the Woomera detention centre in South Australia, helping several refugees escape in a mass breakout. Those trapped on Manus and Nauru frequently protested their situation, inspiring thousands to march in solidarity on the streets of Australia’s major cities. When some of these refugees were transferred on medical grounds to hotel prisons in Melbourne and Brisbane, protests inside and outside the hotels took place on a daily and weekly basis.
A mass campaign supported the family of Tamil refugees Priya and Nades, who were kidnapped from their homes by Australian Border Force in 2018. Priya’s heroic refusal to let the government deport them to Sri Lanka, as well as the work of activists from their hometown of Biloela, Queensland, and from the Tamil Refugee Council, won massive public support for the family. After years of demonisation and abuse from the likes of Peter Dutton, they were granted permanent visas last year.
Both Liberal and Labor governments have made concessions over the years—releasing some refugees while maintaining the system overall. The campaign to free Priya, Nades and their children shows that it is possible to build mass solidarity with refugees, despite decades of hatred from politicians and the media.
Thanks to the Rudd Labor government, thousands of refugees have been waiting ten long years to be granted their basic rights. Albanese’s government is refusing to do so. But we need to keep fighting for these people, as well as the many others who wish to seek safety in Australia, regardless of which party is in office.

Ten years too long: the Labor Party’s appalling record on refugees

The Preston Market, in the heart of Melbourne’s northern suburbs, is the focus of a heated battle between the local community and greedy corporations with powerful political backers.
The open-air market is as much a hub of social activity as it is a source of cheap, fresh food for the more than 80,000 people who visit it each week. It’s a place where parents can chat while their kids play safely, and elderly people can catch up and enjoy a sense of community that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s a place where everyone belongs, and it is much loved for that reason. 
But despite the sense of collective ownership, the market is actually the property of a small number of ultra-rich investors—including Sam Tarascio, who, with a net worth of $1.6 billion, is ranked as one of the richest 100 people in Australia. His firm, Salta Properties, proudly boasts about being one of Australia’s largest privately owned companies. Then there’s co-owner Roy Medich of the Medich Corporation, who was once implicated in the <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/illegal-dumps-discovered-on-ron-medich-and-roy-medich-land-20170421-gvpu9f.html">illegal dumping of asbestos waste</a> and whose brother was convicted in 2018 of ordering a contract killing against a former business partner.
Current <a href="https://vpa-web.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Preston-Market-Precinct-Structure-Plan-April-2022-tracked.pdf">proposals</a> by the Victorian Planning Authority would allow the site’s owners to demolish the existing market and replace it with high-rise apartment blocks. The development would include a new modern shopping centre and minimal open space. 
In response to widespread community opposition, the government and developers have mouthed platitudes about “protection of the market’s unique identity and heritage”, but continue to pursue their plans to demolish it. Their priority is to cram in as many dwellings as possible, in order to generate as much profit as possible. All other considerations are secondary.
After years of ignoring community concern, an alternative <a href="https://hdp-au-prod-app-dare-yoursay-files.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/3416/6209/8077/Appendix_A_-_Darebin_Council_Revised_Position_on_Proposed_Amendment_C182_August_2022.pdf">proposal</a> has at last been put forward by the local Darebin council that includes heritage protections to preserve the market building as it currently is. The council claims its plan would also “substantially reduce dwelling density” in the development, avoiding the problem of a cramped streetscape and protecting the market’s communal atmosphere. Given that this proposal seems to allow the same number of dwellings to be constructed, however, it’s hard to see how this promise could be fulfilled.
Fundamentally, the council would leave these profit-hungry corporations in control of any development on the site, ensuring that making a profit will always be prioritised over social good. Instead of negotiating with billionaires, we should fight to take the Preston Market into public hands. 
Acquisition by the government would mean that development could be undertaken in the interests of genuine community need. Such a development would be sympathetic to the existing market, rather than razing it completely along with its rich history. The market’s structures could be refurbished, something the current owners refuse to do in order to strengthen their argument for bulldozing the “run-down” building. Genuinely affordable housing could be built around it, including public housing, with plenty of public space for community use.
Thousands of people in Melbourne are angry at the slated destruction of this much-loved amenity. It’s a stark example of how corporations and the rich get to decide how our cities work under capitalism—destroying the built and natural environment in the pursuit of profit.
The Victorian planning minister has the power to intervene and compulsorily acquire the site for the state. The Save the Preston Market community campaign, the Victorian Socialists and an independent candidate for Preston, Gaetano Greco, are among those demanding the minister intervene. They are pushing collectively to politicise the fight for the Preston Market and make it an issue that Labor can’t avoid in the lead-up to the Victorian state election in November. 
The campaign’s petition demanding public acquisition, along with other information about the market and the campaign to save it, can be found at <a href="https://www.savetheprestonmarket.com/petition">savetheprestonmarket.com/petition</a>.

Save the Preston Market!

The refugee campaign won a major victory this week, as Tamil refugees Priya and Nades Nadesalingam and their two young children finally arrived home to the Queensland town of Biloela.
The Liberal government pushed relentlessly for them to be deported, but failed due to the overwhelming public support garnered by #HometoBilo and other refugee campaigners, and the resistance of Priya and Nades themselves.
“Priya fought for herself, fought for her family, and now they’re home in Bilo”, said Barathan Vidhyapathy, spokesperson for the Tamil Refugee Council, speaking at the airport shortly after the family landed.
“At the heart of the Home to Bilo campaign has always been the resilience, the courage and the hope of Priya and Nades”, added local campaigner Simeone Cameron. “A group of Biloela locals just sprung up around them and stubbornly refused to accept what our government said was immigration policy.”
From the beginning of her family’s ordeal, when their home was raided in the early hours of the morning and they were bundled into government vans, Priya refused to give in. She resisted every time the government tried to move them, all the while relaying information from within detention to activists on the outside. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people signed the petition and joined protests calling for their release, making their detention a national issue that was impossible for the government or the courts to ignore.
The return of Priya and Nades to Biloela is a victory against Australia’s barbaric border regime, and evidence that resistance can win important gains. But the fight is not over, as they have so far been granted only temporary bridging visas, despite government hints that permanent visas might be a possibility. “We are going to keep fighting until Priya and Nades have permanent safety here in Biloela”, said Home to Bilo co-founder Angela Fredericks. “They don’t deserve any more uncertainty in their lives.”
Vidhyapathy explained that thousands of Tamils and other refugees in Australia face this sort of uncertainty. “They live in fear of being deported back to danger”, he said. “Our homeland of Tamil Eelam is occupied, there’s one soldier for every six civilians ... and yet, when Tamils try to seek asylum, they are often treated very, very harshly by our government, just for seeking refuge. We need to ask ourselves why successive governments have gotten away with this ... There are many more refugees, not just Tamil refugees ... who have been living here for over ten years. We demand that these people are given permanent protection, not just bridging visas, not just false promises.”
Priya hopes that her example can inspire other refugees to stand up and fight back against their treatment. “I have some responsibility”, she explained. “I will be the role model to those people who are in detention. Sometimes people don’t come up and speak for themselves because they are scared of the system ... I’m requesting: never feel afraid to speak up. I hope this gives hope for other people that they can be free too and they can have a good life too.”
The Labor Party saw the public outcry for the Nadesalingams as an opportunity to put on a compassionate face, while reaffirming its commitment to all the anti-refugee policies that have been used to persecute this family and thousands of others. Only a few days after being elected, the new Labor government was celebrating the turning back of a boat of Sri Lankan asylum seekers as a demonstration that nothing would change for refugees under Labor’s rule.
“We thought that since the Australians knew that we were going through tremendous hardship here [in Sri Lanka], that people had no more food to eat, that they would accept us”, one of the people on that boat later told the Sydney Morning Herald. “It didn’t matter what I did there, even if it was sweeping or cleaning toilets. My main objective was to provide a life for my children.”
Climate change and economic crisis will make it increasingly likely that refugees will seek out the aid of wealthy countries like Australia. We need to seize upon the struggle of the Nadesalingam family as inspiration for how we can resist the power of right-wing politicians to decide who belongs here and who does not, and fight for a world where every refugee is free to live a decent life.

A refugee win, but the fight goes on

Millionaire anti-vaxxer Novak Djokovic recently drew global attention to Melbourne’s Park Hotel, which is currently used as an immigration detention centre by the Australian government. While Djokovic got to fly home to one of his mansions, 32 refugees remain imprisoned in torturous conditions, an ordeal that has been going on for more than nine years.
One of the detainees, Mehdi, fled persecution in Iran when he was just 15 years old. He was held in Australian offshore and onshore concentration camps before being moved to the Park Hotel in late 2021.
Now 24, Mehdi is just one of the many refugees who have spent their entire adult lives in detention, imprisoned without charge by a regime determined to crush their spirits. “They took our names away and gave us numbers, and that was our identity”, he <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/forget-about-novak-djokovic-australias-refugees-face-a-far-harsher-fate">told UK magazine Prospect</a>. “I’m a number and not a person to them ... When I’m moved around a facility, they won’t say ‘Mehdi’s going here,’ they say ‘detainee X coming, detainee X going.’ When they write about my case, they write a number. They won’t write Mehdi.”
The media has moved on now that Djokovic has gone, but the fight to free the refugees continues. Refugee supporters have regularly protested outside the hotel prisons since they were first opened in 2019. Thousands have marched over the years to oppose the policy of mandatory indefinite detention supported by both the Liberal and Labor parties. 
We have won some minor victories, but we need to keep fighting until every refugee is free. There are still more than 100 refugees being held in immigration detention on Manus Island and a similar number on Nauru. Many of the more than 1,100 refugees who are on the mainland have been released into the community, but remain in limbo with few rights and little support, forced to rely on charity to survive. Because of a policy introduced under the Rudd-Gillard government in 2013, these refugees will never be allowed to live in Australia permanently.
The cruel and capricious treatment of refugees is intended to deter those who might otherwise seek to exercise their human right to seek asylum in Australia. Politicians of all stripes can claim this barbarity as a victory—a successful effort to “stop the boats” and intimidate some of the world’s most vulnerable people who dare to hope for a better life. 
Refugees are important political pawns—they are people without power who can be made easy scapegoats for politicians looking to win elections by pointing the finger at others to distract from their own crimes and mismanagement.
Capitalism relies on persecuting people in this way. Refugees are tortured for the crime of seeking safety for the same reason that Aboriginal people have been oppressed for centuries and thousands of workers are now being forced to risk illness and death from COVID-19—to uphold the so-called national interest and maintain the all-important profitability and competitiveness of the national economy.
Some supporters argue that refugees should avoid fighting their detention, instead remaining quiet and trying to demonstrate that they would make good citizens while they await their day in court. But people shouldn’t have to prove their worth to a barbaric racist government in order to exercise their basic human right to asylum. Accepting such a premise means the detention industry will continue, with the massive human cost that entails.
Nor can we simply hope that the election of a Labor government will change things. The ALP remains committed to the policy of indefinite detention (a policy that it first introduced). As a party that aims to lead the capitalist state, it is as committed to proving its border security credentials as the Liberals, even as it offers a few humanitarian crumbs in a bid to win votes from liberals. At the same time as Labor was pushing the short-lived Medevac bill which attempted to bring refugees from offshore to receive medical treatment, shadow Home Affairs Minister Kristina Keneally was attacking the government for an influx of “plane people”—which only pushed the narrative around refugees further to the right. 
To win genuine freedom for all the refugees, we need a movement that rejects nationalist hype about borders and that opposes the entire detention regime that flows from it. Such a movement doesn’t yet exist, but we have to start somewhere. That’s why it’s important for refugee supporters to keep protesting, even when our numbers are small, to keep the fire alive.

All refugees must be freed

As the media floods with stories and images of people attempting to flee Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover, the Australian government’s refugee policy is once again highlighting how little those who run our society value ordinary people.
Now that the US-led occupation is over, leaving Afghanistan devastated and the Taliban returned to power, the Liberal government has offered a paltry 3,000 visas to Afghan refugees. Immigration Minister Alex Hawke claims that this is a continuation of Australia’s “generous humanitarian and resettlement program”.
What generosity is Hawke referring to? Perhaps the treatment of more than 4,200 Afghan refugees already in Australia who have been left in limbo on temporary protection visas, denied basic rights and never knowing when the government might deport them? Maybe Hawke is talking about the ongoing imprisonment of 53 Afghans in Australia’s refugee concentration camps, or the thousands <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/afghan-refugees-mull-boat-journey-to-australia-as-desperation-mounts-20210816-p58j3d.html">trapped in Indonesia</a> who the government refuses to let into this country?
The numbers pale in comparison to the more than 2.7 million refugees created by the war in Afghanistan. If there were any sense of generosity in the ranks of the government, Australia—which participated from beginning to end in the invasion and occupation—would provide far greater numbers with permanent protection, with the same rights as any citizen.
There is widespread support for those trying to escape Afghanistan. More than 100,000 people <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/more-than-100-000-people-sign-letter-demanding-australia-take-in-more-afghan-refugees">have signed</a> an open letter calling for an increase in the number of Afghan refugees accepted into Australia, and for them to be granted permanent visas. But we also need more than appeals to Australia’s “moral duty”; we need a movement that is willing to fight the politicians who destroy entire nations on the one hand, and on the other deny help to those who manage to escape.
Our rulers are happy to wage imperialist wars in pursuit of economic or political advantages over their rivals, no matter how many ordinary people get chewed up in the process. When those people come seeking refuge, they are faced with hostile politicians who view them, at best, as useful pawns in strengthening a xenophobic, nationalist agenda.
We should demand permanent protection for those fleeing Afghanistan today, as well as every single refugee who wants to come to Australia. We also have to see this as part of a wider fight against all the barbarities of capitalism—against war, against racism and nationalism, against a ruling class that would sacrifice any of us if that served its interests.

Afghan refugees need permanent protection

As governments and the press around Australia remind us each day about the terrible health effects of lockdowns, we should remember the lockdown that refugees have been subjected to for years, with the full support of politicians from both the Liberal and Labor parties.
On 13 August 2012, Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that refugees attempting to reach Australia by boat would be imprisoned on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. A year later, on 19 July, Kevin Rudd declared that no asylum seeker arriving by boat would ever be allowed to live in Australia, ensuring that thousands of refugees would have years of their lives wasted in the government’s offshore concentration camps.
The camps were notorious for the physical and psychological tortures they were designed to inflict on detainees. A recent Facebook post by “Park Prisoner”, an anonymous account run from within Melbourne’s Park Hotel, where more than 30 refugees remain trapped since being moved from Manus Island in 2019, reflected on their experience: 
“We went through every torture that can possibly happen to someone, when we protested for our freedom we have been beaten to death, neglected medically, starved for three weeks, cut the power and water off for several weeks, the mental and emotional abuse was everyday, females were raped and sexual assaulted, and they were forced to shower for two minutes otherwise a security guard would come in to tell you ‘your time is up’.”
Thirteen people have died as a result of their offshore imprisonment. In February 2014, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/17/four-years-after-reza-baratis-death-we-still-have-no-justice">Reza Barati was killed</a> on Manus Island when camp guards violently attacked refugees who rioted after being refused answers about their futures. Others died after being refused proper medical treatment. On 26 April 2016, Omid Masoumali set himself on fire, a final striking protest against his treatment.
In 2016, the Guardian published leaks known as the “Nauru files”, which contained details of more than 2,000 cases of “assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm attempts, child abuse and living conditions endured by asylum seekers”, calling it “a picture of routine dysfunction and cruelty”. Two years later, reports emerged of several children detained on Nauru suffering from “resignation syndrome”, an extreme psychological reaction in which the sheer depravity and hopelessness of their situation caused them to fall into a coma.
Most of those who were detained on the islands have now moved elsewhere, but this was no act of mercy by the government. Many were deported to an unknown fate. Those who have been allowed to live in the community in Australia lack basic rights, like the right to study or work, and are denied access to welfare or Medicare. They live under constant threat of deportation—the government refuses permanent protection even to those it admits are refugees, periodically requiring them to reapply for protection. And, of course, as of 30 June, there were still 233 people detained on Manus and Nauru, according to <a href="https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/operation-sovereign-borders-offshore-detention-statistics/">statistics</a> compiled by the Refugee Council of Australia.
Of particular significance have been the so-called Medevac refugees, several of whom were moved from Manus and Nauru into hotels in the middle of Melbourne and Brisbane. They were supposedly moved to receive treatment for illnesses caused by almost a decade in detention. “Instead of getting treatment we were locked up in hotel rooms”, wrote the Park Prisoner account, “and after almost two years not even one single person of us have been treated properly in fact every one got worse because we are still the indefinite detention that caused us the sickness”.
Refugees have never given up the fight to end the policy of indefinite detention, and their resistance has inspired supporters in Australia to stand in solidarity. The 2014 protests on Manus, in which Reza Barati was murdered, were one of many that erupted over the years against the detention regime. One significant moment came in 2017, as the refugees on Manus resisted when the government attempted to move them into even worse conditions by shutting off power and water to the detention centre. These events inspired thousands of people to join protests demanding an end to what was dubbed the Manus siege.
Today, protests continue inside and outside detention. Several refugees in Melbourne’s main detention centre have resorted to a hunger strike, and supporters have held daily vigils for those locked away in Melbourne’s Park Hotel. Regular protests have been organised by groups such as Melbourne’s Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, to get as many of us as possible onto the streets to make it loudly known that we won’t accept the government’s torture of refugees.
The people who run our society use refugees as political pawns, whipping up racism when it suits them and strengthening their nationalist agenda with appeals to the necessity of “border security”. They wring their hands at the idea of sacrificing the profits of business to save human lives by implementing COVID lockdowns, but happily lock up refugees for eight years and counting in the interests of political power.

For these refugees, lockdown has lasted more than eight years

In 2019, 65 refugees were imprisoned in the Mantra Hotel in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
The men had fled danger and persecution from across the world: the legacy of imperialist war in Afghanistan, the Sri Lankan government’s genocidal persecution of Tamils, the theocracy in Iran, and more. After years languishing in Australia’s offshore concentration camps, they were brought to the mainland after doctors determined that they needed medical help. The so-called "Medevac" bill was passed by parliament against the wishes of the government; it was repealed less than a year later. Instead of being cared for, the refugees have been locked away in squalid conditions, constantly under guard—the hotel corridors are patrolled by armed private contractors—and unable to even open their windows more than a crack. Their imprisonment has lasted a year.
One of the detainees told the Guardian: “It’s more difficult than what we experienced in Manus Island. Maybe one hour of gym–that’s the only time that I am not in my room. The rest of the day, I’m lying on my bed or sitting on the chair".
The opening of a prison in the middle of a busy Melbourne suburb did not go unchallenged. For months, local supporters organised daily protests outside the Mantra to show solidarity with the refugees inside and to let them know they were not forgotten. As Melbourne’s lockdown eased, larger demonstrations were also organised by campaign groups like the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and Refugee Action Collective.
Standing outside the hotel, we protesters could see the imprisoned men through the hotel’s windows, communicate and gesture in solidarity. The detainees waved, hung blankets out the windows like flags, shone lights, and held up their arms, crossed at the wrist, in a gesture of resistance; on the ground outside, we copied the gestures back, and spoke to them through our megaphones. We were fighting together against the brutal actions of the government.
In December of 2020, rumours began to circulate the men in the Mantra were to be moved. Nobody knew where. To an old detention centre? Back offshore? Security guards gleefully spread misinformation, and the government communicated nothing to the innocent men that it treated like playthings. We quickly organised protests, at night and in the day, outside the hotel, to show that any move would be monitored: we’d know where they were going, and would try to keep showing our solidarity.
Eventually, in the midst of a protest, police vans—backed up by cops on horses and in riot gear—took the men to the Park Hotel in Melbourne’s CBD. You might know Park under its previous brand, Rydges: it was a COVID-19 quarantine facility that contributed to Melbourne’s second wave of coronavirus. Now it has picked up a new contract: imprisoning refugees.
Mostafa Azimitabar, a prominent leader of resistance among refugees in detention, reported that the conditions there were even worse than the Mantra. “I had a window and I could see people outside smiling at us, waving at us. Now I have no window,” he told SBS. “I think this is one of their plans...They want people in Australia not to see our faces.” Since the refugees were moved to the new site, the windows they do have access to have been tinted - and these ones are locked shut.
Those now locked up in the Park Hotel are only a small section of a wider refugee population who are subjected to oppressive treatment by Australia’s government. There are more like them in hotels like Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point, as well as hundreds of men, women and even children in onshore detention centres around the country. The facilities are literally prisons, in which refugees—accused of no crime—are detained indefinitely without charge. That’s not to mention those still on Nauru, or the thousands of refugees in “community detention” or on protection visas who are left impoverished, without any substantial state support; or the unknown number who have simply been deported and never heard from again.
Today’s regime of mandatory detention, under which migrants without a visa are imprisoned indefinitely, originated with Paul Keating’s Labor government in the early 1990s. They sought to broadcast a “clear signal...that migration to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country and expecting to be allowed into the community”, as it was put by the immigration minister at the time. Since then, successive governments of both major parties have worked to make it harder to claim asylum, while subjecting “unlawful arrivals” to ever more barbaric conditions.
Refugees who arrive by boat have been targeted for especially brutal treatment. John Howard introduced offshore detention for such “boat people”, opening camps on Manus, Nauru, and Christmas Island. The Liberals also began removing Australia’s island territories from Australia’s legally defined “migration zone”: the area in which arrivals could apply for refugee status under Australian law. This essentially allowed the government to do what it liked with boat arrivals, without the possibility of being sued in the courts.
Kevin Rudd’s first government feinted towards winding back mandatory offshore detention, but the ALP eventually reopened the island centres under Julia Gillard. Rudd then returned in 2013 and went a step further than the Liberals: shockingly, he excised the entire Australian mainland from the migration zone, declaring outright that no-one arriving by boat would ever be allowed to settle in Australia—a policy Howard had tried and failed to implement in 2006. It was a new low in irrational brutality.
The new policy encouraged the subsequent Liberal government of Tony Abbott, who implemented Labor’s policies with vigour, as did Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison after him. Abbot’s “Operation Sovereign Borders” militarised the border. For people who had been proven to be refugees fleeing persecution, the dreaded “temporary protection visas” (TPVs) were reintroduced. Under that system, even those who succeeded in winning refugee status could be denied the right to stay permanently in Australia. Instead, they lived with the constant threat of having their right to stay revoked, to have their life upended at any moment with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, so that they could be returned to the country they had fled.
The offshore camps on Manus and Nauru became infamous for the physical and psychological tortures inflicted on those detained inside. In 2016, the Guardian published a set of leaks known as the “Nauru files”, detailing over 2,000 cases of “assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm attempts, child abuse and living conditions endured by asylum seekers”, calling it “a picture of routine dysfunction and cruelty”. Facilities were squalid. Refugees often faced violence from guards or local residents. Years of their lives were stolen from them. Families were separated. Many were driven to suicide. Others died after being denied life-saving medical care. Some children spent the majority of their childhoods locked away. Teenagers grew into adults without ever seeing the outside world.
This kind of brutal treatment has been designed to discourage anyone from even attempting to get to Australia. At times, politicians have cynically claimed that their destruction of refugee lives is actually about saving them from dangerous smuggling operations. Confronted with an allegation that his government had actually bribed a boat captain $30,000 to turn his boat around and return refugees to Indonesia, Tony Abbott nonsensically responded: "What we are doing is saving life at sea."
In reality, refugees are important pawns in the battles of Australia’s political elite.
For decades, Australian politicians have used refugees to distract from their own crimes by whipping up racist hatred, to promote the idea that foreign people arriving by boat are inherently dangerous and threatening, and to argue that their political rivals are putting Australia’s “sovereignty” and “security” in danger. John Howard won reelection in 2001 with a campaign that combined nationalist rhetoric about “border protection” with the wave of Islamophobia that followed 9/11 and the start of the War on Terror—a war which itself created more refugees.
As recently as 2019, Scott Morrison attacked Labor’s passage of the Medevac bill because it undermined the quest to “make Australia stronger”. According to Morrison’s government, offering some medical treatment to imprisoned refugees risked an influx of “rapists and murderers”. The Medevac bill made little real change to a system that Labor has backed from the beginning, of course. It merely tossed refugees some humanitarian crumbs, while retaining the horrific system of imprisonment. But even this was enough to provoke a major debate among Australia’s depraved political establishment.
The ALP has spent years working to prove its commitment to “national security” as champions of offshore detention. They often make statements to the right of the Liberals on the question. Shadow Minister for Home Affairs Kristina Keneally went on the attack in 2020 to accuse the government of not being strict enough on refugees who arrived by air: it was no longer just boat people we have to worry about, but plane people, too!
Australia has some of the worst immigration policies in the world, but our border regime has been the example to follow for other politicians around the globe. Donald Trump said admiringly to Malcolm Turnbull in a phone conversation that was later leaked: “You’re worse than I am!” Trump, and other politicians, would race to catch up. Indeed, Australia served as the inspiration for Trump’s expansion of the USA’s own immigration camps. The brutalisation of migrants and refugees is intimately connected to the basic logic of capitalist politics, which constantly produces violence, oppression, nationalism, and scapegoating.
Capitalism is a global system driven of competition among a wealthy minority, who constantly seek to accumulate more profits while trying to exploit the working class and discourage resistance. The world is covered with a patchwork of national states that aim to stabilise this system, to help capitalists, to crush resistance, and to make injustice seem legitimate and necessary. As capitalists compete for economic advantage, states compete for political and military dominance. Economic, political, and military competition combine to create the phenomenon of imperialism.
To make this system seem legitimate, capitalist states cultivate nationalism, convincing ordinary people that we share a fundamental common interest with the ruling class of “our” country. National borders help to foster the idea that there are those of us who belong, and those who do not.
Imperialist competition creates violent conflict and wars that leave millions without their homes, as rival capitalists fight for resources and markets, and rival states fight for greater influence on the world stage. The capitalist state’s drive to cultivate nationalism, so a more homogenous population identify more strongly with their own rulers, leads to atrocities committed against national and political minorities in numerous countries. Iran persecutes its Kurds; the Sri Lankan state wages a genocidal campaign against the Tamil population. Those targeted are often leftists or those who don’t fit into the dominant form of nationalism.
Refugees experience some of the worst horrors of capitalism. First, the system creates the conditions that force people to seek safety elsewhere. Then, the choice to provide refuge is left in the hands of a ruling class who depend on exploitation and oppression. Australia, as a powerful imperialist state, has itself played a role in creating refugees. As well as having participated in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Australia is a major ally of the Sri Lankan government, for example. Tony Abbott’s government gave a “humanitarian” gift to the genocidal Sri Lankan regime: patrol boats to help it track down and intercept refugees before they escape. When refugees get here, they find a hostile regime, led by politicians determined to demonise them in order to maintain their power, and a media ready and willing to scapegoat them.
But hope does exist. Throughout the years of barbarism, there has been inspiring resistance on the part of refugees and their supporters in Australia. One shining example was the 2002 protest at the Woomera detention centre. A thousand protesters arrived to show solidarity with those inside the camp, in the middle of the South Australian desert, and ended up breaking out several of them. Such events partly explain why the government established the offshore camps, far out of reach. The potential for solidarity exists between refugees and the broader population. The Australian government’s refugee policy is designed to crush this potential solidarity at every turn.
Some refugee advocates argue that refugees should remain quiet, to try and demonstrate that they can be loyal and obedient members of the Australian community. They discourage refugees from engaging in activism. But this accepts the basic logic of the system that we are struggling against. Refugees are not just passive recipients of charity: many of them are heroic activists, and we struggle alongside them. Some of history’s greatest revolutionaries were refugees. Karl Marx fled political persecution throughout Europe before settling in Britain; Leon Trotsky was chased across the globe by Stalin’s counter-revolution.
We need to free the refugees, to join them in struggle, and to create a world that no longer creates them. We need to reject the logic of capitalist politics: the nationalism, the imperialism, the division of the world into us-and-them, the expectation that the oppressed should be passive and accepting of the status quo. “We” aren’t on the same side as “our” politicians and “our” ruling class, who create so much horror for ordinary people--whether it be refugee camps, climate apocalypse, or crushing poverty. We are internationalists, and refugees are our comrades in a struggle for global freedom and justice. We must fight for the freedom of each individual refugee, but to free them all, we need to build a movement that can ultimately tear down the capitalist state, in Australia and throughout the world, and replace it with a world based on principles of justice, freedom, and equality, rather than violence and oppression.

Australia's torturing refugees in hotels. That's just the tip of the iceberg

Liberal Minister for Home Affairs and real-life movie villain Peter Dutton has come out to support open borders–at least when it comes to Queensland’s borders with other Australian states. 
"When you hear about families separated from sick kids or [people who] can't get medication, can't get to work, their business is on one side of the border and they live on the other, these are the practical implications of this closed Queensland border scenario," Dutton said on the Today show.
It’s a remarkable admission from a man who has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/07/peter-dutton-defends-nauru-policy-after-refugees-told-to-separate-from-family">overseen the separation of refugee families on Nauru</a>, and fought relentlessly to prevent asylum seekers even receiving adequate medical care.
Dutton has spent his time in government perfecting a border regime that imprisons thousands of refugees in concentration camps for years on end. Australia’s camps inflict extensive physical and mental damage on detainees–a natural consequence of prolonged indefinite confinement, cut off from the world with no hope of release, as well as abuse by the guards hired to run the facilities.
Since 2018, he has made it his personal mission to ensure the Tamil refugees Priya and Nades, along with their two young children, are deported back to Sri Lanka. He has no concern for the persecution and violence they, or any of the other thousands of Tamils deported from Australia, will likely face at the hands of the Sri Lankan regime, a close ally of the Australian government.
It might seem ironic, then, that Dutton is now calling for open borders. But his campaign against the refugees who cross Australia’s borders and his demand for state borders to be opened in the middle of a global pandemic are both driven by the needs of Australian capitalism.
Demonising refugees has often been a key election strategy for Australian politicians. Refugees are presented as a political “problem”, to be solved by means of state violence and persecution. Dutton has played a key role in pushing the debate far to the right, though not without the eager participation of his colleagues in the Liberal and Labor parties. Today, the debate is largely limited to the question of who is most capable of managing that persecution, with no voices in mainstream politics asking whether refugees should be locked up in the first place.
This serves as more than just a convenient talking point for right-wing politicians. Attacks on refugees are bound up with the racism, nationalism and authoritarianism of the capitalist state. The expansion of refugee detention, and the accompanying narrative of “national security”, plays a role in preserving the whole system. It helps to legitimise the expansion of draconian state powers, while promoting racist divisions among workers and the oppressed, inhibiting our capacity to fight back.
Dutton’s call to open state borders reflects his priorities as a representative of the ruling class. The argument that borders should immediately be opened is being prosecuted by some of Australia’s most prominent capitalists, such as Wesfarmers CEO Rob Scott and Alan Joyce of Qantas, and for good reason. It echoes the demands of capitalists around the world to end lockdowns and get workers back to work. In the middle of a pandemic, this is a demand to risk the lives of workers and their families in order to get profits flowing again.
In the eyes of politicians like Dutton, the national border must be closed to refugees to serve the interests of the capitalist state; state borders must be open to serve the economic needs of the capitalist class. To win a world where the lives of refugees and workers alike aren’t treated as expendable, we need to fight the system that gives psychopaths like Peter Dutton the power to decide who is worth saving.

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For these refugees, lockdown has lasted more than eight years

Australia's torturing refugees in hotels. That's just the tip of the iceberg

Peter Dutton’s border wake-up call

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